SFIFF: Thursday, Part I; Time to Die

I decided to let serendipity pick my Thursday movies at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Serendipity was good to me. Simply on the basis of being there when they started and being able to get a ticket, I saw Time to Die and Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed on the mountains. That was two strokes of very good luck.

Time to Die writer/director, Dorota Kedzierzawska, star Danuta Szaflarska, and cinematographer Arthur Reinhart appeared in person before the show, having flown in from Poland for the event. “You are very lucky because even though that Danuta is 93 years old, she works all the time and she plays in the theater,” Kedzierzawska explained through a translator. “But she said that she has not visited San Francsico ever, so she has to come here.”

Almost a monolog, Time to Die is primarily an old woman talking to her dog, and it’s much better than any film that meets that description has any right to be. Szaflarska is wonderful in the role–wistful, bitter, demanding of respect, a little crazy, with a tendency to spy on her neighbors. Not that she doesn’t have reasons. The yuppies next door want to buy her property and tear down the once-beautiful house where she spent her life. Despite the title, the film is not so such much about death as about how one spends the last years of one’s life.

Shot in gorgeous black and white, this was the best photographed film I’ve seen so far at the festival. The camera often looks through the house’s many windows, some dirty, some through odd angles, and some made of interesting, beveled glass. The effect suggests the distortions in which she sees the world.

The filmmakers returned for Q&A after the movie.

Kedzierzawska described one problem working with her then-91-year-old star: “She runs. She runs upstairs and downstairs…we had to remind her, ‘Danuta , please remember you are playing an old lady.’”

She also answered a question about working with Szaflarska’s canine co-star. “We chose a different dog and we trained the dog for six months…it turned out the dog could do all the tricks away from the set, but once on the set, it was paralyzed and couldn’t do anything. We had to do a very quick casting…[the replacement] had a very good trainer and he loved to be in front of the camera.”

You have one more chance to catch Time to Die: Tuesday, May 6, at 3:15, at the Kabuki.