Found

Essential SF: 'Berkeley in the '60s,' 'Brother Outsider,' 'Weather Underground'

By Michael Fox

Three Bay Area documentaries provide an invaluable corrective to the historical revisionism practiced by calculating conservatives, cynical politicians, and the middle-of-the-road mainstream media.

Historical documentaries have a staid, ho-hum reputation with large swaths of the citizenry, who taint them by association with either the musty educational films they watched in public schools or ponderous marathons that get the highest billing on public television. It also must be acknowledged that, for many viewers, the past lacks the relevance and immediacy of verité social-issue docs. However, just as the breadth and style of written biographies has expanded far beyond the once-standard neutral assemblage of facts, contemporary documentaries more often embrace point of view, creative structures, dramatic storytelling, unique characters and moral complexity.

First-person

On the Need to Hire a Producer of Marketing and Distribution

By Jon Reiss

Every film needs one person devoted to the distribution and marketing of the film from the start, just as they have a line producer, assistant director, or editor.

As a filmmaker, I know how difficult adopting these new tasks of marketing and distribution are. I also know how they can interfere with making new films—and there have been a fair amount of complaints lately from filmmakers about being responsible for doing this additional work.

Editor’s note: Jon Reiss teaches the two-day course Think Outside the Doc Box at San Francisco Film Society July 31-August 1. Sign up at SFFS.

Q&A

Getting Down, Dirty with Bob Ray and Chad Holt

By Sean Uyehara

Bob Ray brings his Down & Dirty Austin Film Tour to the Bay Area. And you can’t stop him.

A person who doesn’t listen to the naysayers, who does what they want, when they want, how they want to do it: Admirable, right? Well, yeah, of course it depends on what kind of “what,” “when,” and “how” we are talking about. But. . . that’s not the point. Let’s look at Bob Ray for a second. He makes movies about the people he loves in Austin, Texas. People such as Guinea pig cultivators and roller derby girls. He makes animated shorts and music videos. He unearths whatever it is that’s beneath the underneath in Texas, and says, “Look at this shit!” In short, he is a filmmaker. And, in order to continue doing what he loves to do, he has launched a tour—Bob Ray’s Down & Dirty Austin Film Tour. His new movie is Total Badass. It’s a documentary about Chad Holt, a man who needs an introduction. Bob Ray is coming to San Francisco. You can’t stop him. You can only hope to contain him. But why would you want to?

Found

Essential SF: 'Times of Harvey Milk,' 'Crumb,' 'Cockettes'

Three films document essential chunks of San Francisco’s tragic and mythic past, told in empathetic but non-hagiographic testimony.

Any discussion of the most essential Bay Area films must begin with a nod to the quantity and quality of nonfiction produced here in the past 40 years. That’s neither cheerleading nor jingoism; tally up the Academy Award nominations for these films, their national television broadcasts and presence at international festivals. One could devote a good deal of space to an analysis of the climate and conditions that fostered this output, but, for me, it stems from an atmosphere of community and cooperation fostered historically by and through the Film Arts Foundation, the Saul Zaentz Media Center and Stanford’s renowned doc-oriented graduate film program.

Experience

S.F. Jewish Film Festival Lights 30 Candles

By Michael Fox

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival finds fans beyond its identity-based target audience with a wide array of international films and topics.

For the first 20 or so years of its existence, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival drew most heavily on the Israel-Germany-United States triumvirate for its programming. The world has opened up in the last decade: The historical archives of the former Soviet bloc countries are finally being mined to illuminating effect, for example, while filmmakers are freer to confront their countries’ less-than-shining WWII records—even as U.S. theatrical bookings of foreign films have declined, giving niche festivals access to a greater swath of high-quality dramas.