San Francisco International Film Festival @ BAM/PFA
4/25/14 to 5/8/14
BAM/PFA is the exclusive East Bay venue for the filmmakers and other special guests in person.
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Films - Past
Films - Past
Events
Past Films
All About the Feathers
Friday, April 25 6:30 pmNeto Villalobos (Costa Rica, 2013). An impoverished security guard struggles to care for a fighting rooster in this quixotic Costa Rican comedy anchored by stellar performances from a mostly nonprofessional cast. (85 mins)View DetailsManuscripts Don't Burn
Friday, April 25 8:40pmMohammad Rasoulof (Iran, 2013). Iranian writer-director Rasoulof extends his uncompromising body of work with a taut, finely woven drama based on real-life events impacting a small circle of aging writers menaced by the Secret Service. (127 mins)View DetailsThe Seventh Walk
Saturday, April 26 1:45 pmAmit Dutta (India, 2013). Celebrated Indian filmmaker Dutta fuses painterly technique and cinematic vision to form an engrossing meditation on the artistic legacy of northern India's lush Kangra Valley. (70 mins)View DetailsWe Come as Friends
Saturday, April 26 3:30pmHubert Sauper (France/Austria, 2013). Intrepid documentarian Sauper (Darwin's Nightmare) delivers a piercing examination of the human cost of neocolonialism in newly independent South Sudan. (110 mins)View DetailsTamako in Moratorium
Saturday, April 26 6:15pmNobuhiro Yamashita (Japan, 2013). An apathetic recent college graduate in small-town Japan finds herself with two choices: either sabotage her father's budding romance, or find a place for herself in the world. (78 mins)View DetailsTrap Street
Saturday, April 26 8pmVivian Qu (China, 2013). What's it like to be a twenty-first-century young adult in China's surveillance state? Qu's slow-building noir uses a simple boy-meets-girl tale to unearth a hidden world of government control just below the surface. (94 mins)View DetailsThe Last Season
Sunday, April 27 12:30pmSara Dosa (U.S., 2014). This sensitive, probing documentary examines the bond between two mushroom hunters in Oregon, an elderly Vietnam vet and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, during one unusually hard season. (79 mins)View DetailsWhat Now? Remind Me
Sunday, April 27 2:30pmJoaquim Pinto (Portugal, 2013). Pinto poetically, dynamically, and candidly chronicles a year of his life as he undergoes experimental treatment for HIV and VHC infections in this epic yet personal documentary. (164 mins)View DetailsShorts 5: Experimental: Looking Glass
Sunday, April 27 5:45pmEleven experimental films reflect on the past, illuminate the present, and imagine the future. Works by Basma Alsharif, Bruce Baillie, Paul Clipson, Martha Colburn, Su Friedrich, Jim Jennings, Lawrence Jordan, Lewis Klahr, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Charlotte Pryce, and John Smith. (80 mins)View DetailsBlind Dates
Sunday, April 27 8:15pmLevan Koguashvili (Georgia, 2013). Single and forty, Sandro hopes to find love with a hairdresser, but there's a catch: her husband is getting out of prison. This low-key, comic gem is a wonderful introduction to the Georgian New Wave. (95 mins)View DetailsWhen Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
Monday, April 28 8:30pmCorneliu Porumboiu (Romania/France, 2013). Continuing his very particular parsing of language and politics-here, the politics are cinematic-Porumboiu tells the story of a film director rehearsing the details of a nude scene with his lead actress. (89 mins)View DetailsStop the Pounding Heart
Tuesday, April 29 6:30pmRoberto Minervini (U.S./Belgium/Italy, 2013). This unique hybrid of documentary and narrative offers an evocative portrait of the quotidian lives of a devout young Christian goat farmer and a bull-riding cowboy in Texas's rural Bible belt. (100 mins)View DetailsThe Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir
Tuesday, April 29 8:50pmMike Fleiss (U.S., 2014). Bob Weir, “the other one,” steps out of Grateful Dead bandmate Jerry Garcia's shadow and into the spotlight in this expansive documentary filled with performance footage, home movies, and reminiscences. (90 mins)View DetailsStray Dogs
Wednesday, April 30 6:30pmTsai Ming-liang (Taiwan/France, 2013). A poverty-stricken father and his two young children try to survive in modern-day Taipei in this often mysterious work, yet another remarkable piece of cinema from the great Tsai. (138 mins)View DetailsEastern Boys
Wednesday, April 30 9:10pmRobin Campillo (France, 2013). This erotically charged nail-biter takes the audience on an unexpected ride when a fiftysomething Parisian businessman propositions an eastern European immigrant hustler. (128 mins)View DetailsDifret
Thursday, May 1 6:30pmZeresenay Berhane Mehari (Ethiopia, 2014). In a contemporary Ethiopian village, a fourteen-year-old girl is abducted in an attempt at forced marriage. Her effort to free herself sets off a legal firestorm in this powerful drama inspired by a true story. (96 mins)View DetailsThe Militant
Thursday, May 1 8:50pmManolo Nieto (Uruguay/Argentina, 2013). A student leader fighting against the bosses of striking packinghouse workers in crisis-ridden 2002 Uruguay experiences a coming-of-age crisis when he inherits his father's ranch. (121 mins)View DetailsHappiness
Friday, May 2 6:30pmThomas Balmès (France/Finland, 2013). A nine-year-old boy living at a monastery in the mountains of Bhutan gets a glimpse of television and the modern world, opening his eyes to a complicated future, in this eloquently photographed documentary. (80 mins)View DetailsAll That Jazz
Friday, May 2 8:30pmBob Fosse (U.S., 1979). Digital Restoration. Roy Scheider stands in for writer/director Bob Fosse in Fosse's dazzling, self-lacerating, and clearly autobiographical musical, a Best Picture nominee about a celebrated choreographer/director. (123 mins)View DetailsNorte, the End of History
Saturday, May 3 1:30pmLav Diaz (Philippines, 2013). Art-house favorite Lav Diaz's latest epic profoundly explores everything from the state of the present-day rural Philippines by way of Dostoevsky to the 1890s Philippine Revolution against the Spanish. (250 mins)View DetailsThree Letters from China
Saturday, May 3 6:30pmLuc Schaedler (Switzerland, 2013). Attentively observing life on a parched farm, a grim industrial zone, a rural village, and a booming megacity, this documentary expressively reveals the upheaval and uncertainty of a rapidly changing China. (80 mins)View DetailsThe Dog
Saturday, May 3 8:30pmAllison Berg, Frank Keraudren (U.S., 2013). John Wojtowicz, whose ill-fated 1972 robbery of a Brooklyn bank to pay for his transgender bride's sex-change operation inspired Dog Day Afternoon, recalls the heist and his years as a gay rights activist. (100 mins)View DetailsAgnès Varda: From Here to There
Sunday, May 4 1:30pmAgnès Varda (France, 2011). Armed with her inimitable insight and ability to find beauty where one least expects it, Varda travels to various far-flung locales in this five-part miniseries made for French television. (225 mins)View DetailsManila in the Claws of Light
Sunday, May 4 6pmLino Brocka (Philippines, 1975). Digital Restoration. In one of his most trenchant works of social criticism and ruthless determinism, Brocka portrays the experiences of a provincial youth in Manila, unflinchingly exposing creeping degradation. (124 mins)View DetailsSalvation Army
Sunday, May 4 8:30pmAbdellah Taïa (Morocco, 2013). Adapting his autobiographical novel, Taïa tells the story of a gay Moroccan boy finding self-realization and personal strength within a society that shuns him. Shot by the brilliant Agnès Godard. (82 mins)View DetailsCoast of Death
Monday, May 5 6:30pmLois Patiño (Spain, 2013). The static frames of this documentary offer a meditative and prismatic view of Spain's storied and dangerous “Coast of Death,” granting the luxury of contemplating shifting clouds and crashing waves. (81 mins)View DetailsArt and Craft
Monday, May 5 8:40pmSam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, Mark Becker (U.S., 2013). Prompting reflection around the definitions of art and mastery, this documentary examines the curious life of Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art forgers in U.S. history. (89 mins)View DetailsReturn to Homs
Tuesday, May 6 6:30pmTalal Derki (Syria/Germany, 2013). This urgent dispatch from the besieged Syrian city of Homs presents a visceral eyewitness account of the conflict as a peaceful uprising descends into civil war and idealistic youths become armed revolutionaries. (87 mins)View DetailsTangerines
Tuesday, May 6 8:30pmZaza Urushadze (Estonia/Georgia, 2013). An old man caught in the brutal 1992 conflict over the Abkhazia region of Georgia finds himself nursing two wounded soldiers from opposing sides in this intense and compelling antiwar drama. (84 mins)View DetailsBad Hair
Wednesday, May 7 6:30pmMariana Rondón (Venezuela/Peru, 2013). A ten-year-old Caracas boy's desire to straighten his kinky hair causes outsized conflict with his mother. This finely acted, deceptively small-scale story subtly explores issues of economic pressure and homophobia. (93 mins)View DetailsHistory of Fear
Wednesday, May 7 8:45pmBenjamín Naishtat (Argentina/France/Germany/Qatar/Uruguay, 2014). Paranoia runs rampant as an affluent Buenos Aires suburb is beset by strange occurrences in this accomplished first feature, a film that is sprawling in scope and implications but astonishingly exacting in execution. (79 mins)View DetailsThe Dune
Thursday, May 8 6:30pmYossi Aviram (France/Israel, 2013). Delving into issues of identity and aging, this nuanced drama portrays the personal crises faced by an aging gay cop in France and a younger Israeli man who is found on the beach, mute and without any identification. (87 mins)View DetailsThe Amazing Catfish
Thursday, May 8 8:45pmClaudia Sainte-Luce (Mexico, 2013). This debut feature, set in Guadalajara and lensed by Agnès Godard, embraces an expansive definition of family in portraying a solitary young woman's growing connection to a rambunctious matriarchy in a state of crisis. (89 mins)View Details