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  • San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival, April 27-28, 2013, sfgvff.wordpress.com

    SFGVFF - flyer - for online posting

     

    The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival is a biennial film and video showcase centering Vietnamese filmmakers in Việt Nam and the diaspora—an international vision reflecting a transnational reality. This year’s festival inaugurates, with a party, its 2013 showcase of filmmakers of Vietnamese descent. The Opening Night Gala, held on April 26 at Artists’ Television Access, offers you the chance to mix and mingle with filmmakers, film-lovers, spoken word performers, poets, and visual artists who’ve dropped by to celebrate northern California’s only Vietnamese-focused festival of films. Music, open mic, and refreshments provided by the festival’s host organization, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. $10. Please help DVAN celebrate the film festival’s launch—everyone loves a good beginning. After that, the San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival runs from 2:30pm to midnight each day, April 27-28, 2013, at the historic Roxie Theater. See sfgvff.wordpress.com for the full festival program.

  • Half the Sky

    Half the sky C copy.inddWe’re all for Women’s History Month, but female oppression is far from a flicker on society’s rear view mirror. Join San Francisco Bay Guardian culture editor Caitlin Donohue for a discussion about San Francisco’s role in the global women’s movement, following an abridged screening of this documentary, sponsored by Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center, the Guardian, and ATA. The film is based on a book with the same name by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, and roams across 10 countries, employing Hollywood actresses Gabrielle Union, Eva Mendes, and more to bring attention to atrocity. Don’t worry, there will be a positive takeaway. (Trigger warning for physical and sexual violence)

    From Irshad Manji’s New York Times review of Half the Sky <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/books/review/Manji-t.html?_r=0>:
    “An ancient Chinese proverb goes that women hold up half the sky. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn want that to be appreciated — on the ground. In the opening pages of this gripping call to conscience, the husband-and-wife team come out swinging: “Gendercide,” the daily slaughter of girls in the developing world, steals more lives in any given decade “than all the genocides of the 20th century.” No wonder Kristof and WuDunn, whose coverage of China for The New York Times won them a Pulitzer Prize, declare the global struggle for women’s equality “the paramount moral challenge” of our era.
    Their stories in “Half the Sky” bear witness to that bold claim. Kristof and WuDunn describe Dalit women, Indian untouchables, who swarmed, stabbed and emasculated a serial torturer and murderer — in a courtroom. Further north, Mukhtar Mai, the victim of a Pakistani gang-rape, did the unthinkable for a Muslim village woman. Not only did she expose her assailants, but she incurred the wrath of her country’s president, Pervez Musharraf, endured abduction by his henchmen, started a school and even made an ally of her resentful older brother.
    “Half the Sky” tackles atrocities and indignities from sex trafficking to maternal mortality, from obstetric fistulas to acid attacks, and absorbing the fusillade of horrors can feel like an assault of its own. But the poignant portraits of survivors humanize the issues, divulging facts that moral outrage might otherwise eclipse.”
    Door at 6:30

  • SF Cinematheque’s 2013 CROSSROADS Festival

    CROSSROADS is San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival, a celebration of recent and rediscovered avant-garde film/video work.

    CROSSROADS 2013, curated by Cinematheque Artistic Director Steve Polta, will take place April 5–7, at the Victoria Theatre (2961 16th Street, SF). This year’s festal will feature a total of 51 films, videos and performance works by 48 filmmakers from around the world screened over 8 feature-length programs.

    HIGHLIGHTS of this year’s festival include:

    — WORLD PREMIERES of work by Stephanie Barber, Luther Price, Talena Sanders, Jonathan Schwartz and Robert Todd.
    — LOCAL PREMIERES of work by Olivia Ciummo, Mary Helena Clark, Paul Clipson, Jim Drain and Ben Russell, Taylor Dunne, Erin Espelie, Josh Gibson, Chris Kennedy, Robbie Land, Laida Lertxundi, Jesse McLean, Natasha Mendonca, Sharon A. Mooney, Jeremy Moss, Sarah Grace Nesin, Alee Peoples, Suzan Pitt, Ben Rivers, Michael Robinson, Kelly Sears, Danielle Short, Fern Silva, April Simmons, Jessie Stead, Makino Takashi and Karen Yasinsky.
    — APPARENT MOTION: A live cinema performance event featuring local artists Beige and dyemark and, from Barcelona, Spain, Crater.
    — A SOLO ARTIST TRIBUTE to sometime San Francisco-based filmmaker Scott Stark, including the world premiere of a major new work, The Realist.
    — THE WORLD PREMIERE of Jodie Mack’s Dusty Stacks of Mom, a long-form psychedelic tribute to a struggling family business, set to a completely re-written and re-performed cover-to-cover remix/remake of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with vocals performed live by Jodie Mack herself!

    General admission tickets are $10 per event ($5 for Cinematheque members). Festival Passes provide admission to all 8 programs and are available for $50 ($25 for Cinematheque members). For tickets and more information visit http://www.sfcinematheque.org/#/calendar/201304050/