By Mal Karman
Hike up to Mt. Tam on any given night (sans fog), and the band of stars in the sky likely to catch your eye is the Pleiades, a constellation also known as the Seven Sisters that Wikipedia describes as “an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars.” Look up at the marquee on any given night during the 39th Mill Valley Film Festival and the cluster likely to catch your eye is that of the middle-aged, hot A-type stars.
The California Film Institute’s annual 11-day, high-energy, cinema-plus-more extravaganza beginning on October 6 will be red-carpeting Nicole Kidman (49), Ewan McGregor (45), Aaron Eckhart (48), Julie Dash (64), and (the not-yet-middle-aged) Gael Garcia Bernal (37), all of whom are to be honored with programs highlighting their careers. Following screenings of their latest work and onstage interviews—including audience Q&As, they each get to pack for home with a Mill Valley Award, a statuette that has some resemblance to an Oscar on a diet.
Kidman’s tribute includes an unspooling of Lion (Oct. 9, 3pm), in which she plays the mom to Dev Patel’s adopted son who commits himself to hunting down his birth family. Based on a true story, this tale is not too removed from first-time indie filmmaker Lorenzo Pisoni’s Circus Kid.
“I grew up working in a circus that [my father] created and he taught me the family business,” Pisoni says. “I was his clown partner. But he always had this dark side that I didn’t understand, and after he just up and left his circus and his family, I lost touch with him.”
Circus Kid—screening on Oct. 9 at 8pm, Oct. 10 at 5:45pm and Oct. 11 at 10am on the same program with Berkeley filmmaker Siciliana Trevino’s short New Mo’ Cut: David Peoples’ Lost Film of Moe’s Books—follows the filmmaker as he “finally [builds] the courage to try to get to know the man I only knew in grease paint.”
Another first-time director (and this festival is loaded with them) excavating a piece of the past is Brett Berns, whose engrossing “journey of discovery of a forgotten legend of American music” just happens to lead to his late father. Co-directed and edited by San Francisco’s Bob Sarles, BANG! The Bert Berns Story (Oct. 11, 6:15pm and Oct. 13, 8:45pm) carries us through the personal and vocational struggles of a songwriter-music producer who overcame failure and rejection to become a pioneer of ’60s rock, spinning out a long line of hits, among them “A Little Bit of Soap,” “Twist and Shout,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Hello Walls,” “Piece of My Heart,” “Cry Baby” and “Here Comes the Night.”
“[Interestingly] the film’s primary funding source were the songs [he wrote],” Brett Berns says. “Bert Berns was one of the greatest record men of the 20th century, yet he is also one of its most obscure creative forces. I realized that only by telling his true story would my father be recognized for his part in our culture.”
We find another story with its family ups and downs in Ewan McGregor’s adaptation of American Pastoral (Oct. 9, 7pm and Oct. 14, 9pm), Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a family man who has it all and then doesn’t. The actor takes a turn at first-time directing himself along with Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning in a tale that will make you think your kids aren’t so bad after all. McGregor will be on hand to screen the film and engage audiences in one of the festival’s Spotlight programs, an evening with far more lumens than a flashlight.
In keeping with our fascination for the stars both here and beyond, Sicario director Denis Villeneuve’s Opening Night offering, Arrival (7pm) stars Amy Adams as an international linguistics expert pressed into service by the military to transit through time and space and to try to communicate with a dozen mysterious spaceships that have descended on the planet, mostly on beachfront property. Adams, nominated for an Oscar five times, will introduce the film.
Those of you who prefer Opening Night hoopla closer to Earth will gravitate toward La La Land (7pm, 7:15pm and 7:30pm) with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as a latter-day Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. An aspiring
actress (that means a waitress) and a jazz musician fall in love and encounter all the layers and overlap of the dual meaning of La La Land. Expect some schmaltz and a happy ending. Stone and writer-director Damien Chazelle will be there to sprinkle around a little fairy-dust.
Not considered an Opening Night entry but playing on Oct. 6 nonetheless is the latest from Berkeley filmmaker Rob Nilsson, who thinks the David Foster Wallace novel, Infinite Jest, may have influenced his work. “[The book] was a magnificent hybrid,” he says. “Maybe it inspired the hybrid Love Twice, the film of the film that could not be made. But we made it anyway.” Love Twice plays only once at 7:15pm.
The festival has amassed 201 films from 37 countries, including a few from Iran, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Mongolia. Among the best is The Salesman from Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), who will be there in person. The film won Best Screenplay and Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
International heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mama Tambien) comes to Marin with two Spanish-language films, one in which he is a cop hunting Chile’s greatest poet and most famous communist, the other in which he is a jilted husband in Mexico crazed with hunting down his wife in Iowa. Neruda (Oct. 10, 7pm and Oct. 16, 8:15pm) is director Pablo Larrain’s imaginative “anti-biography” of Pablo Neruda, part fact, melded with a lot of fiction. In You’re Killing Me, Susana (Oct. 7, 6pm; Oct. 8, 9:15pm and Oct. 12, 8:30pm), under the direction of Roberto Sneider, Garcia Bernal demonstrates his range, letting loose with a droll comic side. He’ll be on stage on Oct. 10 for a Q&A and to charm and disarm the audience.
Annette Bening, who was a resident actress at A.C.T. in San Francisco before she hit stardom, and director Mike Mills (Beginners) headline this year’s Centerpiece Spotlight program, 20th Century Women (Oct. 13, 7pm), about a mother who ropes two young girls into helping her raise a teenage brat. Bening, Mills and a number of castmembers will pour onto the stage following the film for conversation and Q&A.
If politics is your game, then you really need to get out more often—especially this year when a pompous 70-year-old presidential candidate with a thin blonde toupee proves how easy it is to behave like Pinocchio. A great place to start is in a master class on Documentary Storymakers (Oct. 8, 2pm) with Senator Barbara Boxer, producer-director Nicole Boxer and director Robin Hauser Reynolds. Then check out the uber-current Do Not Resist (Oct. 9, 3:45pm and Oct. 12, 2:15pm), about police militarization in dealing with citizens in the streets; or the Steven Spielberg executive-produced Finding Oscar (Oct. 9, 3:30pm and Oct. 13, 5:30pm), a probing doc of the 1982 massacre of an entire village in Guatemala; or the hypnotic Tower (Oct. 8, 4:45pm and Oct. 9, 6:15pm), an animated/live action account of the 1966 mass murders by a sniper on the University of Texas campus in Austin.
Closer to home is Company Town (Oct. 9, 2pm and Oct. 15, noon), Berkeley filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow’s dissection of a political campaign for a San Francisco supervisor seat in which tech, gentrification, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb are central to the election. They describe their doc as exploring a fight “over the excesses of new tech companies and their impact on housing, affordability and temp workers.”
Tech. Tech. Tech. How did we ever function without it? Hah! Ever tear your hair out over a computer crash? Lost data? Wasted hours? Well, there is a device that can fix all that, that Tom Hanks and Sam Shephard swear by, that will never crash, that can be serviced in Berkeley by one of the most unique shops left to mankind. It’s called a typewriter and its advocates, the shop that is the ER for near-death machines, and an Oakland artist who creates anatomically correct human figures from unusable parts without soldering or welding are rolled into veteran San Anselmo filmmaker Doug Nichols’ fascinating and curious California Typewriter (Oct. 7, 3pm and Oct. 10, 8pm).
Witness the murder of a typewriter, a performance by the Boston Typewriter Orchestra and a woman who types out poems on the fly for people healing from personal hurts. Nichols sees his documentary as “a thought-provoking meditation on the changing dynamic between humans and machines, encouraging us to consider our own relationship with technology, old and new, as the digital age’s emphasis on speed and convenience redefines who’s serving whom, human or machine?”
While Nichols’ subjects long for the clickety-clack days of their Smith Coronas, those in Nora Poggi and Insiyah Saeed’s ambitious documentary are trying to reboot “the ruthlessly competitive boys’ club of high tech startups.” She Started It (Oct. 8, 1:30pm, Oct. 9, noon and Oct. 12, 10am) sent the co-directors chasing down the roller coaster stories of five entrepreneurial women (ages 17-28) through Vietnam, Germany, France and Singapore. “We did not want the film to be only a Silicon Valley story, as entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon,” San Francisco’s Poggi says, “but most of all we followed our compelling characters wherever their journey took them across the globe.”
One young woman got investor-philanthropist Richard Branson to pony up $1 million in seed money based on a single tweet, then celebrated with a milkshake, she said, “because I’m not old enough to drink.”
“It was high time to show the stories of real women who were making it happen,” Saeed of Palo Alto adds, “which would, in turn, encourage more women to take the leap. We want them to think, ‘If she could do it, I could do it.’”
There are women with perhaps equally big dreams but very little means in The Nine (Oct. 11, 9pm and Oct. 12, 2:30pm), Berkeley filmmaker Katy Grannan’s vérité film “about searching for beauty and possibility where
there is none.” Grannan spent four years shooting on the troubled Modesto street from which the film’s title comes.
“People were regularly victimized and there was often little I could do—many women were raped, men and women were murdered, beaten, you name it,” the first-time director says. “But I didn’t want the film to be entirely about misery, because the remarkable thing is that people find a way to keep their spirits alive, even in the middle of that hell.
“Early into filming I was drawn to Kiki, an effervescent and childlike drifter who escapes tragedy through her imagination—she creates an alternate reality by inventing a new story to tell herself. Kiki’s a visionary of innocence in the middle of unimaginable suffering.”
See if it wrings your guts on Oct. 11, 9pm, and on Oct. 12, 2:30pm.
Another story that might do the same is Garrett Zevgetis’ Best and Most Beautiful Things (Oct. 8, 2:30pm and Oct. 10, 2pm), which he says is “a coming-of-age story about a precocious young, blind woman (with Asperger’s) who disappears into quirky obsessions and isolation … (chasing) love and freedom in the most unexpected places: A provocative sex-positive community in Bangor, Maine.”
Kris Kristofferson once described Mill Valley to me as “the most stoned-out place I’ve ever been.” So maybe it is fitting that the festival devote a kilo of programming to cannabis in what it cleverly calls its day of Smoke Screens, a morning, afternoon and evening on Oct. 8 of marijuana movies, marijuana music and marijuana panels, all aimed at getting you high on entertainment.
Maybe you’re too healthy to qualify for a medical marijuana card (count your blessings), but plunk down 50 cucumbers and a Canna-Pass will take you to heights you never imagined—like the Mill Valley filmmakers lounge and the whole day of freaky, trippy, groovy events, including a panel on Cannabis in Athletics (11am) with three former NFL players, and a screening of Rolling Papers (12:30pm), a documentary dissecting the first year of Colorado’s legalized weed, with a panel following including the Denver Post’s marijuana editor (really) and executives from the Sonoma County Growers Alliance and the Bloom Cannabis Group. (Don’t expect free samples.)
A program of shorts, I Want to Take You Higher, at 1:30pm, will no doubt initiate a few giggles over warning signs from a bygone era, such as, “Only a puff of smoke but it killed her soul.” One of the shorts, The Secret Story, is San Francisco and Guerneville filmmaker Brian Applegarth’s history “about how (Bay Area) hippies, the AIDS epidemic and cannabis-as-medicine all collided … to leverage the courts and legislation.”
L.A. Film Festival Audience Award winner Green Is Gold (3:45pm) is a coming-of-age tale of a 13-year-old
essentially parented by his older brother and brought into the family marijuana growing and peddling business. First-time Sonoma filmmaker Ryon Baxter cast himself and his kid bro’, lending an unmistakable authenticity to their relationship as they hurtle toward an unsettling fate.
At 8pm, if Jamaican reggae artist Prezident Brown has the tables, chairs and walls at the Sweetwater grooving with the band, we suggest you don’t drive. This is one of nine nights of live music in connection with MVFF [see Music, pg.34, for more].
Round out your joint with One Week and a Day (9:30pm) about a 25-year-old son who dies and whose father steals his medical pot, claiming he inherited it, though it may take more than a couple tokes to ease the pain of losing someone you love.
That familiar high is sure to trigger that familiar growling—of stomachs. The festival obliges our cannabis-induced hunger with a delicious selection of mouth-watering films, offering a virtual food fight between three of cuisinedom’s top foodies: Ella Brennan, Jeremiah Tower and Massimo Bottura.
Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table (Oct. 15, 7pm) reveals how a woman who did not know the difference between French toast and a pig’s ass became a pioneer of the modern American food movement by creating elaborate New Orleans breakfasts and jazz brunches, revolutionizing Creole cuisine and opening the destination restaurant Commander’s Palace.
In the immodestly titled Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent (Oct. 9, 8:15pm and Oct. 11, 5pm), we are treated to glimpses of the celebrity chef of Chez Panisse and Stars, one of the fathers of the culinary style known as California Cuisine, and a man who mysteriously chooses to describe himself thusly: “I have to stay away from human beings because somehow I am not one.” Alright, Jeremiah, after dinner can we introduce you to a good shrink?
In Theater of Life (Oct. 10, 4:45pm, Oct. 11, 12:15pm and Oct. 12, 3:30pm), the great master chef Massimo Botturo, whose restaurant Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, has been listed in the top five at the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards since 2010, cobbles together 60 internationally renowned chefs to feed Milan’s refugees and homeless utilizing waste food from the city’s 2015 World’s Fair. Before your eyes, they magically put together meals that anyone would gladly devour. Save this one for dessert.
Mill Valley Film Festival, October 6-16; mvff.com.
