Author: Fara

Shorts by California filmmakers including Bay Area. A combination of seasoned and emerging talent. Several filmmakers have had their work with CMSF in past seasons.

Cross
Dir. Gerardo Maravilla
2015,USA, 10 mins – Action/Drama

As a sick mother nods off to sleep, her teenage son anxiously sits with his new role as the familys breadwinner. Rather than spend his night with a girl or at a house party, he sneaks out to handle the thick stack of medical bills. Salvador, his co-worker leads him into the dark arena of backyard boxing where hes set to face off against a fighter almost twice his size.

Stay
Dir.Andres Gallegos
2016, USA, 6 mins- Drama
Driven to reconstitute his past, an aging man searches for his most precious memory.

El Doctor
Dir. Heather de Michelle Writer: Jude Roth
2015, USA, 11 mins, Drama
In an Arizona Home Depot parking lot, a married couple – ‘Andrew’ and ‘Jen’  hires undocumented day laborer ‘Carlos’ and his buddy to repair their deck. As Carlos washes up in the familys bathroom, 7-yr-old ‘Jonah interrupts him. A tragedy of errors puts Carloss and Andrews lives at risk, leaving everyone caught between their individual consciences and the law.

Mexican Cuisine
Dir. Fran Guijarro
2015, USA, 5 mins, Doc

Peek into the kitchen of most restaurants- Mexican or otherwise- chances are there’s a Mexican staff.

Through The Wall
Dir. Tim Nackashi
2015, USA/Mexico, 6 mins
A short documentary about a family divided by the US/Mexico border. Uriel, Abril and Julián must cross difficult terrain to reach the border fence where they spend time together through the wall.

Diablo / Devil
Dir. Paula Sozzi Saslow
2015, USA, 21 mins
Somewhere in Northern California, a construction worker finds a large sum of money while excavating a job site but when he learns that it is blood money from a drug lord, he decides to take justice into his own hands with unexpected consequences.

Dogs & Tacos
Dir.Steve Bachrach
2016, USA, 17 mins.
High school junior Alma Pantaleon arrives at her after-school work shift at a local South-Central Los Angeles taquería. Instead of tacos-and-burritos-as-usual, things get complicated when she finds herself stuck baby-sitting a former boyfriend’s 13 year-old kid brother, who’s no longer the ‘sweet little boy’ she remembers.

Libertad
Dir. Brenda Avila-Hann
2016, USA, 9 mins.
Profile on a young trans woman in Santa Cruz via Oaxaca.

spirit of Fallen Artists
Dir. Claudia Escobar
2016, USA, 6 mins.
Oakland artist painting a mural who was killed lives on in his work and the memor of those who knew and worked with him.

Artists’ Television Access (ATA) teams up with San Francisco Public Library to mine the treasures in the Library’s 16mm film archive. Join us for a quarterly screening series of fantastic movies.

Night And Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955, 16mm)

 “Some films are pleasant, others beautiful, some magnificent. This film is NECESSARY,” cineaste Ado Kyrou wrote upon Night And Fog’s release in 1956. “This is what war looks like, and fascism. Every man alive on this Earth should see this film. And as a result, maybe things will get better.” Sixty years later Kyrou’s hopeful hypothesis remains untested. It takes a certain courage to confront the ghastly images presented in this, arguably the first artful film made about the Nazi Holocaust. Perhaps that’s why, despite its critical acclaim and historical importance, Night And Fog is rarely projected before audiences.

Alain Resnais was commissioned to direct Night And Fog by the organizers of an exhibit commemorating the end of World War II ten years after the fact. By then he’d made several short documentaries, including one on Picasso’s Guernica and another investigating why African art was displayed in the Musée de l’Homme rather than the Louvre. Resnais asked concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol to write a poetic voice-over narration to be recited by actor Michel Bouquet, to compliment the haunted visuals he’d arranged. For the most part, black-and-white images were selected from archives, and color images were filmed by Resnais’s crew at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Intercutting these elements, the filmmaker created a work that, while focused on the particular horror experienced by the Nazis’ victims, complicates the viewer’s relationship to history and memory.

Controversy has followed Night And Fog from the beginning. Pressure from West German officials caused the Cannes Film Festival to revoke its planned premiere there; ultimately it was reinstated out of competition. A shot of a recognizably French policeman was censored for years while political expedience demanded minimization of Vichy collaboration with the death camp system. Later the film was attacked for its universal approach; Bouquet only utters the word “Jew” once. But Resnais’s sensitivity, the foundation of a feature film career beginning three years later with Hiroshima Mon Amour and lasting until his 2014 passing, has ensured Night And Fog remains an essential document of the twentieth century’s most terrible depths.

Noe Valley Library, 451 Jersey St, San Francisco.