“Patti Cake$” plays the 60th S.F. International Film Festival.
S.F. festival presenter, now 60, has become year-round force in grants, education
Here’s a statistic most people don’t know: SFFilm, the parent organization of the San Francisco International Film Festival, is the largest grant-giving body for narrative features in the country. Not in the Bay Area, but in the United States. And we’re not talking about little films that no one ever sees, but major players in the independent marketplace, such as “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Short Term 12” and “Fruitvale Station.”
Celebrating its 60th anniversary with its annual two-week festival beginning Wednesday, April 5, the San Francisco International Film Festival has grown into something way beyond a festival. It’s a benevolent behemoth, granting a million dollars each year to narrative filmmakers, while keeping its hand in yearround exhibition and even in education.
The story of how this festival grew to become one of the most important arts organizations in the Bay Area is one of survival through constant innovation and adaptation, changing from a foreign film festival to a glamour festival to the complicated multifaceted entity that it is today. Over a turbulent stretch of national and local history — six decades of change — the film festival has remained nimble and voracious, becoming an ever bigger presence within the local film scene.
The 2017 rebranding of the festival’s umbrel-
la organization — it’s not the San Francisco Film Society, anymore, but SFFilm — bespeaks the organization’s confidence. The new title no longer suggests a secret society of movie lovers. The new title has some effrontery about it, the suggestion that they are, indeed, what film is all about in San Francisco.
Like a lot of things that prosper, it began small and grew naturally. Theater owner Irving M. Levin got the idea to bring international cinema to San Francisco and created a festival devoted to foreign films in 1957. These days, there are film festivals everywhere, for some of the most fringe categories, but in the middle of the last century there were only a handful of festivals scattered throughout the world.
In those early years, the Los Angeles film community felt a certain competitiveness with San Francisco, and so any San Francisco film festival almost had to be international just to have a full slate of movies to show: The big Hollywood studios did not want to encourage this upstart to the north. Still, even in the beginning, there was a Hollywood component. Fred Levin, the son of the founder, remembers from his childhood that “stars like Gregory Peck and Bette Davis were in and out of our home.”
Then somewhere by the end of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the San Francisco International Film Festival blossomed into something truly glamorous. It wasn’t Cannes, and it wasn’t Venice, but it seemed like it wanted to be, and it was close enough — and a lot closer by for people who lived in the area.
Years later, it’s staggering to contemplate the luminaries who appeared at the festival. There were great international filmmakers such as JeanLuc Godard, Claude Miller, Akira Kurosawa, Pedro Almodóvar, Milos Forman and Jean Renoir; and classic stars, such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth and Edward G. Robinson. There were major American directors such as Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Sidney Lumet, Clint Eastwood and Mel Brooks. And there were stars, national and international, such as Jack Lemmon, Barbra Streisand, Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau, Jane Fonda, Miou-Miou and Jack Nicholson.
Such was the festival’s affection for celebrities that one year — in 1980 — there was even a Charles Bronson retrospective. You might well ask, what was there worth remembering in Bronson’s filmography? “Death Wish” (1974)? “Death Wish V”? In fact, all the awful “Death Wish” sequels came after 1980. The example goes to show how film history is an evolving thing, and how film tributes to stars in the midst of their careers are always mere guesses — and interesting for that reason.
In any case, by the turn of the millennium, much of the A-list Hollywood element had retreated. By then, it was clear: San Francisco was never going to be a glitzy-gorgeous festival, like Venice, or an important industry festival, like Cannes, Berlin and Toronto. Its placement at a time of year when prestigious premieres are just not available meant that it was never going to compete for the best and highest-profile Hollywood product. Instead it would remain a respectful, perfectly acceptable second-tier film festival.
A needed shift came with the hiring in 2005 of Graham Leggat as executive director. An Englishman from Surrey with a lilting accent that he got from his Scottish parents, Leggat had worked for various arts groups for upwards of two decades. If Irving Levin is the festival’s George Washington, Leggat is its Abraham Lincoln, a visionary who transformed, defined and revitalized the organization — and left it too soon.
Leggat faced the festival’s reality and saw opportunity there. Yes, it was never going to be Cannes, but it could be something else, something extraordinary. Leggat reconceived the festival as the hub for all things cinematic in the Bay Area. The annual festival would be just one of the products offered. He imagined film programs throughout the year, plus educational outreach, grants to emerging filmmaking and other, smaller festivals, catering to special tastes, all operating beneath the film society umbrella. In other words, he envisioned SFFilm.
Leggat was not only a visionary but also an impeccably decent person, with a sly sense of humor and a calm aura. Everyone liked him, and the people who knew him best loved him. A relatively young man, he might have held the position of executive director for decades. But he was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and died in August of 2011. He was only 51.
Bingham Ray, an independent filmmaker, was appointed to replace Leggat in October, but in a macabre and awful twist of fate, Ray himself died of a stroke, at age 57, in January of 2012. He was stricken ill while at the Sundance Film Festival.
“What we learned during that period of turmoil and transition is that the festival is bigger than any executive director,” recalled Rachel Rosen, the festival’s programming director since 2009. “It was destabilizing, traumatic and frightening, but it was also a really positive time, in the way that the staff and the board came together to keep moving forward and take care of each other.”
Under subsequent leadership of Ted Hope (2012-13) and Noah Cowan (since 2014), the festival continued to expand, pursuing the organizational vision that Leggat put in place a decade ago. “It’s reassuring,” said Rosen, “that Noah is the first person since Graham who relishes the city and the job with the same intensity.”
Today’s SFFilm has a nurturing hand in many different areas. Rosen and a team of three programmers choose the films not only for the San Francisco International Film Festival, but also for a variety of Doc Stories (documentaries), Hong Kong Cinema, French Cinema Now, Modern Cinema (a repertory partnership with SFMOMA) and other festivals throughout the year.
Keith Zwolfer directs SFFilm’s educational program, which started in 1991 as a program that took place during the festival. In 2005, Leggat expanded it to a year-round operation. “We teach kids about the art of filmmaking,” said
Zwolfer. “This could help prepare them in their own careers, and it also leads to media literacy.”
In some cases, foreign films are used to help students learn a language, or at least learn a language’s culture. At other times, filmmakers are brought into the classroom to talk about their work and inspire the next generation. SFFilm has a filmmakers camp as well, where students learn how to make movies.
SFFilm is also a leader in funding films and nurturing talent. “We are giving away a million a year to narrative films, either in the screenwriting or packaging phase,” said Caroline von Kuhn, who heads the program. “We provide preproduction grants, production grants and postproduction grants. Once we’re behind a project, we want to make sure it’s realized.”
Yet it’s about providing not only money, but also resources and know-how. To that end, SFFilm has created Film House, which offers free office space for up-and-coming filmmakers where they can meet others in their field and learn the logistics of funding a motion picture.
Under Cowan, there has been a great emphasis on San Francisco values. “In deciding which films to support,” said von Kuhn, “we ask does it have social relevancy, does it exemplify Bay Area values?”
Rosen defines these values as “adventurousness, a spirit of exploration, a certain openness and acceptance, humanism, an interest in social issues, experimentation and open-mindedness.”
Cowan sees San Francisco as a “very curious place that really wants to know about new ideas. The Bay Area is one of the most welcoming places on the planet — there’s a great vibrancy in embracing other cultures. People will open the program and see, ‘Oh, look, Ethan Hawke is coming. I have to go see that,’ ” said Cowan, in talking about this upcoming festival. “And they’ll think, ‘What is this film from Georgia?’ But they’ll end up loving the film from Bangladesh the most, because it shows them something about the world they’ve never thought about.”
Cowan said he wants “to make sure that filmmakers with our values continue to have a voice — that’s why we do artist development programs. Also, we see a role for film festivals to help sift through the vast number of films, to identify what new talent looks like and what new ideas look like. That’s why we’ve started an online streaming service.”
The advent of the Trump administration presents special challenges. “The most obvious one,” said Cowan, “is the free movement of artists. The magic, the alchemy, that happens between filmmakers and audiences is essential to our relevance. And when filmmakers from some great filmmaking nation, such as Iran, can’t come to the United States, it limits our ability to create this international dialogue, which is so meaningful to our audiences and to society as a whole. I think that we are also in a golden age of the American documentary, and many of our finest documentary filmmakers are addressing the more reactionary elements of contemporary politics.”
Like Leggat, Cowan wasn’t born here — he’s Canadian — and has the special love that an outsider has for the best of America. “I chose to come to the United States, because I believe in the values that exist here,” said Cowan. “That’s been challenged a little bit, but it’s also being supported by what I’m seeing in the artistic community here. So I’m really happy to be here for the ride — and interested in what happens in the next couple of years.”
Cowan expects good things, despite the current climate. “This moment of anger that we are feeling right now does not feel very productive to me,” said Cowan. “But moments of anger usually give way to great art.”
Good or bad, SFFilm will be there to present the story, as one of the sturdiest and most essential institutions in San Francisco’s cultural life.