The SF Int'l Film Festival isn't just about great national and international movies -- they've got music events, gala events, talks about the state of cinema, an online presence through SF360.com, and -- what we stopped by to see this afternoon -- a series of panels about the state of cinema today.

Today's panel was about the state of the film scene in San Francisco, and included basically every single movie-related constituency group in the city: Stefanie Coyote from the SF Film Commission; Kevin Epps, the director of local indie movie ; Allyce Bass, the executive director of the Roxie; Chi-hui Yang, programmer for the SF Asian-American Film Fest (whom you all know we LOVE); and Lisset Barcellos from Kink.com. And if that wasn't enough, none other than our very favorite SFist co-editor Eve Batey was moderating! Too much excitement!

With an embrace of the SF cineaste culture and a pledge to invest in local film, and the power of live movie screenings to create a community, the conversation was pretty stimulating. From the reasons why we can't get big movie shoots to come to San Francisco (money), to a discussion of the kink.com online media strategy (interactive fetish shoots where you direct what happens next), to the reason why the Kabuki Theater is now owned by Sundance (antitrust law) and the model of the Roxie New College programming strategy (the Pacific Film Archive), pretty much everything about the local film scene was covered. Also -- we had absolutely no idea there are 47 film festivals in San Francisco every year.

And for those of you keeping score -- Eve did a masterful job moderating and making sure everyone got their point of view across, and YES, we got to meet Chi-hui!!! We basically spent the whole time squealing like a teenage girl, ohmigod ohmigod OHMIGOD!!! (We also met Steve Rhodes, who was just as cool as his pictures.)

Confidential to the Photoshop crowd -- we tried to fix those color curves in this picture like you'd advised!

Straight Outta Hunters Point