SPECIAL SCREENINGS

OCTOBER 4, 2006
Afghanistan Unveiled

Location: San Carlos Library
Time: 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Fee: $0
Contact: Annie Malley
Registration Name: 650.591.0341. ext., 238
Comments: Afghanistan Unveiled, a United Nations Association Film Festival TFF special screening
Library Name: San Carlos Library
Library Address: 610 Elm Street, San Carlos, CA

........................................................................................

APRIL 17, 2006
SF360

UNAFF is co-sponsoring SF360 San Francisco Movie Night, the largest citywide film screening in the country on April 17 in Palo Alto.The San Francisco Film Society and Ironweed Film Club partnered with other film organizations to get the word out about this ground-breaking series of events that will be hosted by the citizens of San Francisco and the greater Bay Area. We invite you to gather for house party screening events with your friends and neighbors on the evening of April 17 to watch one specially selected film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Street Fight, and participate in a citywide webcast discussion of this fantastic film.

To join the effort, visit www.ironweedfilms.com/sf and sign up to get Ironweed Film Clubís April DVD featuring Street Fight. 

A co-presentation of Ironweed Film Club and the San Francisco Film Society, SF360 San Francisco Movie Night draws on the wealth of cultural, social and political institutions unique to the Bay Area to connect citizens from all facets of our community in the viewing and discussion of a single film. This series of events is a special pre-fest presentation of the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, opening April 20.

........................................................................................

APRIL 20-MAY 4, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

UNAFF is co-presenting a few films at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival which runs from April 20-May 4 and features over 185 international films, many lively Q&A sessions with both new and established filmmakers, and a number of spectacular events.

THE DIGNITY OF THE NOBODIES

This second chapter in a series of four documentaries exposing the condition of Argentina today follows last year‚s forceful opener, A Social Genocide (SFIFF 2005). This is activist cinema at its best: passionate, informative and uncompromising. Director Fernando Solanas focuses on those who have suffered the most from the corporate sacking of his country and their struggle to fight back. As he writes in the opening notes, „What I‚m going to tell you are the stories of the Œnobodies,‚ of men and women, like so many Argentinians, with no resources and with no name, those who have always suffered deprivation and adversity. They are the people who Œgrin and bear it,‚ who carry their courage and dignity like a flag.‰ The stories and testimonials in The Dignity of the Nobodies expose that orgy of exploitation by multinational corporations and lending institutions called globalization. A country of 38 million that once had the agricultural capacity to feed hundreds of millions, 21st century Argentina has been devastated by staggering rates of unemployment and poverty. Interviewing workers, small farmers and indigenous people with his handheld DV minicam, Solanas shows how they are resisting. Displaced women farmers organize to confront banks and disrupt auctions. Organizers of communal soup kitchens, clinics and bakeries team up to help each other deal with poverty and hunger. Workers who have taken over unprofitable factories abandoned by their owners begin running them for themselves. Thousands march against police murderers and send them to jail. The film‚s power and immediacy make it feel like a hopeful forecast of things to come.

-Wednesday, April 26 at 6pm at the Kabuki Theatre
-Thursday, April 27 at 8:30pm at the Kabuki Theatre
-Saturday, April 29 at 1pm at the Pacific Film Archive
-Monday, May 1 at 7pm at the Aquarius Theatre

LOOKING FOR MADONNA

Indonesian film master Garin Nugroho has earned a reputation for making cinema that is engaged with social issues and for having idiosyncratic insight that is neither preachy nor didactic. This approach underlies his production of director John de Rantau‚s feature film debut. One of the more unusual AIDS films ever made, Looking for Madonna follows the fate of Joseph, a Papuan teen who, together with his girlfriend Yolanda, contracts AIDS. When Yolanda is burned alive by her father for embarrassing the family, Joseph and his friend Minus (who also acts as the film‚s commentator) travel to their home village where they are attracted to the local prostitute, Madonna. In this depressed economy, the local lumberjacks exchange top-grade gaharu (aloe tree wood) for sex and, although Madonna has been rejecting their wood (and the sex), she chooses Joseph one night, and they discover their common infection. At the close, Madonna lights candle tributes to Joseph, while Minus watches him on a posthumous video. While the film‚s focus is AIDS awareness and the plight of Joseph and Yolanda, de Rantau adds further dimension to the narrative through the figure of Minus. In the tradition of Nugroho‚s „boy-men‰ (see Octavianus in Bird Man Tale, 2002), Minus is a teenage schoolboy with some very adult attributes–he tells salacious stories to the camera, has sex with twins and seems of strikingly muscular heft for a boy his age. And it is Minus who concludes this moral tale, emphasizing the social ignorance and poverty that have contributed to the spread of AIDS.

-Thursday, April 27 at 8:45pm at the Kabuki 8 Theatres
-Saturday, April 29 at 12:45pm at the Kabuki 8 Theatres

THEY CHOSE CHINA

Shui-Bo Wang was a teenager in Eastern China when he saw his first Westerner, a man riding a green bicycle. „He could have been from outer space,‰ he says, so cut off was China from the rest of the world during the cold war. The man was James Veneris, a former American POW who, at the close of the Korean War, chose China for a home, one of 22 POWs, including one Briton, to do so. But if he seemed alien to Wang, Veneris came to be right at home in China, married, working in a factory and speaking New York-inflected Chinese. Wang‚s documentary illuminates on many levels as it explores the fates of three such expatriates, only one of whom, David Hawkins, is still living and returns to China with the filmmaker. At the time, the „turncoats‰ (a word Mike Wallace emphasizes repeatedly in archival sequences) were thought to have been brainwashed, Manchurian Candidate style. Wang unearths rare and fascinating footage that reveals a different story of individuals who, out of loathing for McCarthy‚s America, chose a people they viewed as peace loving and who repaid their admiration until the tide turned with the Cultural Revolution.

They Chose China will be preceded by Thornton Dial 
A portrait of the contemporary Southern artist the New York Times called „preternaturally gifted.‰ Talking with an unseen interviewer, Dial reveals by example what such a gift means. Observations by Southern art historian Bill Arnett further illuminate the role of outsider art in African American history. (Celia Carey, USA 2005, 20 min.)

-Monday, April 24 at 6:45pm at the Kabuki 8 Theatres
-Tuesday, April 25 at 8pm at the Bar of Contemporary Art (BOCA)
-Wednesday, May 3 at 9pm at the Kabuki 8 Theatres.

For more information please visit www.sffs.org

Main Festival Screening:

October 25-29
Stanford University, Palo Alto
schedule

Pre-Festival Screenings:

October 22
Roxie Cinema, San Francisco
schedule

October 20
Eastside Theater, East Palo Alto
schedule

October 18
Delancey Screening Room, San
Francisco
schedule

Traveling Festival Screenings:

February 12, 2007
Berkeley
Info

February 24, 2007
New Hampshire

March 18, 2007
Davis

March 25, 2007
Saratoga

March 28 & 29, 2007
Waukesha

September 29 & 30, 2007
Cambridge, Harvard University & Boston

November 9, 10 & 11, 2007
Monterey

__________________

Join our mailing list:

If you would like to receive periodic updates about UNAFF events please join our mailing list.