Reel Local News:
Frameline opener “Pushing Dead” comes to the Roxie.
Nearly two years after making its world premiere at Frameline where it won the AT&T Audience Award, starting a run of nearly 80 film festivals and a dozen awards, “Pushing Dead” returns to Bay Area theaters with writer/director Tom E. Brown participating in Q&As at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, 6:45 p.m., March 22, and Oakland’s New Parkway, 6:30 p.m., March 25.
Described as an AIDS comedy, the movie stars James Roday (“Psych”) as a long-term survivor in San Francisco thrown for a loop when a $100 birthday check makes him ineligible to receive a subsidy on the prescriptions he needs to stay healthy.
“This movie is not autobiographical, but I’ve been positive for most of my life,” Brown says. “I’m 50 and I’ve been positive for almost 33 years, I’m about to have an anniversary, my AIDS anniversary. I just wanted to share a little bit out of my HIV survival guide. This was my way of doing that.”
To see a video of Tom Brown: http://bit.ly/Tomebrown
Competing for cash at SFFilm
Festival: Oakland resident Erika Cohn traveled to the Palestinian territories to find the subject of her documentary “The Judge,” a film about the country’s first female Sharia judge. Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont similarly journeyed to Ukraine to focus on a family in the midst of war in “The Distant Barking of Dogs.” Meanwhile, Serbian Mila Turajlic only had to visit her mother for a film focused on the older woman’s political activism in “The Other Side of Everything.” Those are but three of 10 documentaries competing for a $10,000 Golden Gate Awards McBaine Documentary Feature prize at the 2018 SFFilm Festival that opens April 4 and runs through April 17.
Ten narrative directors similarly compete for $10,000 in the GGA New Directors competition, and are just as diverse. A young man searches for his father in Cape Verde in Portuguese filmmakers João Miller Guerra and Felipa Reis’ “Djon África”; a 50-year-old mother’s autobiographical novel roils her family in Ana Urushadze’s “Scary Mother,” a Georgia-Estonia co-production; and a Kyrgzstan boy becomes part of a con in Elizaveta Stishova’s “Suleiman Mountain.”
SFFilm Executive Director Noah Cowan says that there are two world premieres in this year’s competition along with others he describes as “best of films from around the world … (We) select films that we think really embody the values of the Bay Area and the film community of San Francisco and try and transmit those ideas to the world and, hopefully, impart our belief in films of this kind to the industry and distribution world.”
This and that
The world premiere of “Ingmar Bergman: Through the Choreographer’s Eye” will be shown on Sunday, April 29, at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. Presented by the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and the Consulate General of Sweden, the documentary focuses on the work of four choreographers who drew inspiration for their dance from the late director’s work and his home in Faro. Executive producer Ingmar Bergman Jr. and dancer/choreographer Alexander Ekman will participate in a post-screening discussion after the 7:30 p.m. screening. http://bit.ly/2G3nlLQ
Bay Area filmmaker Cheryl Dunye (“The Watermelon Woman” has been tapped by Lionsgate to write and direct the adaptation of Jason Mott’s novel “The Wonder of All Things.” The supernatural drama will center around Ava, a 13-year-old whose mysterious healing powers save the life of a friend.
Four films with strong Bay Area ties will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival that opens April 18 in New York City. “Ghostbox Cowboy” connections include director John Maringouin, producers Molly Lynch and George Rush, who live in San Francisco, and editor Sean Gillane, who resides in Oakland. “Satan & Adam” writer/director V. Scott Balcerek also lives in Oakland. “Call Her Ganda” producer Marty Syjuco and “General Magic” co-producer Dee Gardetti are San Franciscans.