REEL LOCAL NEWS
Editor’s note: Welcome to Reel Local News, a new feature in Sunday Datebook. Each week, The Chronicle will present news and features about the people who have contributed to the Bay Area movie scene and enhanced our lives.
S.F. filmmakers on “Flint
Town”: San Francisco filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari, along with their co-director Jessica Dimmock, have a new series on Netflix that premiered Friday, March 2. “Flint Town” is an eight-part series that views the Michigan city once famous for its General Motors plant and now notorious for its dirty water through the eyes of its often overwhelmed police force.
Three years ago, Cooper and Canaperi won the documentary audience award and a special jury award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, for their documentary “T-Rex” about Flint boxer Claressa Shields. That experience set them on the path to “Flint Town.” And although the series might be about a specific place, Cooper sees a wider story that encompasses the Bay Area.
“I think what the series is doing is a deep dive into a very specific place that bears the history of the Industrial Revolution’s fall,” he says. “It’s been a few decades now since that cycle has been put into motion with General Motors closing shop there.
“The Bay Area is fortunate in that it’s so diverse and has so many different industries, but it hasn’t been immune to this, either. There’s a history here of big plant closures and whatnot.
“Policing in America is probably the most divisive subject in our country next to politics, and the two are often intertwined,” he adds. “People have really strong opinions about how they think and feel about police. … In some ways, the series is about how do we incrementally move the conversation forward with respect to community/police relationships.”
Vietnam revisited: Errol Morris will talk about his 2003 AcademyAward winning documentary “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” at the Pacific Film Archive on April 29. The screening concludes BAMPFA’s “Documenting Vietnam,” a series that also includes another Oscar winner, Peter Davis’ “Hearts and Minds” (1974) on Sunday, March 11; “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me N— ” (1968) on Thursday, March 15; and Werner Herzog’s “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” (1997) on Thursday, March 29.
Six Degrees of Janet Gaynor: If odds-on favorite (and San Francisco native) Sam Rockwell wins a best supporting actor Academy Award for his work in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” he will join a pantheon of Bay Area acting winners that dates back to the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929 when San Francisco Polytechnic High School graduate Janet Gaynor won best actress for her roles in “7th Heaven,” “Street Angel” and “Sunrise.”
Film clips
Today is the movie lover’s Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, with red-carpet coverage commencing at 3:30pm, followed by the ceremony at 5 p.m. on ABC. Enjoy the spectacle at home or attend one of the many public parties in the Bay Area. Here are some options: https://tinyurl.com/yb3pjgmn
“PowerPoint Karaoke,” a free event hosted by the Internet Archive, in which participants improvise PowerPoint presentations based on slides they’ve never seen before, will take place at the Archive on Tuesday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m. Rick Prelinger, creator of Lost Landscapes and the Prelinger film archive, and Avery Trufelman of “99% Invisible” podcast will join the crowd in making presentations. http:// bit.ly/2BLnGCE
Women’s History Month will open Wednesday, March 7, at 7 p.m. at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission with a short film anthology “Breakthrough: Portraits of Women in Science,” followed by a live discussion with Danielle Dana, executive director of Science Friday; Lisa D. White, director of education and Outreach at UC Museum of Paleontology; Chung-Pei Ma, a UC Berkeley astronomy and physics professor; and Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences. http://bit.ly/2HEglW8
Applications for the SFFilm Catapult Documentary Fellowship (a $10,000 grant and more) close Monday, March 5. http:// bit.ly/2EZQp8N