San Francisco Independent Film Festival + Winter Music Festival 2010

STAFF FOUNDER/DIRECTOR: Jeff Ross ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Fay Dearborn FILM FEST PROGRAMMING: Anita Monga, Holly Roach, Fay Dearborn, Jeff Ross MUSIC FEST BOOKING: John Paulson (Talking House Records), Rick Abruzzo, Jeff Ross DEVELOPMENT: Tia Mignonne and Caitlin Curtin ADDITIONAL MARKETING: Christi Crowe and FLAG Marketing, Wendy King VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR: Romany PUBLICIST: Karen Larsen and Associates GRAPHIC DESIGN: Studio 1500 PRESS COVERAGE 7x7's Winter Music Fest Picks CORNER STORE and OH MY GOD! IT'S HARROD BLANK! in the New York Times SF WInter Music Fest in the Chronicle Music Fest mention in Datelines SF Weekly's picks for the Winter Music Fest WAH DO DEM and HARMONY AND ME in My Cultural Landscape Winter Music Fest in The Bay Bridged Music Fest shows in The Rumpus/a> San Jose Mercury News Winter Music Fest Picks TOM JONESING and more Music Fest in the SF Examiner Hot Moon in the SF Weekly DUCKMANDU in the SF Weekly TEMPO NO TEMPO in the SF Weekly Popdose's Winter Music Fest picks Winter Music Fest in Flavorpill 7x7's Fashion Advice for IndieFesters Winter Music Fest in SF Gate's Off The Record Music Fest kick off in SF Appeal LAST DAY AT THE NUT HOUSE in the Chronicle TOM JONESING in Cronicle's Off The Record LIMBO LOUNGE, MY MOVIE GIRL, OH MY GOD! IT'S HARROD BLANK in the Chronicle A+D in Undine BLOOD OF REBIRTH in Undine Reviews of IndieFest short films: ME, YOU AND A BAG OF BAMBOO, WEIGHT, TRUE BEAUTY THIS NIGHT, NEW AMERICAN SOLDIER, UNBELIEVABLE 4, ENTERING THE MIND THROUGH THE MOUTH IndieFest in the Sunday Chronicle IndieFest in Twitch Film IndieFest in the Bay Area Reporter IndieFest in Catholic Scoop IndieFest in 7x7 Magazine CORNER STORE in the Chronicle IndieFest overview in the Examiner IndieFest in Flavorpill A really great IndieFest overview in SF360 IndieFest mention in the New York Times Interview with Tom Pankratz on Blog Talk Radio Interview with Tom Pankratz on BBN3 IndieFest overview in the Examiner IndieFest in SF Appeal Jeff talks about IndieFest with Kevin Robinson on Cross Currents on KALW Hell On Frisco Bay reviews three Canadian features at IndieFest: ZOOEY & ADAM, WEST OF PLUTO and POINT TRAVERSE IndieFest screenings at Sugar Bowl Winter Music Fest on KQED Jason Watches (a lot of) Movies

WORLD PREMIERE What would life be like without public access television? Unfortunately many communities have had to find out the hard way. We’ve lost many wacked-out gems due to cancellation (or just the transient nature of public access programming), but thanks to obsessive collectors of pop culture ephemera there is a goldmine of lo-fi creativity to be found in the back catalogue of now-defunct public access stations. Fantastic Fest programmer and Twitch Film critic Rodney Perkins has put together an exclusive show for SF Indie that celebrates the weird and wonderful world of public access from San Francisco and beyond. Clips include SF fave Burn My Eye, the early Guy Maddin post-apocalypse show Survival, the anarchic Jerkbeast, musical interludes from the amazing R. Stevie Moore, talk shows, call-in shows, and more public access preachers than you can shake a stick at. Culled from rare, hard-to-find sources (much of which is unavailable online or otherwise), fans of Found and TV Carnage would do well to check out this schizophrenic TV assault! Co-presented by the BAY AREA VIDEO COALITION

WEST COAST PREMIERE For Alice and Dan, it's love at first sight. It’s the rest of their relationship that they find so hard. Confined to their small London flat, they magnify their differences, create conflict out of nothing, and slowly tear each other apart. Raw, edgy and intensely intimate, A + D offers a documentary-like portrait of a relationship; the insatiable intensity of new love, the comfort of a lived in relationship, the breakdown of trust and the aftermath of heartache and regret.

This fascinating documentary chronicles the long and dramatic struggle for control of the Barnes Foundation, a private collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern art valued at more than $25 billion. After the cultural elite scorned his collection as “horrible,” Dr. Barnes left control of the collection to a small African-American college with a strict proviso that the Foundation should remain an educational institution and the paintings must not be removed. But times and tastes change, and now the very people who belittled Barnes want access to the collection. 

US PREMIERE In a small English town, a boy wakes to find his father brutally beaten by members of his own family. Though his devastated mother pleads for him to leave, vengeance and retaliation flood his mind, and he’s off to exact retribution. Violence begets violence however, and the boy is soon entangled in a messy web of family allegiances, realizing the true consequences of his actions much too late. Shuffling between past and present, At the Foot of A Tree is a unique and engrossing drama. 

WEST COAST PREMIERE As the first-ever carbon-neutral, vegetarian, organic expedition to attempt the North Pole, Mark and Brian have high hopes of doing their bit for global warming, and perhaps getting into the Guinness Book of Records. Unfortunately, the world first is a first for them too. All alone on the ice, the boys hadn't reckoned on the polar bears, the competitive Norwegians or on Mark’s rapidly loosening grip on reality. No one said saving the planet would be easy. But does it have to be this hard?  Starring Stephen Mangan (Green Wing), Rhys Thomas (Bellamy’s People), Helen Baxendale (Friends) and Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood).

US PREMIERE The Blood of Rebirth is Toyoda’s first film in four years. After exploding onto the international film festival scene with award winning films, Unchain, Porno Star, Blue Spring (IndieFest ’02), Nine Souls (IndieFest ’04) and Hanging Garden (IndieFest ’06), he returned to the proverbial wood shed. During this time he focused on his music and filming a double fistful of live music projects. The time spent away was, well, torture for his international fan base. This hallucinogenic gem takes the audience to a place both intensely Japanese and through layers of ancient mythology, religious mysticism and is perfectly punctuated with a rocking sound track. This newest Toyoda film will blow your mind! The Blood of Rebirth is set in the Middle Ages in Japan, when gods and demons reigned over a larger domain than mere mortals. Oguri, a renowned masseur, is summoned to the fortress of the ruler of the dark world, a man known simply as “the Lord” and ailing from a particularly wicked type of venereal disease. After encouraging Terute – a captive princess from another land – to escape, Oguri is poisoned to death by “the Lord” before he can make good his escape. At the way station between heaven and hell, Oguri requests, and is granted his wish – to be sent back to the land of the living in the form of a “Hungry Ghost,” who has “unfinished business.” Saved by a monk who happened to pass by, he learns of a “spring of rebirth.” Meanwhile, Terute manages to flee from “the Lord’s” fortress and reunites with the undead Oguri. But the wicked “Lord” is on the prowl and the chase is on… In a complete departure from typical narrative films this is unquestionably a new genre of film. I first saw this film in October of 2009 at a press screening in Tokyo during the Tokyo International Film Festival. This was before the subtitles were added and I was with an American who does not speak any Japanese. He was completely blown away by this film with only a quick glance at the synopsis before the screening… It’s not about the dialogue, it’s about the experience. The Blood of Rebirth is a beautiful film with signature Toyoda touches of elegance in slow motion and both visual perspective alongside that spiraling camera which absorbs images and light. Dilated pupils are aperture settings on his camera. The adaptation of the folktale is compelling and has the depth I’d expect of a Toyoda film, but beyond this? This film pulsates with it’s own life form and is one the audience will want to have again and again. The haunting rock beat and the spiraling images take the viewer deep, deep, deep to a place where they too have the opportunity of a “rebirth.” The Blood of Rebirth. Jimi Hendrix asked us and said it best in the psychedelic heyday of the 60’s “Have you ever been experienced?” - Mike Skurko

WEST COAST PREMIERE Lucas Chaffin is a proud fourth-generation coal miner, trying to live up to the legend of his dad and what he believes is a family duty. But his father Luther, still known in the mines as “Bonecrusher,” is withered and sick at just 61. He’s given his life to the dust, and he wants his son to get out of the mines before it’s too late. Bonecrusher is an intimate account of the love between a father and son; and a moving portrait of a tough community and an even tougher way of life. 

"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." — Jean-Luc Godard "A pioneer of '60s New Wave cinema, Godard was making a case with this famous quote for the ability of image and attitude to triumph over limited means, an idea that fits the cultural thrust of Memphis art in most any medium. The first feature in nearly a decade from local filmmaking pioneer John Michael McCarthy, Cigarette Girl takes the quote to heart. The low-budget dystopian noir stars Amazonian wonder Cori Dials in the title role, a black-market cigarette dealer who quits smoking and defies her mob employers, forcing her to simultaneously fight against nicotine withdrawal and for her life. The film's tagline: "She'd kill for a smoke." Cigarette Girl is a different kind of film for Mississippi native McCarthy, a comic book artist turned filmmaker who built a worldwide underground reputation in the '90s as a purveyor of '50s- and '60s-style "exploitation cinema," displaying the natural talents of muse D'Lana Tunnell in films such as the (mostly) black-and-while Teenage Tupelo (a curious, memorable blend of Elvis lore, personal fetish, and mixed-up autobiography) and the lurid color The Sore Losers, a genre-hopping, comic-book-crazy thriller starring garage-rocker Jack Yarber, (SF INDIEFEST 2000). This stretch of films culminated in 2000's visually striking girls-with-guns Superstarlet A.D., a woman-worshipping spectacular that was something like Russ Meyer (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) gone glam-rock (SF INDIEFEST 2001). McCarthy's new film, by contrast, cuts back on spectacle while beefing up story. It also draws on a slightly different mix of cultural influences: girlie mags, trash cinema, and early rock-and-roll giving way to anti-hero comics, film noir, and gritty sci-fi. (Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis is repeatedly referenced.) The film is set in 2035, a future in which cigarette smokers have been ostracized into crumbling ghettos dubbed "smoking sections" and a pack of cigarettes costs more than $60. Dials' character works as a cigarette girl in the mob-controlled, smoking-section hangout the Vice Club, but she is undercutting her employer by dealing packs on the street for $50. Early in the film, her bosses discover her double-dealing as she discovers her cigarette-addicted grandmother (local film vet Helen Bowman, in perhaps her best role) dying of emphysema. Among the other cast members are slender, tomboyish punkette Ivy McLemore (a recent McCarthy discovery who later landed a role in the MTV web series Savage County) as the replacement cigarette girl, J. Lazarus as a menacing mid-level heavy, and D'Army Bailey as a smoking-section quickie-mart owner. Everything in Cigarette Girl orbits around Dials, though. McCarthy demands a lot from her in what might be considered something of a superhero origin story. She is asked to be an iconic presence, and she delivers. Dials is a spectacle even when not stripped down to bra, panties, and fishnets. (Unlike most of McCarthy's other films, Cigarette Girl contains no full nudity.) Her palpable combination of toughness and vulnerability makes her character click. "Cori is like the living, breathing embodiment of what a cult movie becomes by sitting on a shelf for 25 years," McCarthy said last week in the attic of his Cooper-Young home, which might double as museum of his work and its influences. "I didn't have a million dollars, but she looks like a million dollars. I haven't made a movie in 10 years [in part] because I hadn't met anyone like Cori in that period of time." An attraction to Dials as an authentic presence, and a desire to capture that presence on film, was as much an impetus for Cigarette Girl as anything. McCarthy was similarly inspired in some of his early films by Tunnell, whose gold-framed black-and-white nude photo he references to explain Dials' appeal. "If you look at that picture of D'Lana, that could be 1930. It could be 1950. It could be 1970," McCarthy says. "It's a motorcycle junkyard in Mississippi in 1992. If I have any gift at all — whether the movie is uneven or incoherent or beautiful or has good moments or bad moments — the gift I have is objectifying that, because I drew it first when I was doing comics, and I can still see it when I'm making films. "The beauty of [Dials] is very much like D'Lana there. She's not an actress. She's a starlet," McCarthy says, deploying a pet word that's been used in the title of two of his films. "Anybody can act. But only certain people that nature spits up can be starlets. They have a charisma." McCarthy met Dials while working as a tour guide at Sun Studio and later partnered with her in the glam-rock band Fingers Like Saturn before Dials moved to Virginia, where she's now training to be a mortician. "Cori sings like a pop-culture priestess and looks like a gothic Brigitte Bardot," McCarthy says. "So she has all these inherent pop-culture qualities to her. She has to move around a lot. She gets heckled. Can you imagine walking around on the street and looking like God?" While not at all rejecting the "exploitation" moniker, McCarthy talks about the women he films in terms of "female empowerment," citing social critic Camille Paglia. He describes Cigarette Girl as a film "about a female character who uses a sexual persona to survive in a dystopian world where men are in control." He also says that he casts women to play himself, an assertion most detectable in Teenage Tupelo and Cigarette Girl. (McCarthy's own mother died of a smoking-related illness.) "I seem to be the only local filmmaker who has decided to do fantasy — epic fantasy — on a shoestring," McCarthy says of his place in a growing local film scene that he, perhaps more than anyone, helped launch. (In a Flyer interview last year, Craig Brewer described himself as "very much a student of Mike McCarthy.") McCarthy hopes that more people will join him in the fantasy with Cigarette Girl, though one also has to wonder if all of McCarthy's hardy cult will be as enamored of this more professional film with less camp and sensationalism. "The other stuff is my street cred," McCarthy says. "This borrows from that but is a little more commercial, a little more formula." After a world premiere this summer at the Perth Revelation International Film Festival in Australia, Cigarette Girl will have its U.S. premiere this week at Studio on the Square in a pair of screenings co-sponsored by the Indie Memphis Film Festival and the On Location: Memphis International Film Festival, a collaborative first for the two local festivals". - Chris Herrington, Memphis Flyer