sf indiefest

Victoria Theater     2/10/2007     12PM

                                2/16/2007     4:30PM

Our relationships with our mothers is usually a charged dynamic, beginning the moment we’re born. The mother-daughter variety can be particularly complex, especially if your single mom is mentally unstable and threatens to kill when you’re 19 years old, as is the case for filmmaker Tara Wray.

Near the beginning of Wray’s debut feature, “Manhattan, Kansas,” she notes, “My mother was my entire life...she and I were so close it was difficult to tell where one of us ended and the other began. But we were always running from her demons, both real and imagined. All the while it was my job to love and protect her as much as I could, but it was never enough.”

Roxie Cinema     2/10/2007     12PM

                            2/12/2007     7PM

Desperate Measures

The things we do for love, money, and family.

The Trainee

Craig Rosenthal

Singapore, 2006, 9 min

US Premiere

Better think twice before trying to rob this inconvenience store…

Shank

Jenessa Joffe

USA, 2006, 17 min

Lilah is about to learn the meaning of the word “shank.”

Musi Byt Ma (She Must Be Mine)

Brian Emery and Max Hoffman

Czech Republic, 2006, 10 min

Roxie Cinema 2/10/2007 2.15PM

Roxie Cinema 2/18/2007 2:15PM

All The Lonely People

Where don’t they all come from?

A woman working in a condom factory tries to buy happiness.

Victoria Theater 2/17/2007 7PM

Victoria Theater  2/10/2007    2:15PM

Thrill to the strange adventures of Tex Kennedy after the great nation formerly known as the United States collapses completely. By the year 2097, history has begun to unfold again in New America. The survivors are re-emerging from the ashes to take (by any means necessary) their rightful places as the founding fathers of a brutal and bizarre new nation.

Roxie Cinema    2/10/2007   4:30PM

                            2/18/2007  12PM

California Theater-Berkeley   2/14/2007  9:30PM

Oliver Meyrou’s Beyond Hatred is a calm and moving cinema-verite documentary about moving past anger and revenge. François Chenu, a young gay man, was beaten by three skinheads and thrown in a pond to die in Rheims, France.

Winner of the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, the film bears witness to the strength and dignity of Chenu’s parents and siblings as they travel from despair to hope. Told without narration, the story portrays the families, the victim, and the accused, and details the French legal system in its examination of the aftermath of this terrible attack. Austerely composed and flawlessly directed, the film is powerful without being preachy. Beyond Hatred is shot in the classic Verite style where the crew is invisible and the characters in this real-life tragedy speak on their own, and in their own way. In one bravura sequence, Chenu’s sister recounts her memory of the evening her brother was killed as the camera calmly surveys the park two years after the attack, accompanied by an evocative and sparse score by François Eudes Chanfrault.

Victoria Theater    2/10/2007    4:30PM

                                2/18/2007    7PM

"LOL is a witty mini-satire of post-collegiates trying to connect romantically and erotically… in a tangle of up-to-the-minute technology." - Gerald Peary, The Boston Phoenix

“We started with nothing but the theme of relationships and technology, and over the course of 6 months we discovered a film much funnier, sadder, and more relevant that I ever could have hoped for.”- Joe Swanberg

Alex, Tim, and Chris view the women in their lives through a computer screen or the lens of a camera-phone, struggling to balance their online fantasies and addictions with the demands of real life. Featuring a nonprofessional cast, video contributions from people all over the world, and music by lead Kevin Bewersdorf, “LOL” shows how the latest tools of communication can either help us click or turn us off.

Victoria Theater    2/10/2007    7PM

                            2/18/2007    12PM

“Mojave Phone Booth is a rebellion against the Hollywood philosophy and all the bloat it stands for. I believe that a compelling story can be told without it costing an arm and leg.” - Director John Putch

In the middle of the Mojave Desert rests an abandoned phone booth, riddled with bullet holes, its windows broken, but otherwise functioning. Its identity was born on the Internet, and for years travelers would make the trek down a lonely dirt road and camp next to the booth, in the hopes that it might suddenly ring, connecting them with a stranger (often from another country) on the other end of the line.

Roxie Cinema    2/10/2007    7PM

                          2/12/2007    9:30PM

California Theater-Berkeley    2/15/2007    7PM

US Premiere

To those of us familiar with Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s controversial body-of-work (HoleHead’s “Kichiku dai Enkai” and IndieFest’s “Antenna”), his latest film comes (literally) out of left field: It’s a baseball movie. However, with one of the most provocative talents in new Japanese cinema behind the camera, it's not going to be a traditional sports film by any stretch of the imagination.

Roxie Cinema 2/10/2007 9:30PM

Please put on your party hats for this rare theatrical presentation of Infra-Man. We will unveil an original 35mm IB Technicolor film print (in excellent condition), so you witness it as it was originally intended - in stunning Thunderball Fist-O-Scope!

Hong Kong's legendary Shaw Brothers produced this mind-blowing cinematic spectacle, and we're going rip off Roger Ebert in a futile attempt to describe the wonders that await:

Victoria Theater     2/10/2007     9:30PM

Roxie Cinema         2/16/2007     11:45PM

US Premiere

“I hope this independent film has both Irish and Canadians identifying with this dysfunctional but loving Irish family as they take on the biggest fight of their lives - all the while being entertained by the perverse humor.” - Director Mike Scullion

“Good, unclean, plain-old adult fun.” - Calgary Sun

Gobshite is a (blacker than pitch) comedy crime thriller about Ronnie Banks, an amoral (and more than slightly demented) English gangster, who upsets the underworld pecking order by deciding he wants a bigger piece of the criminal pie controlled by “The Gov.”

Roxie Cinema 2/10/2007 11:45PM

Victoria Theater 2/18/2007 9:30PM

“Why would anybody watch a scum show like Videodrome?” - Barry Convex

Do you want to watch S&MAN?

S&MAN (pronounced “Sandman”) is a movie about voyeurism and underground horror, focusing on our balance of sympathy and sadism when we watch death. JT Petty, a filmmaker responsible for his own underground horror films (e.g. “Soft For Digging” that played here a few years ago), tracks down and interviews psychologists, scholars, actors, and most importantly—the underground and extreme filmmakers themselves.

Primitive Screwheads and Tossing Alice

Victoria Theater

  2/9/2007 11:45PM

 2/10/2007 11:45PM

2/16/2007 11:45PM

2/17/2007 11:45PM

The Primitive Screwheads, along with their friends Tossing Alice, present “The Crazy Go Nuts Show;” a late night comedy/horror variety program that harkens back to the glory days of The Donnie and Marie Show and Creature Features.