47th San Francisco International Film Festival at PFA

4/16/04 to 4/29/04

  • 47th SFIFF

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Five Obstructions

    • Thursday, April 29 7:00pm

    In this playfully profound documentary, Dogme demon Lars von Trier challenges great Dane filmmaker Jørgen Leth to remake his 1968 masterpiece The Perfect Human according to devious rules that test the elder statesman's creative and ethical limits.

  • Three Step Dancing

    • Thursday, April 29 8:55pm

    The Sardinian landscape serves as a stunning backdrop to these interconnected, seasonal tales, told "with a talented eye for beautiful compositions and an unpatronizing feel for [the] peasant characters."-Variety

  • Squint Your Eyes

    • Wednesday, April 28 7:00pm

    A laid-back film as concerned with the perfection of a summer day as with parents and children, strivers and slackers, and how each defines happiness. A girl hides from her yuppie parents at her dropout ex-teacher's rural farm.

  • Doppelganger

    • Wednesday, April 28 9:25pm

    Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelganger uses the classic supernatural theme of the double to generate dread and tension. It's also a darkly funny and heartfelt work, held together by a dazzling dual performance by Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?).

  • Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army

    • Tuesday, April 27 6:30pm

    Neverland chronicles the formation and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Filmmaker Robert Stone's juxtaposition of archival footage and contemporary interviews with former SLA members plunges us into the early 1970s. With short Café 1996.

  • Magic Gloves

    • Tuesday, April 27 9:00pm

    In this most deadpan of deadpan comedies, Alejandro, a car service driver, lives marginally in Buenos Aires. He is befriended by people who, like himself, circulate aimlessly, victims of an Argentine economic depression.

  • Checkpoint

    • Monday, April 26 5:30pm

    The checkpoints that Palestinians face when traveling between their communities form a roadblock between two sides of a conflict. A high-tech camera minimizing his presence, the filmmaker illustrates in shockingly tangible scenes that intimidation and compassion are curiously arbitrary.

  • Life Is Shorts

    • Monday, April 26 8:00pm

    Mel Novikoff Award presented to Paolo Cherchi Usai. Jon Mirsalis on Piano. A sampler from George Eastman House, dedicated to all lovers of the whimsical, the unorthodox, and the idiosyncratic. From Italian divas to American comics, silhouette animation to social realism, a guided tour through the labyrinth of silent film.

  • Silent Waters

    • Sunday, April 25 1:30pm

    The sunny prospects of a loving family in Pakistan are challenged when Islamic fundamentalists come to town. A young man, caught up in the fervor, risks losing his family, and his soul, in this beautiful and moving first feature film.

  • James' Journey to Jerusalem

    • Sunday, April 25 4:05pm

    James, an African on a holy pilgrimage, has his faith tested when he is arrested as an illegal worker upon entrance to Israel in this sharply ironic fable about what happens when the Holy Land enters the global economy.

  • Goodbye, Dragon Inn

    • Sunday, April 25 6:30pm

    It's a rainy night in Taipei, and a crumbling kino-barn is screening the action epic Dragon Inn. However, in Tsai Ming-liang's tribute to cinema, and to cinemagoing, the audience and staff seem more concerned with cruising for a different kind of "action."

  • The Middle of the World

    • Sunday, April 25 8:50pm

    When an unemployed truck driver and his family cross northeastern Brazil by bicycle in search of a better life, family conflicts are inevitable. Wonderful light and lively music accompany this journey through a harsh landscape with dignity and hope.

  • The Story of the Weeping Camel

    • Saturday, April 24 2:00pm

    In the Gobi Desert, Mongolian nomads raise their herds with all the love (and high expectations) they have for their own kids. When a mother camel snubs her young, measures must be taken. But can you guilt-trip a camel?

  • God Is Brazilian

    • Saturday, April 24 4:00pm

    God is stressed and needs a vacation. Searching for a temporary replacement, he enlists a lazy con artist and lovely young woman in a nutty yet poignant soul-searching journey through some gorgeous, remote regions of Brazil.

  • Since Otar Left

    • Saturday, April 24 6:45pm

    This story of three generations of Georgian women is haunting in its depth and simplicity. Mother and daughter decide to protect their matriarch from the news of her son Otar's death, but the formidable 90-year-old has other plans.

  • Triple Agent

    • Saturday, April 24 9:25pm

    Eric Rohmer's homage to Hitchcock is an espionage thriller with double agents agonizing over marriage indiscretions as well as assassination. Set in 1930s France, it follows an exiled Russian general's evenings with his wife...and his spying.

  • Route 181-Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel

    • Friday, April 23 1:30pm

    This road-movie documentary is a provocative collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan as they remap, through poignant interviews, the contours of the 1947 partition line.

  • The Corporation

    • Friday, April 23 7:30pm

    This inspiring, infuriating, epic documentary details how corporations' sense of social responsibility has largely failed to keep pace with their power and influence, while saluting the committed citizens and visionary executives who speak out against irresponsible practices.

  • What the Eye Doesn't See

    • Thursday, April 22 6:30pm

    This Peruvian Magnolia is an ambitious, suspenseful mosaic of stories and people, a portrait of a society exposing its broken moral compass, set against the backdrop of the fall of the Fujimori regime.

  • Save the Green Planet!

    • Thursday, April 22 10:00pm

    Lee Byung-Goo must single-handedly save the world from a space invasion by kidnapping a suspected alien king posing as human. Or maybe he's just a wacko. This nutjob masterpiece will leave your head thoroughly spinning.

  • Vodka Lemon

    • Wednesday, April 21 7:00pm

    In an isolated Armenian village, the quirky inhabitants do the best they can with their dubious post-Soviet freedoms. In this disarming gem, a widow and widower find that there is something more than snow between a man and a woman.

  • Master, a Building in Copacabana

    • Wednesday, April 21 9:25pm

    When a documentary film crew spends a week talking to tenants in an apartment building in Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana neighborhood, they capture the charming stories of several lifetimes.

  • Bringing to Light

    • Tuesday, April 20 7:00pm

    Ten stunning experimental films explore cinema's ability to transform and reimagine the world. Keenly wrought observations of place, animation, educational films, decaying celluloid, and an eclectic array of optical techniques bring to light hidden realities and unspoken emotions.

  • Loving Glances

    • Tuesday, April 20 9:00pm

    Srdjan Karanovic brings us this gently comic romance between young refugees in wartime Belgrade. Hilariously bedeviled by voices from their emotional past and the growing ethnic divide, the lovers decide whether love and hope are worth the risk.

  • Vibrator

    • Monday, April 19 6:30 pm

    A guy, a girl, and a truck. This film of uncommon tenderness and sensuality unfolds on a road trip though northern Japan, as a truck driver and the woman he casually picks up discover a rare human connection.

  • Last Life in the Universe

    • Monday, April 19 9:00pm

    Tadanobu Asano plays a suicide-obsessed librarian whose orderly life is disrupted by a yakuza killing and a chance meeting with a Thai bar girl in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's contemplative, enigmatic, quietly funny almost-romance, gorgeously photographed by Christopher Doyle.

  • Back to Kotelnich

    • Sunday, April 18 3:45pm

    Near Moscow, Emmanuel Carrère begins a film about a married couple, one of whom works for what used to be the KGB. When one of them is later killed, Carrère returns to solve the mystery of the murder.

  • The Missing

    • Sunday, April 18 6:45pm

    A grandmother looks for her missing grandson while a boy searches for his grandfather in this directorial debut by Tsai Ming-liang's lead actor. This portrait of contemporary Taipei finds its "missing" in the lost, the dead, and in the ever-changing cityscape.

  • After You

    • Sunday, April 18 8:40pm

    In this elegant French comedy, an attentive maitre d' (Daniel Auteuil) who's trained to fix any problem aims his well-pressed tuxedo towards mending a suicidal man's life, but meeting the man's beautiful ex-girlfriend starts to overheat this reserved waiter's outlook.

  • This Little Life

    • Sunday, April 18 1:30pm

    Through the struggles of a mother and her premature infant, this captivating film by first-time feature director Sarah Gavron emphasizes the value and fragility of human life.

  • The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Bear

    • Saturday, April 17 1:30pm

    Recommended for age 7 and up. Special admission, children under 12: $6. This majestic animated family film pits Man against Beast in a tale of maternal love, family bonds, animal instinct, and survival. The Inuit legend follows the star-crossed paths of an Eskimo family and their polar bear counterparts.

  • Dame la Mano

    • Saturday, April 17 3:10pm

    Every weekend a tiny New Jersey nightclub called La Esquina Habanera is set ablaze with authentic African rumba, a largely improvised music always accompanied by joyful, passionate dance. Experience la musica with this group of working-class Cuban exiles.

  • Control Room

    • Saturday, April 17 6:30pm

    Control Room goes inside Al Jazeera headquarters as well as U.S. Central Command, site of the war in Iraq's most important battles: the press conferences. The battle for real "enduring freedom" is covering a war without being controlled.

  • That Day

    • Saturday, April 17 8:50pm

    Trickster-philosopher Raoul Ruiz is in a particularly playful mood in this deliciously macabre farce set in a Swiss village whose denizens find the murder and mayhem all around them rather amusing, as will you. The fine ensemble cast includes Michel Piccoli. With short Life and Death of a Boring Moment.

  • We Loved Each Other So Much

    • Friday, April 16 5pm

    Though a recent 15-year civil war has left the people of Beirut struggling to find common ground, this breathtaking film documents the binding importance of beloved singer Fairuz to people all over the Arab world.

  • The Saddest Music in the World

    • Friday, April 16 7:10pm

    Breaking the wintry pall of Depression-era Winnipeg, Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), a bewitching beer baroness, announces a competition to determine which nation possesses the most sorrowful song. Soon maudlin musicians from every lamentable land descend in Guy Maddin's joyously stilted comedy.

  • Suite Habana

    • Friday, April 16 9:25pm

    This is not the sunny Havana of baseball, revolution, and cha-cha-cha, but Suite Habana resonates with the poignancy of everyday existence and the quiet joy of small satisfactions as few films ever have.