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CHILD’s ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES + KAVANAGH’s WE’VE BEEN WARNED

This first of two Puppet Shows—this one foregrounding the Scary—sees the SF premiere of Abigail Child‘s Origin of the Species, her masterful hour-plus exploration of both new tech/engineering developments and of radically new understandings of the relations between humans and machines…that are apparently our equals, and soon to be our superiors. Abby‘s cinematic genius is realized in exquisite doc coverage—especially of the new Japanese initiatives. Opening the evening is a much-needed push-back from OC ally Mike Kavanagh, A Short History of Robots and AI in Cinema, that presses the case for regulatory action to keep the genie back in the bottle. This 40-minute chronology includes scores of riveting clips, from Metropolis to Colossus: The Forbin Project, and beyond, teasing out the critical distinctions between “generative” and “sentient”. Enhancing the two anchors are Keith Sanborn on Jeremy Bentham, Peter Freund on HAL 9000, Mark Shephard‘s Sentient City, and David Cox‘ “real-world” noggin’-choppin’ heli-drone! $13

THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING + SACHS’ ALL ELSE FAILED

A book release evening that focuses on the victims of war and those who struggle to provide humanitarian care. Dana Sachs is an old neighbor of ours, who has published some half-dozen books, and we are honored that we can launch this brand new one with her in person! Her brief reading/Q&A is followed by Elabdi/Graversen‘s Ghosts of Moria, a finely made doc on a burnt down Syrian refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Though the hour-plus anchor of the show is the Bay Area debut of Bianca Stigter‘s Three Minutes, an utterly astonishing filmic achievement—almost a materialistic approach to the medium that stretches out the duration of a single 100′ roll of 16mm to a wide and deep history, tracing back very many individual human stories. A whole world is revealed through interviews, narration, music, and jaw-dropping post-production—an entire milieu that was surely no more within a year of the 1938 filming. Steve McQueen and Helena Bonham Carter were among the principals who oversaw the “deconstruction” of this home movie, shot by a Polish-American tourist visiting relatives in East Europe, just before hostilities broke out. Some 3000 of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish, and only six survived the War. $8-100, benefiting Dana‘s Humanity Now.