IndieFest pulls gems from vault
While programming his 20th IndieFest, founder Jeff Ross found himself overwhelmed with memories from the festival’s early years, when he was a twentysomething film geek and the underground indie film movement was in full flower.
“I still have a whole bunch of VHS tapes that people would send us for their submissions — they take up so much room,” Ross said. “Those first few years were very memorable to me personally. (There were) some excellent movies that, because they came out before the digital wave, they’re not really movies people get a chance to see.”
So for this year’s San Francisco independent film festival, Ross is bringing back one film from each of the past IndieFests, creating an informal timeline of how the festival — and by extension, independent cinema — has evolved over two decades, from the 1999 punk/horror/sci-fihybrid “Sore Losers,” to his favorite from last year, the Brazilian drama “Kill Me Please.”
“I had the most fun looking back at the early days,” Ross said. “The first few years of the festival, the films were closer to what you might call underground, or experimental or whatever, than they are now. The films we select now tend to be more polished. Our audiences expect a film that doesn’t have the boom (microphone) in it.”
Highlights include “Funny Ha Ha” (2004 festival) and “Harmony and Me” (2010), both key films of the “mumblecore” movement; “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation,” a shot-by-shot remake by three Mississippi kids in the 1980s that was resurrected in 2005; “Viva” (2007), an early film by “Love Witch” director Anna Biller; and “Bubba Ho-Tep” (2003), that strange movie set in a retirement home in which Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) and John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) battle an ancient Egyptian mummy.
“Bubba Ho-Tep” was the closing-night film, and Ross was stunned when Campbell agreed to appear.
“I think we were drinking at a bar until they kicked us out,” Ross said. “I never would have expected that from someone who had such fame. IndieFest doesn’t get a lot of name stars at the festival, so having him there was pretty cool.
One treat is “Shut Yer Dirty Little Mouth” (2002), a San Francisco-made film by Robert Taicher based on underground audio tapes from the late 1980s of an alcoholic, bickering couple in the Lower Haight secretly recorded by their neighbor.
“These tapes became underground sensations in the 1980s,” Ross said. “You would hear clips on punk rock records. So many lines that stick in your heads. Fans would say them and repeat them like ‘Rocky Horror’ or ‘The Big Lebowski.’ Definitely an indie classic . ...
“These are kind of like movies for the people. They end up being personal, even if it’s a slasher midnight movie thing.”