San Francisco International Film Festival kicks off Wednesday night with Sean Wang’s “Dìdi—tributes to Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joan Chen; awards to Johan Grimonprez, Gary Meyer

Charismatic networker and film enthusiast, Gary Meyer, SFFilm’s Mel Novikov Award recipient, will be honored by SFFilm on Saturday for his years of contributing to the global film sphere. He was inducted into SFFilm’s “Hall of Fame” in 2019 and this further seals his unparalleled commitment to making, producing, preserving and promoting film.

There’s something undeniably special about sitting in a theater with others and experiencing a story unfold on the big screen. The experience is made even better when there’s an illuminating on-stage conversation with an actor or director.  The 67^th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFilm) opens Wednesday evening and runs through Sunday, offering over 80 films from 40 countries with 12 world, 8 North American, and 5 US premieres and lots of talent in attendance. The majority of screenings this year are at six theaters in San Francisco’s Presidio and Marina neighborhoods and at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMFA).  The move to the Marina District is great news for North Bay Residents who can now easily access the festival right off the Golden Gate Bridge and avoid the off-putting parking hassles that the festival has long posed for who came by car.  

ARThound recently published a “top picks” feature for films with filmmakers/stars in attendance.  Here, I profile opening and closing nights and the festival four special tributes and awards programs, each featuring the honored guest in conversation with a highly accomplished moderator and a screening of a special film the awardee has either directed, acted in, or selected. These wonderful in-depth programs are very thoughtfully curated, offering the chance to really expand your film take-away.

Izaac Wang is Chris in Sean Wang’s “Dìdi.” Image: SFFilm

Opening Night: Sundance audience award winner, “Dìdi,” opens the festival on Wednesday night. Bay Area director Sean Wang’s debut feature is set in Fremont and follows 13-year-old Taiwanese American Chris (Izaac Wang) in the fleeting months prior to his freshman year as he clumsily navigates life. Joan Chen, plays his mother.  Wang was recently nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary for his warm humanistic short, “Nai Nai and Wài Pó,” about his maternal and paternal grandmothers (SFFilm 2023).  An Opening Night Party follows at Fort Mason’s 308 Gallery. (2023, USA, 90 min)

Richard Roundtree and June Squibb in a still from “Thelma.” Image: SFFilm

Closing Night: Sunday evening’s closer is Josh Margolin’s “Thelma,” starring June Squibb, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell, Fred Hechinger and Richard Roundtree.  When a phone scammer steals 93 year-old widow Thelma’s nest egg (Squibb), she and her friend Ben (“Shaft” star Richard Roundtree in his final performance)  use their social invisibility and elder-age devices to pursue the thief. (2023, USA, 97 min) Screens: Sunday 7:15 PM, Premier One Theater at One Letterman (Director Josh Margolin, actor June Squibb, and producers Chris Kaye and Zoe Worth will attend this screening only) and 8 PM, Marina Theatre.   

POV Award: Johan Grimonprez +”Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat” (Thursday, April 25, 6:30-9:40 PM, BAMPFA)

Belgian director and multimedia artist, Johan Grimonprez. His latest doc, “Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat” was motivated by his interest in Belgium’s role in African politics and the political agency jazz had in U.S. foreign policy in the Congo.

A still from Grimonprez’s “Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat,” in which jazz and well-meaning musicians become a successful smokescreen for the US and its conspiring allies to stage a coup in 1960 against the newly-elected Democratic Republic of the Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Image: SFFilm

Established in 1997, the Persistence of Vision Award (POV) honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking. Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez’s feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (Festival 1998), Double Take (2009), and Shadow World (Festival 2016).  His curatorial projects have exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His art works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. He will be in conversation with Moderator Fumi Okiji, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, whose work addresses black studies, critical theory, and sound and music studies as avenues of understanding modern life. His documentary, “Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat,” interweaves interviews, archival footage, and more to tell the story of Western nations conspiring against the nascent Democratic Republic of the Congo to protect capitalist interests. Grimonprez acknowledges that history is never fully known: it is always ongoing. The film’s polyphonic approach to history opens up a forum to question and re-imagine events that transpired and to negotiate their consequences and rewrite history once again. (2024, 150 min, Belgium, France, The Netherlands in English, French, Dutch, Russian)

Mel Novikoff Award: Gary Meyer + “Macario” + “Sour Balls” (Saturday, April 27, noon-2:30 PM, Premier Theater, SF)

A still from Roberto Gavaldón’s 1960 classic of Mexican cinema, “Macario,” with Ignacio Lòpez Tarso (L) as Macario and Enrique Lucero (R) as Death.  Mexico’s first foreign-language film Oscar® nominee, it was a huge hit at SFFilm 1960 and Tarso won the Golden Gate Award for Best Actor.  Image: SFFilm  

A still from Jessica Yu’s 1992, 4 min short, “Sour Death Balls,.” shot in black and white 16mm.

The SFFILM Mel Novikoff Award is given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the film-going public’s appreciation of world cinema. This year’s recipient, Gary Meyer, has been involved in making and screening film since childhood and his passion evolved into a remarkable career that includes co-founding Landmark Theatres; serving as co-director of the Telluride Film Festival (2007-15); producing the sumptuous doc “The Art of Eating: The Life and Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher,” and founding/editing EatDrinkFilms. Disclosure: he’s been one of my editors for nearly a decade and his enthusiasm for/knowledge of global film is astonishing as is his energy and capacity for networking. As I am writing this, we are texting about the classics of Greek film. He will be in conversation with IndieWire Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson, followed by a screening of the 1960 Mexican classic “Macario” and Jessica Yu‘s memorable short “Sour Death Balls.” “‘Marcario’ was one of the first foreign films I ever saw as a young teenager,” Meyers.   “It was unlike anything I had seen before—the cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa was incredible.  Years later, I was able to bring him up to a film festival I produced in San Diego for a tribute.” (1960, Mexico, 91 min, in Spanish, 4K restoration)

Chiwetel Ejiofor Tribute + “Rob Peace” (Sloan Science on Screen) (Saturday, April 27, 7-9:30 PM, Premier Theater, SF)

British director, screenwriter, and actor director Chiwetel Ejiofor. 

In Ejiofor’s “Rob Peace,” Jay Will delivers a magnetic performance as Rob Peace, a New Jersey science prodigy headed for Yale, but impacted by his past. His father (writer-director Ejiofor) is convicted of homicide and Rob devotes himself to proving his innocence with dire consequences. Image: SFFilm

SF Film celebrates British actor, screenwriter, and director Chiwetel Ejiofor with a tribute that includes a conversation and a screening of his latest feature, “Rob Peace.”  Film lovers know Ejiofor for the incredible vulnerability he brings to his characters from his BAFTA-winning performance in the seminal drama, “12 Years a Slave” (2013), to the comedies “Love Actually” (2003) and “Kinky Boots”(2005) and as Mordo in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange (2016), and the amazing CGI lion, Scar, in the “Lion King” remake (2019).  Theater lovers know him for his legendary BAFTA winning run in “Othello” at the Donmar Warehouse and Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet” at the National Theatre.  Lately, he has embraced  screenwriting and directing.  His first feature, “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind” (2019) was awarded the Sundance Film Festival’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize; an NAACP Image Award for outstanding direction; and the British Independent Film Awards’ Douglas Hickox Award.  His latest feature, “Rob Peace,” about is about a young black Yale student, a science prodigy excelling in biophysics, whose connection to his imprisoned terminally ill father is his downfall. Ejiofor will be in conversation with Vijay Ramani, PhD, Assistant Investigator at the Gladstone Institute for Data Science and Biotechnology and Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. (2024, USA/BRazil, 119 min)

Joan Chen Tribute + “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl” (Sunday, April 28, 1-3:30 PM, Premier Theater, SF)

Joan Chen grew up in China and become a Hollywood star with her first US film performance in “The Last Emperor” (1987). She ticked off the Chinese government in the mid-1990’s when she filmed ”Xiu Xiu: the Sent Down Girl” in a remote rural area of China without permission. She was subsequently banned from working in China. The film, about an innocent girl who is exploited by corrupt men whose currency is sex, went on to international acclaim. Image: SFFilm

In Joan Chen’s confident directorial debut film, the radiant Lu Lu (Li Xiaxo Lu) plays Xiu Xiu. She is sent to a mountainous backwater in Tibet in the 1960’s during the Cultural Revolution’s fanatical relocation of millions of China’s urban residents and intellectuals to the countryside, with tragic results. Image: SFFilm

Actor/director/writer/producer Joan Chen will be honored with tribute that includes an intimate conversation celebrating her career and a special 35 mm screening of her debut feature, “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl” (1997). Chen will interviewed by Hollywood producer Janet Yang, current President of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. At age twelve, Chen, an excellent shooter, was discovered on the rifle range of a Shanghai school by Jiang Qing, “Madame Mao,” the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong.  In 1975, when she was 14, the Shanghai Film Studio placed her in the Actors’ Training Program. As a teen, her performance in “Little Flower” (1979) garnered her China’s Best Actress award, and the Chinese press hailed her the “Elizabeth Taylor of China. ” Her parents, both doctors in Shanghai, had a Sloan Kettering fellowship to do research in New York and Joan accompanied them. Her roles in “The Last Emperor” (1987) and as the enigmatic mill owner Josie Packard in the cult TV series Twin Peaks (1989-91) 90) and “Heaven and Earth” (1994) brought her international fame. She then turned to writing and directing and her debut feature, “Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl” (1998) won seven Golden Horse Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Feature Film. She also directed “Autumn in New York” (2000) and the short “Shanghai Strangers” (2012). Chen will interviewed by Hollywood producer Janet Yang, current President of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.  (1998, 99 min, China/USA, in Mandarin with English subtitles)

Details:

SFFilm 2024 is April 24-28 in San Francisco and Berkeley.  Advance ticket purchase is mandatory as films sell out.  Most film and awards tickets are $20; seniors and students $19 plus handling fees.  Tributes are $35. For full schedule and tickets, visit: https://sffilm.org/.

A new encore edition of the festival’s most popular films will run May 2-4 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater in the Mission district.  Visit the Roxie’s website to browse offerings and purchase tickets: https://roxie.com/