Filmmaker Jan Krawitz explores the nature of altruism in a story about a woman seeking to donate an organ to a perfect stranger.
Filmmaker Jan Krawitz explores the nature of altruism in a story about a woman seeking to donate an organ to a perfect stranger.
Filmmaker Jan Krawitz explores the nature of altruism in a story about a woman seeking to donate an organ to a perfect stranger.
Filmmaker Jan Krawitz explores the nature of altruism in a story about a woman seeking to donate an organ to a perfect stranger.
First-time doc-maker Dain Percifield offers notes on capturing the highs and lows of drag queen Anna Conda's 2010 run for S.F. Supervisor.
First-time doc-maker Dain Percifield offers notes on capturing the highs and lows of drag queen Anna Conda's 2010 run for S.F. Supervisor.
First-time doc-maker Dain Percifield offers notes on capturing the highs and lows of drag queen Anna Conda's 2010 run for S.F. Supervisor.
First-time doc-maker Dain Percifield offers notes on capturing the highs and lows of drag queen Anna Conda's 2010 run for S.F. Supervisor.
Oliver Stone reflects on his own heated past, and the world’s, as he accepts the Founder’s Directing Award onstage at the Castro Theatre during SFIFF54.
Oliver Stone reflects on his own heated past, and the world’s, as he accepts the Founder’s Directing Award onstage at the Castro Theatre during SFIFF54.
Oliver Stone reflects on his own heated past, and the world’s, as he accepts the Founder’s Directing Award onstage at the Castro Theatre during SFIFF54.
As the San Francisco International Film Festival opens, key films consider the value of place.
As the San Francisco International Film Festival opens, key films consider the value of place.
As the San Francisco International Film Festival opens, key films consider the value of place.
Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider follow 'Speaking in Tongues' with a doc that talks baseball.
Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider follow 'Speaking in Tongues' with a doc that talks baseball.
Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider follow 'Speaking in Tongues' with a doc that talks baseball.
Reality bursts through daydreams; labors of love pay off in 2011's edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
Reality bursts through daydreams; labors of love pay off in 2011's edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
Reality bursts through daydreams; labors of love pay off in 2011's edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
Reality bursts through daydreams; labors of love pay off in 2011's edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
The scoop on the projects of the inaugural class for the SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants, which support lively, intelligent social-issue narrative films.
Shot in depressed burgs and 'burbs across the country, this documentary looks at the U.S. at its lowest economic ebb in generations.
The documentary chronicles several large-scale pranks devised in the hopes of fooling corporate/government event attendees and/or the media.
It’s hard to imagine a venue where the new documentary Holding On to Jah will sound better than it did at Mezzanine last Wednesday night.
Franny Armstrong talks about the moral imperative of her films, the importance of Hopenhagen, and the unexpected magnitude of her success.
A mini-retrospective of the work of Kim Longinotto plays during the Women Make Movies Film Festival at the Roxie.
With in-process Volunteer Nation: Stories of Service, veteran producer-directors Ben Hess and Dan Janos are mobilizing the millennials.
East Bay documentary producer Pete Nicks places interactive storytelling booths in hospital waiting rooms.
Oakland attorney Richard Lee speaks on the legal case surrounding the Swedish filmmakers of the hot-button documentary Bananas!.
Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's documnetary, Until the Light Takes Us examines the dark intersection of local Norwegian history and Death Metal.
Director Armando Iannucci's razor-sharp satire is about how the politics of spin can determine critical decisions on both sides of the Atlantic.
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival arrives with an expansive program spotlighting the Jewish tradition of social justice and human rights.
David Weissman speaks on his new project, Heartbreak and Heroism, revisiting the early years of the AIDS outbreak in San Francisco.
Like most social-issue documentaries, Food Stamped sprang from an activist impulse for Shira and Yoav Potash.
Berkeley-based filmmaking team Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan speak about social justice as a career and their film Soldiers of Conscience.
Ask the Documentary Doctor: Where does the filmmaker stop existing to give way to the reporter/activist/responsible citizen with camera in hand?
Iranian filmmaker Cyrus Omoomian documents post-Pinochet Chile in work-in-progress Pushing Towards Democracy.
On May Day Eve, Travis Wilkerson performed Proving Ground, probably the first multimedia Leninist rant to have ever graced the Sundance Kabuki.
City of Borders, the debut film by Bay Area filmmaker Yun Suh, follows several Palestinian characters seeking refuge at a gay bar. The film testifies to the intolerance that members of the LGBTQ community face in addition to all of the other walls, physical and social, separating people in the region.
Mark Kitchell current project is an ambitious summation of the environmental movement, from the protests of the 1960s, the '70s focus on pollution, the Greenpeace campaigns and the global climate change.
Co-directors Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel, two American friends with family ties to opposite sides of the conflict, went to Kashmir together to see what they could learn–and what the rest of us could.
Sam Green talks about his latest project, an experimental documentary where the stories tease out, in more of an emotional way, ideas about hope and imagination of the future
Sam Green talks about his latest project, an experimental documentary where the stories tease out, in more of an emotional way, ideas about hope and imagination of the future
On January 24 the San Francisco film and arts community lost Ave Montague, who was well known for her hard work, creativity and passion for the arts.
Levy offers thoughts on the program she's presenting at Sundance and what's being called the "New Documentary Movement."
Steven Soderbergh's fascinating portrait of legendary revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara is willfully disinterested in the conventions of mainstream movies.
Waltz with Bashir is another animated feature that embraces a more grown-up story and audience than anything in the long history of "cartoons."
If you've been waiting for a punk-rock doc about sewage and wastewater treatment–admit it–it's in the pipeline and heading your way by year's end.
50 California students talk about their problems with gender in the new documentary Straightlaced–How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up.
The controversial Cargo 200, a take-down of the Soviet era, makes its U.S. theatrical debut at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
If, in the ol' days, they were called "'toons," these days, some heavy-duty words are required to express the strength and breadth of contemporary animation.
Robb Moss and Peter Galison's deliberative, atmospheric and engrossing documentary, Secrecy, puts democratic transparency to the test.
We sat down with Michel Shehadeh, who joined the festival earlier this year, for a wide-ranging interview on Arab film.
Marilyn Mulford collaborated with Quique Cruz on the pensive, humanistic, and inspiring Archaeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi.
In 'Crooked Beauty,' mental health is re-imagined and redefined.
SF360.org talks to the senior director of original programming at Link TV, which provides an antidote to the standard television news mix.
SF360.org looks at the making of a documentary about the controversial leak of the Pentagon papers.
SF360.org looks at the making of a documentary about the controversial leak of the Pentagon papers.
Empress Hotel looks at residents of a hotel turned homeless people's residence through San Francisco's Access to Housing program.
Those attracted to the new film CSNY: Deja Vu simply expecting an opportunity to recall the old days might be in for a surprise.
SF360 caught up with Ruby Yang during a recent Bay Area visit to discuss her "latest and most lyrical film yet," A Double Life.
The historic Castro Theatre, its marquee recently revamped for the Milk biopic shoot, hosted Frameline's announcement of its 2008 festival.
Joan Didion famously said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." We've internalized the American narrative of Abu Ghraib and accepted its implications.
Warren Beatty on the sexual and political message of Shampoo and a new film in the works about romantic revolutionary journalist John Reed.
Founded in 1968, San Francisco-based Newsreel is the oldest nonprofit, social-issue documentary film center in the U.S.
The Mission filmmaker has slaved in the underground for some three decades, a guide and shaman for other artists working on the fringes.
Two films at the Arab Film Festival's program Palestine: Interior/Exterior map physical, personal and ideological terrain.
In Honeydripper it will no doubt be pleasure to see Danny Glover play a familiar character: The good man trying to gain a leg-up when fortune has rained on his hopes.
The list of talking dog movies is long and storied, but one stands head and forelocks above the others: A Boy and His Dog.
Underneath The Band's Visit's poignant humor, the film subtly reflects the director's attempt to comprehend Israel's pull between the Middle East and the West.
Praise any god you like for Alex Gibney, who has quietly risen from stellar PBS series to a run of exceptional theatrical-release docs.
Judd Apatow has come to so dominate American comedy that I often find myself thinking, "If only this movie had been written by Apatow..."
U.S.-Cambodian co-production Holly might easily have gone straight to DVD, which would be a pity because it's well worth rushing to the theatre for.
The filmmaker talks about her recent projects, including Salud!, which looks at Cuba's world-class health system.
Lynn Hershman Leeson discusses her new project, ÔStrange Culture'.
Miles Matthew Montalbano's evocative and empathetic portrait of Bush-era dissatisfaction among the post-collegiate set.
One film takes us from the American South to the Korean North, another to Frank Oz's last gasp.
Manufactured Landscapes, the film, extends photographer Edward Burtynsky's vision into a new medium, the documentary, and engages a dialog about global capitalism's impact on Earth.
Sicko's story of the mismanagement of U.S. healthcare takes Michael Moore from the U.S. to Canada to Europe, and most notably, to Cuba.
The prolific British director, known for a large and eclectic body of work, has done something very unusual in the past half decade.
A shot in Wonders Are Many makes visual reference to Guernica as shorthand for art's charge to speak for the voiceless.
Verhoeven's career can be divided between the character-driven movies he made in Holland and the slick genre films he directed in Hollywood after 1985.
A Western occupying power faces opposition from the locals and responds with brutal military suppression, spurring a countrywide resistance movement reaching down to the grassroots.
The cinematic image of the Ô60s commune is normally as two-dimensional as the screen it's projected on, and rarely very kind.
Filmmaker Rory Kennedy talks about her process and approach with making her new chilling documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.
James Longley's Fragments stands out amongst the crowded field of Iraqumentaries, while Others pulls back the Iron Curtain to powerful effect.
Von Donnersmarck talks about his Lola-winning and Oscar-nominated debut during a visit to San Francisco.
Inteview with the artist and filmmaker on her work and her latest movie, presented at Sundance.
Hailed as one of the best films of 2005 without distribution, Becker's doc hits theaters nearly two years after it debuted at Sundance.
Miljenko Skoknic's list of favorites in Chilean Cinema.
A documentary provides an in-depth description of Robert Wilson's life and art. Melville's spy story on a Resistance cell in Nazi-occupied French challenges our idea of heroism.
At least three Bay Area-based filmmakers will be making the trek to Park City this year, Jon Else, Steven Okazaki, and Jay Rosenblatt.
This series of cinematic responses to war, curated by Lebanese video artist Akram Zaatari, opens up possibilities for re-imagining the dehumanized landscape of violence.
The filmmaker talks about tagging along with three renegade activists on their self-funded humanitarian excursions to war zones and disaster sites.
With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, a crop of documentaries are collectively trying to get a message across that has largely been passed over by the mainstream media.
Segueing from network television news to documentary features, Amy Berg makes her debut with a shocking, powerful film about pedophile priest Oliver Grady.
Why do updates of Jerry Lewis flicks get more slack from critics than Zailian's "All the King's Men" and Demme's "The Manchurian Candidate?"
The real voter fraud is orchestrated under the radar, says the director of American Blackout.
Craig Baldwin and Noel Lawrence bring their brand of smart, quirky, avant-garde and political programming into the home.
The Maquilapolis filmmakers talk about empowering their subjectsÑwomen factory workers in Tijuana.
The List: American Blackout director Ian Inaba names the top four Web sites.
The provocative documentary filmmaker is recalled with a retrospective at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.
Al Gore's fledgling S.F.--based cable and satellite channel, Current TV, generates cutting-edge content democratically, with a third of the programming created by viewers.
Director Laura Poitras’ traveled to Iraq for her latest film, “My Country, My Country.”
A conversation with Pamela Yates, director of State of Fear, on Peru's 20-year war on terror, which bears an unsettling resemblance to U.S. current events.
The sudden climate change in the Middle East has had a tone-altering effect on the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where the war will be Topic A.
Mat Whitecross talks about his documentary The Road to Guantanamo, which takes a look at the inhumanity of U.S. "detainment" camps in Cuba.
Al Gore's documentary keeps the viewer thoroughly engaged while offering what may be the most comprehensive explanation of global warming for the layperson that exists.
The revolution will not be televised, but it may be digitized, run through Final Cut Pro, and projected on the screen near you.
Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi's Waiting intricately and ingeniously intertwines irony, humor, and pathos.
George Bush Senior's thousand points of light may never have materialized, but Adam Werbach believes that millions of pixels can truly accomplish something.
Jeff Adachi, San Francisco public defender, adds filmmaker to the resume.
The List: In the aftermath of the Roxie resurrection, the five top-grossing films that screened there over the past two decades.
A tribute to the life and work of the late documentary maker Garrett Scott.
HRW's series of films chosen for aesthetic value and human rights content continues to grow as it stays true to its roots.
With a Leacock-Pennebaker tribute, SF State's Documentary Film Institute proves there's no reason to "revive" cinema verite; it never died.
Michael Fox goes behind the scenes on Peaches Christs' slice-'em-up.