Editor’s note: Our tag-team take on the SFIFF begins today with Michael Fox’s post and Jonathan Kiefer’s comment (supplemented, hopefully, by your comments), with Kiefer posting and Fox commenting tomorrow. Both critics will return with an additional post next week at the festival midpoint. In addition, you can follow them on Twitter throughout the festival.
For a good many years, the S.F. International Film Festival displayed what might be called casual indifference to the output of local filmmakers. Whatever Bay Area work was shown — the occasional documentary and a goodly number of experimental shorts — typically emerged from the Golden Gate Awards competition; darned few local films were specifically invited and programmed. It was a source of no little frustration and bitterness in the film community, I can tell you.
The outlook brightened considerably in recent years with the SFIFF’s introduction of a “Cinema By The Bay” sidebar, and this year’s program fairly brims with feature-length local work. A watchful observer may guess that the SFIFF was embarrassed in recent years by the Mill Valley Film Festival’s enthusiastic, void-filling embrace of Bay Area filmmakers (notably Rob Nilsson). Said observer might also factor in that the S.F. Film Society (the fest’s parent organization) assumed several of the functions and dozens of the members of the Film Arts Foundation (of blessed memory) since the last SFIFF. The SF Film Society, naturally, wants to serve that constituency more prominently through the festival (and, not incidentally, keep those renewal memberships rolling in).
The most visible indicator of the festival’s focus on Bay Area filmmakers is the opening night selection, Peter Bratt’s La Mission. Set and shot in the Mission District, the film (which premiered at Sundance but wasn’t previewed for critics here) follows the struggle of a macho father (Benjamin Bratt) to deal with the realization that his son is gay. The real find among the local work, however, is My Suicide, David Lee Miller’s relentless, visual-idea-crammed look at the malaise — nay, epidemic — of high-school nihilism and image overload in the upper-crust suburbs.