YBCA’s Filipino Film Festival, plus Hitchcock and Gaudí in the city
The Filipino Film Festival, a grand showcase for the latest in aesthetically and politically inventive Filipino cinema, returns to San Francisco for its sixth year at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from Thursday, Aug. 17, through Sept. 3.
The films shed an artistic light on the recent political and human rights crises that have taken place during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency.
“As the indelible specter of dictatorship continues to cast a shadow on the nation, filmmakers continue to tell stories that bring to light, in ways both overt and subtle, the injustices that Filipinos face every day,” Dy said in a statement.
Exciting films at the festival include “Forbidden Memory,” a documentary on the little-known 1974 massacre in the town of Malisbong, where 1,500 citizens were killed by the Philippines army; “Seklusyon,” a religious horror parable directed by Erik Matti (“On the Job,” “Honor Thy Father”); and Brillante Mendoza’s “Ma’Rosa,” which won a Jaclyn Rose Award for best actress at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
A special event, “Inside the War on Drugs,” with Manila photojournalist Raffy Lerma, is scheduled for 1 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 20.
“At the Top,” about a stripper (Rita Gomez) groomed to be an actress during a time of toxic political strife, promises to be an essential rediscovery of a shamefully overlooked corner of world cinema.
The film won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, awarded to films that “open new perspectives on cinematic art.”
“Rebecca” and “Marnie”: The Castro Theatre screens two of Alfred Hitchcock’s weirdest psychological thrillers: “Rebecca” (Daphne du Maurier’s classic ghost yarn, starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, and produced by David O. Selznick) and “Marnie” (the second of two unsettling, expressionist masterpieces Hitchcock made with actor Tippi Hedren in the 1960s).
The camera of Teshigahara (“Woman in the Dunes,” “The Face of Another”) films in and around Gaudí’s schools, houses and parks, tracing the gentle slopes and flowing curves of Gaudí’s architectural marvels, including the still-unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona.