Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee (U.K., 2011), Old Dog, Pema Tseden (China/Tibet, 2011)

Description

Friday / 4.27.12
55th San Francisco International Film Festival @ BAM/PFA
6:30
Patience (After Sebald)
Grant Gee (U.K., 2011)

Layering voices and images into glowing “rings,” Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) casts light on the German writer W.G. Sebald’s uncategorizable novel, The Rings of Saturn (“fiction/travel/memoir” was the best the publishers could do). Standing witness for the book’s narrator, Gee relies on static long takes—virtually unpeopled—of war ruins, crossroads, and train terminals. Sebald’s words are “irradiated by melancholy,” yet soothing in their integrity, reaping the alien from the specific. In voiceover, his allies and admirers puzzle out the intensity of their affection for the artistry and courage of the author, who died in 2001. Julien Poirier

Photographed by Gee. With Jonathan Pryce, Tacita Dean, Rick Moody. (90 mins)


8:50
Old Dog
Pema Tseden (China/Tibet, 2011)

(Khyi rgan). This absolutely mesmerizing third feature from the leading filmmaker of the New Tibetan Cinema tells the story of an aged sheepherder, his gruff grown son (who’s having trouble conceiving a child with his wife), and the old man’s Tibetan mastiff hound—a highly prized breed—whose existence is imperiled from all sides. An emotionally gripping family story that combines “slow cinema” pacing with limitless vistas, Old Dog makes use of those horizon lines that delimit human destinies in ways that might have wowed John Ford, even as its portrait of rural anomie amid astonishing scenery takes a completely modern approach to narrative. Chuck Stephens

Written by Tseden. Photographed by Sonthar Gyal. With Lochey, Drolma Kyab, Tamdrin Tso, Yanbum Gyal. (88 mins)

Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/sfiff_2012

Special Pricing
BAM/PFA members, San Francisco Film Society members, UC Berkeley students: $11
General admission: $13

More Info

Link

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/sfiff_2012

Call

(510) 642-1412

Email

Contact Form (account required)