Fest’s new programs: docs and young dames

2023-02-05 - By Carla Meyer

Decades working as a film journalist and festival co-director have given Ruthe Stein an uncanny sense of the film landscape.

While planning the 2023 Mostly British Film Festival, which runs Thursday, Feb. 9, through Feb. 16 at San Francisco’s Vogue Theatre, Stein noticed that fewer new narrative films were being made available by distributors, after a pandemic backlog had led to an avalanche of such offerings the year before.

“I needed to think out of the box a little, because I couldn’t count on 25 new films,” said Stein, a longtime Chronicle staff writer and editor who co-founded the Mostly British festival with Jack Bair in 2008.

Stein’s need to pivot resulted in new programming for the festival this year, including a “Great Dames … When They Were Young” series of early Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith films, and a Saturday double bill starring the luminous young Irish actor Paul Mescal that includes the family drama “God’s Creatures” and the delicate father-daughter story “Aftersun,” for which he was just nominated for an Oscar in the lead actor category.

Recognizing that the best films she was screening were documentaries, Stein created a program for them as well, scheduling a full slate of docs — including 2023 best documentary Oscar nominee “All That Breathes,” a standout from India about two bird-rescuing New Delhi brothers — to screen at 5 p.m. on most nights of the festival.

When they secured “Aftersun” and “All That Breathes” last year, Stein and the festival’s committee of volunteer programmers could not have predicted they would be nominated for Oscars in January. But again, instincts and experience play roles. Stein was so taken by “Aftersun,” which she called her favorite movie of 2022, she decided to show it even after it had started a theatrical run in San Francisco.

“I usually wouldn’t do that,” she told The Chronicle. “But I believe people should see it on a big screen. It merits that.”

Now, the film’s Oscar imprimatur is likely to boost interest in its festival screening, just as it will for “All That Breathes,” which British-born festival programmer Maxine Einhorn discovered “before a lot of people realized how fantastic it was,” Stein said. The film is set for release Tuesday, Feb. 7, on HBO and HBO Max.

The Mostly British Film Festival will open with what seems like a traditional choice: the costume drama “Emily,” which stars Emma Mackey (Netflix’s “Sex Education”) as “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Brontë. But actor turned first-time director and screenwriter Frances O’Connor has reinvented Brontë’s life story, so that it approaches the passion and wildness she packed into her famous and only novel.

“Emily” sticks less to history than to O’Connor’s vision of “the kind of woman who would have written ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ” Stein said. This Emily gets tattooed, lusts for a clergyman and romps the Yorkshire moors with her libertine brother. Stein spoke to O’Connor by Zoom about the movie, and a recording of their conversation will play before the film.

all the festival’s programming is so highbrow. On Feb. 11, Mostly British will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the sprawling, illicit-romance-centered 1983 ABC miniseries “The Thorn Birds.” The 90-minute program will include expansive clips from the series and Stein’s free-ranging Zoom interview with stars Richard Chamberlain, Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown. Ward and Brown, who married not long after meeting on set, dish about their romance, and Chamberlain fondly recalls working opposite screen legend Barbara Stanwyck on the miniseries.

Ward mostly directs now, and on Feb. 13, the festival will screen her new film “Palm Beach,” an ensemble piece starring Brown, Sam Neill, Greta Scacchi and Richard E. Grant, about a gathering of old friends in a tony Sydney enclave.

The festival ends Feb. 16 with the closing night film “The Lost King.” Directed by Stephen Frears and written by Steve Coogan — the team behind “Philomena” — the movie stars the always-wonderful two-time Oscar nominee Sally Hawkins (“Blue Jasmine,” “The Shape of Water”) as the real-life amateur historian who helped locate the remains of King Richard III in a Leicester car park.

Here’s a more in-depth look at highlights from the festival schedule:

‘Emily’

How Emily Brontë, the unmarried clergyman’s daughter who died at 30, came up with the swooningly romantic and dark novel “Wuthering Heights” has always been a mystery. Here, writer/director Frances O’Connor, who imagines Brontë as a lustful town outcast, and actor Emma Mackey, who plays her as shy, watchful, playful and wonderfully weird, help fill in the blanks.

This Emily prefers exploring the rolling Yorkshire hills (where she later would have Heathcliff pine for Cathy) over sitting at a writing desk. But this visually sweeping film plays less like another gloomy “Heights” screen adaptation than “My Summer of Love,” the Yorkshire-set 2004 film in which Emily Blunt, whom Mackey resembles, found sexual freedom and artistic inspiration amid the tall grass. This is mostly sunlit, daytime Brontë, although the weather sometimes intervenes with perfect timing, like when rain forces Emily and a handsome clergyman she pretends to loathe (a smoldering Oliver Jackson Cohen) to seek shelter together. The film is set for wide release in theaters Feb. 24.

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9.

Paul Mescal double feature

Mescal has shown a distinct ability, since breaking through in the 2020 Hulu miniseries “Normal People,” to seem immediately, fully present — to the viewer as well as to his characters’ intimates — while holding something back. This quality serves him again in “God’s Creatures,” in which he plays an affable, hardworking young man whose unexpected return to his Irish hometown delights his mother (a stalwartly maternal Emily Watson) until she begins to question how well she knows her son.

In “Aftersun,” told as a memory, Mescal is the fun young dad to a preteen (Frankie Corio, bright and curious) on holiday in Turkey. Sharing inside jokes, they goof together in a way that probably would not happen if they saw each other every day. The father’s absences from his daughter’s life are spelled out less in dialogue or story as in the strains of regret and restlessness in Mescal’s expertly layered performance. Dad and daughter are both haunted despite all this movie’s sun and splashing about.

“God’s Creatures”: 1 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11; “Aftersun”: 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11.

40th anniversary tribute to ‘The Thorn Birds’

Although the miniseries’ romance between a priest (Richard Chamberlain) and a young woman (Rachel Ward) the priest watched grow up hasn’t aged too well, Barbara StanNot

wyck’s Emmy-winning performance as a power-mad, priestpawing ranch owner remains as powerful in 2023 as it was in 1983. The dynamics of the rancher’s extended family also still compel, as does the developing-in-real-time chemistry between Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown.

7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11.

‘Four in the Morning’

It’s almost unnerving to see Dame Judi Dench, already in her late 60s when she became familiar to most American filmgoers, look so young in this 1965 black-and-white British “kitchen sink” drama/mystery, for which Dench received the BAFTA for “most promising newcomer.”

Part of the festival’s “Great Dames” series, the film starts, proto-“White Lotus” style, with a shot of a woman’s trench-coatclad dead body washed ashore from the Thames. The story then tracks back to follow two story lines of women who own trench coats, the more interesting of which features Dench as a young mother left at home with a crying, teething baby while

her handsome husband drinks with a pal and pursues other women.

Had this film been made in Hollywood, Shelley Winters would have played Dench’s role. But Dench eschews Winters’ signature self-pity in favor of simmering rage that she quietly metes out to her husband upon his return home. Although it would take decades for Dench to perfect the air of authority she brings to her present-day roles, she already shows glimmers here.

3 p.m. Feb. 15.

‘All That Breathes’

Majesty and grit coexist throughout documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s Oscarnominated film. The documentary is centered around brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have devoted their lives to caring for black kites, the birds of prey that keep falling from New Delhi’s pollution-choked skies. In their cramped basement, the brothers prepare the injured birds to once again “swim” through the air, wings barely flapping — an elegant sight no matter the AQI reading. Sen is set to introduce the film in person before the screening.

5 p.m. Feb. 16.