This Year’s San Francisco Film Festival Officially Announced

~ Lincoln Spector

Tuesday morning, Graham Leggat, Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society, stood up at the St. Francis and officially announced the 51st annual San Francisco International Film Festival. The press conference was mercifully short.

There was, of course, the usual long and boring thanks to the corporate sponsors–a preview of the long and boring on-screen thanks they will receive before every film. Well, that’s a necessary evil.

And the whole thing left me puzzled with a vexing professional question: With how much skepticism should one report a press conference held on April 1st?

Seriously, the festival runs from April 24 through May 8. It will screen 177 films, 94 of them features. Here are some of the big events:

  • The festival opens at the Castro (where all festivals open) with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress. I said awhile back that “I tried to watch one of her films, Sex is Comedy, a year or so ago. It was not sexy, funny, nor in any other way worth watching.” I now remember that she also made Romance, which was very sexy, despite an idiotic story.
  • Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness continues the Festival’s tradition of picking New York-based comedies (Delirious, Romance and Cigarettes) for the Centerpiece screening. The description sounds utterly bizarre and quite likely entertaining.
  • Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine will give the State of Cinema speech on May 4. His speech is titled “Beyond Moving Pictures: Possibilities for the Future of Film.”

When it comes to awards, they’re making all the right choices this year:

More soon.

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Published by Lincoln Spector

Lincoln Spector writes about cinema, technology, and cinema technology. From 1986 through 2008, he wrote Gigglebytes, the first technology-oriented humor column. From 1977 through 2016, he wrote PC World's Answer Line column and blog.