The 55th annual Film Festival is full of animated surprises!
April 19 – May 3
The San Francisco International Film Festival is always a destination event for film fans, but there’s quite a bit of special interest to animation fans, specifically:
Chicken with Plums is a live action feature with animated segments by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, (France, Germany, Belgium). Marjane told her own story in Persepolis, and now it is the life of her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan, a revered Iranian musician. It is a story of lost love, familial tensions and musical genius shimmers with visual riches. Much of it is set in Tehran ca. 1958.
Crulic – The Path to Beyond, Anca Damian, (Romania, Poland, France) This sounds live a powerful Kafkaesque feature about a wrongly convicted man who dies while on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration. His death caused a public outcry that didn’t exist when it was needed.
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (feature, USA) “An entrancing journey through the heart and mind of aggressively intelligent filmmaker Terence Nance, who turns the camera on himself in this documentary-narrative hybrid.” He combines “vérité realism, dramatic recreation, tone poetry and a wild array of animation… as the artist tries to understand himself and the nature of love.” “Wholly unique!”
And/Or by Emily Hubley, (USA) In her new short an artist negotiates with interior and/or exterior muses using colorful hand-drawn animation.
Plus, there’s two collections of interesting shorts, the first called Shanimation:
Belly (Julia Pott, England) Oscar is coming of age…
Dust and Glitter (Michaela Copikova, Slovakia) the filmmaker reflects back on her year studying in SF. She wrote me, “The movie is not based on one character, but on images, scenes and feelings that I have witnessed and crossed in SF”
Lack of Evidence (Hayoun Kwon, France) A translation of an application for political asylum is the touchstone for multiple perspectives on the consequences of civil war.
La Luna (Enrico Casarosa, Pixar – Oscar nominated)
The First Time I Ran Away (Joel Trussell and M. Ward)
Oedipus (Paul Driessen, Canada) a delightfully strange trip to a shrink’s office where screwed up Oedipus meets other well-known NFB-animated characters.
Plume (Barry JC Purves, France) A masterpiece in which a primeval winged man falls to earth and is robbed of freedom by his alter egos.
663114 (Isamu Hirabayashi, Japan) The 66-year cicada has been waiting a long time to creep up your wall…
20 HZ (Ruth Jarman, Joseph Gerhardt, UK) An experimental work that captures “tweeting and rumbling caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 hertz.”
The Storytellers Show is a shorts program for ages 6 and up:
Storyteller (Kahanikar) (Nandita Jain, UK) When grandfather can no longer remember details of a favorite story a child recreates the fable of fishing and coconuts.
Keenan at Sea (Jeremy Galante, USA) Adrift at sea in a small boat, two girls sing a sea shanty about food and hunger.
Play Lunch (Cassandra Nguyen, Australia) A small girl finds a clever way to make new friends.
Little Boat (Nelson Boles, USA) Like a nautical Red Balloon: A tiny boat wends its way across the globe, both besieged and beloved by all it encounters.
Panyee FC (The Glue Society, Thailand) In a water-bound Thai village a group of boys is determined to pursue a love of soccer despite having no land on which to play.
The Boy in the Bubble (Kealan O’Rourke, Ireland) A gothic love story of a heartbroken boy who finds a magic spell to shield him from emotion forever.
The Vacuum Kid (Katie Mahalic, USA) Kyle, aged 12, has an odd obsession: he owns over 160 vacuum cleaners.
Paper Piano (Papierowe Planino) (Marianela Maldonado, Poland) A Venezuelan girl who lives in an urban jungle take part in a groundbreaking youth orchestra.
The Girl and the Fox (Tyler Kupferer, USA) In this beautifully animated tale a girl tracks a mysterious fox through a foreboding snow-covered wilderness.
Orange O’ Despair (John Banana, France) Life in the orange box seems awfully boring compared to the pineapple dance party going on across the way. How can a sad little orange make the leap to the fun side of the store?
Most films have more than one scheduled showing; you can check the extensive program and buy tickets at the SFIFF website.