After flirting with a five-day program in 2024, the San Francisco International Film Festival returns to an 11-day run this year for its 68th iteration, April 17–27.
Filmgoers who thrill at having too many options to choose from can once again assiduously plot their schedules, even if it involves some tight layovers. As SFFILM Executive Director Anne Lai said during the March 26 program announcement, “We like to see people running.”
Like last year, most programming will take place in the Marina and Presidio neighborhoods and at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive.
Boasting over 150 films from over 50 countries, this year’s festival is packed with world premieres, films with local ties, feature-length debuts and special appearances. Here are five not-to-miss events to seek out when festival tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday, March 28 at 10 a.m.
Asia Kate Dillon and Ridley Asha Bateman in a scene from Elena Oxman’s ‘Outerlands.’ (SFFILM)
April 27, 5 p.m. at Premier Theater
April 27, 6 p.m. at Marina Theatre
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No, this is not a documentary about the popular Outer Sunset restaurant, though the narrative feature was filmed in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods. Outerlands, the festival’s closing-night film, follows Cass (played by Asia Kate Dillon), a recent transplant to San Francisco. Cass is cautiously patching together a life when they unexpectedly become the caretaker of a coworker’s 11-year-old daughter, Ari. As the days stretch on, the two bristle and bond, their interactions shaped by their shared experiences of childhood abandonment.
Bonus: Director Elena Oxman will speak at a free event on April 25 about filming in San Francisco.
‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ is part of a a six-film retrospective of classic horror films. (SFFILM)
Horror highlights
SFFILM generally has a few “midnight films” on the program, but this year they’ve leaned into horror classics. Spread across the festival run, this mini-retrospective kicks off with John Carpenter’s They Live, followed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (preceded by the documentary Chain Reaction, charting the 1974 film’s lasting influence), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a potentially foggy outdoor screening of Carpenter’s The Fog and Herk Harvey’s haunting Carnival of Souls.
For a taste of contemporary features and shorts following in these genre footsteps, check out 40 Acres (cannibals!), Cloud and the shorts block “Dark Waves & Stranger Tides.”
A still from Sky Hopinka’s ‘maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore,’ 2020. (SFFILM)
Five years ago, filmmaker Sky Hopinka was set to screen his debut feature maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore at the 2020 SFFILM festival — an event completely canceled due to the pandemic. Now SFFILM is honoring Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, with the festival’s Persistence of Vision award, alongside a screening of his experimental documentary, at long last.
maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore follows two people as they wander through nature and share their personal reflections on identity, language and the spirit world, promising to be “a layered art piece that challenges the positioning of Indigenous culture in American society.”
If that sells out, which it likely will, there are two other opportunities to engage with Hopinka’s lush, beautifully shot work. A program of Hopinka’s shorts plays on April 25, and BAMPFA is showing Sunflower Siege Engine through Aug. 17, a 2022 film featuring footage of Richard Oakes reading “Proclamation: To the Great White Father and All His People” at the Alcatraz occupation.
A still from Naja Pham Lockwood’s mid-length documentary ‘On Healing Land, Birds Perch,’ 2025, part of a three-film program. (SFFILM)
In another welcome programming change, 2025 also marks the return of mid-length films, which weren’t included in last year’s festival. A highlight is Naja Pham Lockwood’s 33-minute film On Healing Land, Birds Perch, focused on what happened after Eddie Adams photographed South Vietnamese general Nguyễn Ngọc Loan killing Viet Cong captain Nguyễn Văn Lém in the Pulitzer Prize-winning image “Saigon Execution.” The film gathers the children of General Loan and Captain Lém, along with the son of a family Lém executed, all now living in the United States. Their complicated and conflicting views of their forebears — and the war — are depicted in candid detail.
Lockwood’s film screens with two others: Jess X. Snow’s Roots That Reach Toward the Sky and Christopher Radcliff’s We Were the Scenery (about two Vietnamese refugees in the Philippines who became extras in Apocalypse Now).
Anna Baryshnikov stars in Nastasya Popov’s ‘Idiotka.’ (SFFILM)
So far this list has leaned toward the serious stuff (with a delightful side of gore), but the festival is not without its lighthearted fare! May I present Idiotka, writer-director Nastasya Popov’s zany debut film. Fans of Love Lies Bleeding may remember lead actress Anna Baryshnikov as the clingy, wannabe girlfriend caught on the wrong side of Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian’s true love. (Who could forget those teeth?)
Here, Baryshnikov plays Margarita, an emerging fashion designer attaching high-end tags to her own work to sell pieces online. Much of the film’s comedy comes from her chaotic life with her extended Russian Jewish family in West Hollywood. When a reality fashion show called Slay, Serve and Survive comes calling, Margarita signs on to save — and/or escape — the family home.
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