Here’s a list you can really use: The Best Unavailable Films of 2006.
I attended a lot of festival screenings this year, so it’s not surprising that many of the best movies I saw didn’t get a wide–or even an art house–release in this country. Since I lack the resources to produce the Bayflicks Second Chance Film Festival, here’s my Top 10 Festival-Only Films from 2006:
10) Berkeley, Berkeley Video & Film Festival. I don’t know if anyone but a baby boomer can appreciate Bobby Roth’s look back at the radical end of the 1960’s; it may even require an East Bay Baby Boomer. But Berkeley progresses beyond nostalgia, examining the both the excitement and the shortcomings of youthful idealism.
9) Zozo, 10th Annual Arab Film Festival. An eleven-year-old boy (Imad Creidi) suddenly loses his family in Lebanon’s extremely uncivil civil war, and must make it on his own to Sweden, where his grandparents are waiting. Writer-director Josef Fares uses a style reminiscent of Latin American magical realism to show us two cultures through the eyes of a child.
8) Iberia, San Francisco International Film Festival. Dance. Pure, simple, graceful, beautiful, and without story-filling dialog scenes to get in the way. The dances in this tribute to Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz are plentiful and short; in the unlikely event you don’t like one, something wonderful is only a few minutes away.
7) Beethoven’s Hair, Docfest. Part forensic mystery and part history lesson, this documentary stuffs a lot of fascinating stories into its 84-minute running time. There’s an Arizona urologist named Che Guevara, the Holocaust in Denmark, a particle accelerator, the 19th century composer Ferdinand Hiller, and Ludwig himself. Great music, too.
6) Local Call!, Jewish Film Festival. What’s scarier than your dead father calling constantly from beyond the grave? The phone bills. Director/co-writer Arthur Joffé meditates hilariously on memory, communication, Jewish spirituality, and the precariousness of our comfortable lives.
5) Au Bonheur Des Dames, San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A silent film from 1930 is hardly a product of 2006, but it qualifies on the grounds of getting its first Bay Area screening this year. If it wasn’t for the total cop-out of an ending, this Emile Zola adaptation about a giant department store and the people it displaces would equal The Crowd as the greatest serious drama of the silent era.
4) In Bed, San Francisco International Film Festival. Before you’ve seen anything but credits, In Bed treats you to the sound of a very long orgasm. Then we meet two people
who’ve just had incredible sex but don’t know what to say to each other. Eventually they say a lot. Writer Julio Rojas and director Mati as Bize catch the intimacy that casual sex can produce in near-total strangers in this talkie and erotic two-person character study.
3) Forgiving Dr. Mengele, Jewish Film Festival. "Getting even has never healed a single person.– Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor devotes herself to keeping the memory of the Shoah alive, even running a small museum in her adopted home town. Yet the subject of this documentary has done something altogether remarkable, and controversial: She has publicly forgiven the mass murderers who killed her family and turned her childhood into a living hell.
2) Facade, San Francisco Independent Film Festival. Keep an eye on Brian Bedard; we’ve got a major new talent here. The 23-year-old Bedard wrote, directed, and acts in Façade, a small-scale film about five young people partying their way towards disaster. While two characters fall sweetly in love (or at least lust), the other three dig themselves deeper into an emotional quagmire in this thoughtful, surprising, and disturbing first film.
1) Adam’s Apples, San Francisco International Film Festival. The plot sounds like vapid,
Hollywood, feel-good drek. But Anders Thomas Jensen’s tale of a hate-filled neo-Nazi who learns compassion with the help of an optimistic minister and some oddball eccentrics is actually the blackest of black comedies. That minister and those oddballs should be locked away for their own safety–and ours. On one hand, this is a profoundly religious picture, built on redemption and filled with miracles. On the other, I never laughed so hard at a man shooting a cat.
Now, how about some movies that you actually can see:
Recommended: For Your Consideration, Balboa, ongoing; Cerrito, opening Friday. A 
conventional narrative rather than a mockumentary, For Your Consideration still feels much like director/co-writer’s Christopher Guest’s previous works like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. It stars the same Guest repertory company (including Fred Willard, Parker Posey, and Guest’s writing collaborator, Eugene Levy), examines a show business subculture (in this case, independent films), and delivers a hearty supply of honest laughs. And like A Mighty Wind (still Guest’s best), it mixes a bit of pathos with the humor. Catherine O’Hara makes the movie her own as an aging actress who’s head is turned by an Oscar rumor.
Recommended: Seven Samurai, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 7:10. If you think all
action movies are mindless escapism, you need to set aside 3½ hours and watch Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece. The basic story–”a poor village hires warriors to defend them against bandits–”has been retold many times since, but Kurosawa told it first and told it best. This is an action film with almost no action in the first two hours. When the fighting finally arrives, you’re ready for it, knowing every detail of the people involved, the terrain that will be fought over, and the class differences between the peasants and their hired swords. One of the greatest movies ever made. Part of the Archive’s Janus Samurai series.
Recommended: A Christmas Story, Parkway, 9:15. Sweet, sentimental Christmas movies, at least those not authored by Charles Dickens or Frank Capra, generally make me want to throw up. But writer Jean Shepherd’s look back at the Indiana Christmases of his youth comes with enough laughs and cynicism to make the nostalgia go down easy. A holiday gem for people who love, or hate, the holidays. A Speakeasy Theaters Tribe Night event.
Recommended, with Reservations: La Strada, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 5:00. 
Giulietta Masina brilliantly plays a simple, innocent girl sold by her parents to a coarse, crude, and violent traveling strongman (Anthony Quinn in another strong performance). But for all the great acting, Fellini’s 1954 heartbreaker comes off as shallow. Even worse, it manages to romanticize child abuse. (Or is it spouse abuse? The movie is never too sure about that.) Part of the Archive’s Janus Films series.
Recommended: The Princess Bride, Cerrito, opening Friday for a one-week run. William Goldman’s enchanting and funny fairy tale dances magically along that thin line between parody and the real thing. There’s no funnier swordfight anywhere. A Cerrito Flashback.
Recommended: Throne of Blood, Pacific Film Archive, Wednesday, 7:30. Kurosawa
stands Shakespeare on his head with this haunting, noh- and kabuki-inspired loose adaptation of Macbeth. Toshiro Mifune gives an over-the-top but still effective performance as the military officer tempted by his wife (Isuzu Yamada) into murdering his lord. The finale–which is far more democratic than anything Shakespeare ever dared–is one of the great action sequences ever. Another part of the Archive’s Janus Samurai series.
Recommended, with Reservations: Lifeboat, Stanford, Wednesday and Thursday. Alfred Hitchcock liked a challenge. He set this entire World War II drama in a lifeboat and shot it in a studio tank. There he created a microcosm of society, putting the wealthy and the working class–and even an African-American and a Nazi–together in extremely close quarters where they must cooperate to survive. It doesn’t quite work as well as it should, feeling contrived and talky at times, but it’s an interesting experiment in both constricted storytelling and social commentary. Hitchcock would make two more one-set movies before getting it right (extraordinarily right) in Rear Window. On a double-bill with Lancer Spy.
Recommended: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, Roxie, opens Friday. Dangerous, tyrannical, and megalomaniac religious leaders don’t just exist on the political 
right. Stanley Nelson’s documentary takes us into the heart of the left-leaning, San Francisco-based Christian cult that ended in mass murder and suicide in 1978. Nelson shows us, and survivors tell us, why people followed Jim Jones, how the good things he did (including creating what was perhaps Indiana’s first integrated church) attracted so many, how he robbed his followers of their facility for critical thought, and finally, how he robbed them of their lives. Through archival footage, photos, and audio recordings, Nelson does more than tell you what happened; he makes you feel it, understand it, and shiver all the more for the reality of it.
Noteworthy: The Robe, Stanford, Saturday and Sunday. One of the first two films shot, and the first one released, in Cinemascope, The Robe brought the wide screen and stereo sound to the masses. It’s been many years since I saw this very Christian sword-and-toga movie, which I remember as being pompous, silly, and mildly entertaining in ways that probably weren’t intended. But this movie literally changed the shape of cinema. On a double-bill with Anastasia.
Recommended: Shut Up & Sing, Presidio, opening Friday. We all know what happened when Dixie Chick lead singer Natalie Maines
spoke her mind during the lead-up to the Iraqi War. But if you haven’t seen Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s documentary, you probably don’t know the group dynamics that helped the trio, their management, and their families cope with the hatred, lost revenue, and death threats that followed. Or how the experience helped them grow as people and as musicians. One complaint: Kopple and Peck should have let us hear and see at least one entire song, performed from beginning to end.
Recommended: Flags of Our Fathers, Elmwood, opening Friday. The film that Saving Private Ryan should have been. According to director Clint Eastwood and screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, many heroic and horrifying acts occurred during the Battle of Iwo Jima, but raising that flag wasn’t one of them. Still, that famous photo made it look heroic, and the War Department needed heroes. The filmmakers cut between the battle itself and a War Bonds tour starring the three surviving flag raisers (the rest died elsewhere in the battle), contrasting the horrors of war with the absurdity of wartime propaganda. It also shows us three very believable young men trapped both in carnage and in what they see as undeserved hero-worship.
Recommended: The Wizard of Oz, Castro, Saturday. You don’t really need me to tell you about this one, do you?
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