FILMS
- Birdbeat (Fugue)
The ritual hierarchy at a backyard bird feeder, accompanied by a jazz ensemble. —Steven Jenkins more...
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- Geoff Adams
- USA
- 2002
- Birdhouse
An exotic pet’s devotion proves very unhealthy for its owner. more...
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- Richard Zimmerman
- USA
- 1996
- Birds Do It... Bees Do It...
Procreation in all life forms (other than man) is the subject of this fascinating and explicit documentary from David Wolper Productions, who made the award-winning Hellstrom Chronicle. All lif more...
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- USA
- Birds, Orphans and Fools
In Birds, Orphans and Fools two friends, Yorick and Ondrej, live in a bombed-out church, decorated with the detrius of life (old furniture, a bathtub, a tiny piano and lots of birds). They take more...
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- Juraj Jakubisko
- Slovakia
- 1990
- The Birds, the Bees and the Italians
Germi gives us a worm’s eye view of the provincial dolce vita in his third comedy of morals (after Divorce—Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned). He dissects the hypocritic more...
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- Pietro Germi
- Italy / France
- 1965
- Birdy
Defying predictable genres like war film, buddy film and nostalgic coming-of-age film, Alan Parker gives us a fresh, iconoclastic movie that continues to surprise up to the last frame. Nicolas Cage, i more...
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- Alan Parker
- USA
- 1984
- A Bird’s Life
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- Makourek Dobrava, Born
- Czechoslovakia
- Birju
Distracted by the many sights, sounds and smells of his Indian village, a four-year-old boy takes us on an odyssey that becomes a snapshot in time. —Joanne Parsont more...
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- Heeraz Marfatia
- USA / India
- 2002
- Birth
Over the past few years, first features by Indian directors have been capturing the attention and accolades of the International film community. A strong contender for last year's Camera d'Or (Cannes) more...
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- Shaji
- India
- 1988
- Birth of a Fairytale
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- Poland
- The Birth of Light
A single, time-lapsed shot captures the brilliance of the morning sun as it cuts across the darkness of a starry sky high above an Iranian mountaintop. —Jennie Yabroff more...
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- Abbas Kiarostami
- Iran / Switzerland
- 1997
- The Birth of Love
Philippe Garrel is one of those filmmakers who, every few years, presents a new film that is a candid reflection on his life and the new problems that beset it. He takes the material for his fictions more...
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- Philippe Garrel
- France
- 1993
- The Birth of the Goalie of the 2001 Cup Final
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- Mike Leigh
- England
- 1971
- Birthplace
If history could talk, we might begin to understand something. Birthplace, in which Henryk Grynberg, a Polish Jew, returns to the village of his childhood to discover the fate of his family, co more...
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- Pavel Lozinski
- Poland
- 1992
- Bisbee ‘17
Prolific editor and filmmaker Robert Greene brings us to Bisbee, Arizona—a remote copper mining town close to the Mexican border where 100 years ago, there was a violent deportation of 1,200 str more...
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- Robert Greene
- USA
- 2018
- Bitch Rabbit
A jaded prostitute and her unexpectedly frisky trick share a tender moment in this curious love story. more...
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- Guérin van de Vorst
- Belgium
- 2010
- Bits and Pieces
Bits and Pieces is a sprawling ensemble piece with 130 speaking parts, around 65 substantial characters and some 30 intertwined stories. The film’s structure and its somewhat bitter take on h more...
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- Antonello Grimaldi
- Italy
- 1996
- A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief
Eerie mechanisms duel to the death in a surreal underworld. more...
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- Jonathan Reiss
- USA
- Bitter Seeds
The first two documentaries in Micha X. Peled’s globalization trilogy—Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town (SFIFF 2001) and China Blue (2005)—exposed the effects of multinationa more...
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- Micha X. Peled
- USA
- 2011
- Bix
A loving, informative and thoroughly entertaining documentary on the legendary jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, who died in 1931 at the age of 28. Every jazz fan has heard of Beiderbeck but, strangely e more...
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- Brigitte Berman
- Canada
- Bizarre, Bizarre
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- Marcel Carné
- France
- 1937
- Bjorn’s Inferno
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- England
- Black & White Affair
Through the use of unconventional transitional cuts, Black & White Affair examines a timeless, spaceless social club where the members pursue the ideal identity—a persona suitable for any occ more...
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- J. Thornton Davis
- 1984
- Black and White
Claire Devers’ compelling first film charts the strange relationship of a very ordinary young accountant, married to a sensible wife, who gets a temporary job keeping the books at a health club. One more...
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- Claire Devers
- France
- 1986
- Black Belt
At last, a thinking person’s martial arts movie. Or, in other words, a well acted, deliberately nuanced drama about the moral dilemma of a young man forced to choose between his principles and his o more...
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- Shunichi Nagasaki
- Japan
- 2007
- The Black Book
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- Anthony Mann
- USA
- 1949
- Black Bread
In the dark days following the Spanish Civil War, a young boy, Andreu, witnesses the murder of another boy and his father in a Catalan forest by a mysterious hooded figure. His trauma is complete when more...
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- Agustí Villaronga
- Spain
- 2010
- The Black Cannon Incident
China’s first satirical comedy worthy of the name in 30 years charts the consequences of a paranoid misunderstanding. German-speaking engineer Zhao Shuxin (played by Liu Zifeng, who could be China more...
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- Huang Jianxin
- China
- 1985
- Black Cat, White Cat
Emir Kusturica conjures up another outrageous, sprawling epic with his new film Black Cat, White Cat. After his Palme d’Or–winning Underground (SFIFF 1997), Kusturica swore he would more...
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- Emir Kusturica
- France / Germany
- 1998
- Black Coal, Thin Ice
A frosty noir about a surly cop whose life is forever changed by one particularly gruesome and maddening case, Black Coal, Thin Ice is both tense whodunnit and layered character study more...
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- Diao Yinan
- China/Hong Kong
- 2014
- Black Friday
Black Friday creates a vivid, personal experience of one of America's most devastating natural disasters, the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1889. Black Friday provides an introductio more...
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- Tim Radford
- USA
- 1990
- Black Friday
Car bombs are a staple of today's news, but for Western viewers Black Friday may be their first encounter with the day of terror that gripped Bombay in March of 1993. With 270 characters and a more...
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- Anurag Kashyap
- India
- 2004
- Black Girl
In 1966, Ousmane Sembène burst on the world scene with his first full length film, Black Girl, the most profound film ever made on the micro politics of everyday racism. Sembène documents the more...
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- Ousmane Sembène
- Senegal
- 1966
- Black God, White Devil
In 1966, a Brazilian feature was brought to the attention of the Festival after all the selections had been made. However, the quality and the subject matter of The Black God and the White Devil more...
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- Glauber Rocha
- Brazil
- 1964
- Black Harvest
Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson (First Contact, SFIFF 1984) have spent 12 years documenting the relationship between the Ganiga tribe of Papua, New Guinea and the modern world. Their third film more...
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- Bob Connolly
- Australia
- 1992
- Black Hula
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- Marv Newland
- Canada
- Black Is... Black Ain’t
Black Is... Black Ain’t is the late Marlon Riggs’s bold and richly textured exploration of Black American identity. In this final work (completed by colleagues after his death), Riggs shows more...
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- Marlon Riggs, Christine Badgley
- USA
- 1995
- Black Joy
This rousing, reggae comedy-drama is in many ways the other side of The Harder They Come. The characters in Black Joy are ultimately all winners, even in the context of the London ghett more...
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- Anthony Simmons
- England
- Black Litter
Banned in Spain, this tough anti-fascist satire is already being called a “bombshell,” “the most daring, outspoken, and controversial film ever to be made in Spain,” and “a landmark in the h more...
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- Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón
- Spain
- 1977
- Black Moon
Louis Malle, whose Murmur of the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien highlighted recent Festivals, makes a complete change of pace with this strangely surreal film set somewhere in the future. Whi more...
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- Louis Malle
- France
- Black Narcissus
As “The Archers,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wrote, produced and directed many of the most elaborate and tasteful spectacle films of the modern British cinema. From 1942 through 1957, P more...
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- Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
- England
- 1947
- Black Orpheus
During 24 hours at carnival time in Rio de Janeiro, a young black couple relives the classic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. He is a streetcar conductor, she is a country girl followed by a persistent s more...
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- Marcel Camus
- France / Brazil / Italy
- 1959
- Black Pearls
Set on a small Adriatic island housing a reform school for boys, Yugoslavia’s entry Black Pearls reveals the struggle between progressive forces in educating the children and the instinctive more...
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- Tomo Janic
- Yugoslavia
- 1958
- The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975
Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson’s fascinating documentary, coproduced by longtime activist and acclaimed actor Danny Glover, juxtaposes recently discovered Swedish archival material chronicling more...
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- Göran Hugo Olsson
- Sweden/USA
- 2011
- The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords
An eloquent and elegant documentary film wipes away the mists of time and blurred memory to reveal the little-known story of one of the most powerful institutions in African American history. Armed on more...
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- Stanley Nelson
- USA
- 1998
- Black Pudding
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- Nancy Edell
- USA
- Black Rider
When a young man of African descent boards a train in Berlin, you won’t need subtitles to understand what one older German feels about the recent influx of foreigners. more...
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- Pepe Danquart
- Germany
- 1993
- Black Rose, Symbol of Sorrow; Red Rose, Symbol of Love
A breathtakingly irreverent and playful attempt to depict, in its director's words, "Sorrow, Love, Kitsch and Perestroika," Black Rose demonstrates more sheer love of filmmaking than anything t more...
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- Sergei Solovyov
- USSR
- 1990
- Black Sheep
Forget mad cow disease—it’s Mary’s little lambs you need to worry about! With a little creature and makeup assistance from Peter Jackson’s formidable Weta workshop, debut director Jonathan Kin more...
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- Jonathan King
- New Zealand
- 2006
FACTOID #88
Steve Cochran, the American actor who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 SFIFF entry Il Grido, demanded a private screening of the film before it could be shown to Festival audiences so he could ensure that scenes that had been censored in Italy had not been cut from the print. Cochran, who had American distribution rights to the film, got a screening’delaying the film’s 8:30 start time for ticketholders.
