San Francisco International Film Festival 20 April - 04 May 2006

Following last year’s Opening Night sensation The Last Mistress, France’s masterful Catherine Breillat returns to the Festival with this playful, intoxicating and highly personal rumination    more...

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Blank spent six weeks in Texas filming the great blues singer on his home turf for this moving, down-home portrait.     more...

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Tricks, turns and crazy acrobatics on two wheels make this documentary about one teen’s hobby into a thrill-a-minute ride. —Joanne Parsont    more...

Out of this year’s presentation of New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center, Markus Imhoof’s The Boat Is Full was one of the best-received works. It describes another chapter in the tragic    more...

An artist’s painting of a tranquil pond becomes a child’s playground. A beautifully shot exploration on the different ways water can inspire the imagination. —Keith Zwölfer    more...

Ever wonder if waiters grow on trees? Bob investigates that odd but common feeling. —Brian Gordon    more...

This touching romantic drama focuses on the love that grows between a cold, unemotional race car driver (Al Pacino) who flirts with death routinely and a beautiful, electric young woman (Marthe Keller    more...

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Body of Correspondence tells the complex story of a postmortem menage a trois involving an obsessed archivist and two dead women whose letters he curates. In uncovering the letters, he unwittin    more...

Hong Kong circa 1906 existed in a strange political limbo, ruled by the British Empire but nestled alongside dynastic China. While the ancient Qing Dynasty was turning its back on the ever-encroaching    more...

From time to time, a number of films from abroad get “lost” in the underworld of distribution, and, occasionally they are rediscovered by a film festival or an enterprising film society. It is qui    more...

With its carefully wrought script buoyed by a clutch of superb performances, El Bola is a compelling feature debut by Achero Mañas. This accomplished, low-key take on child abuse refuses to se    more...

In this silent piece—beautiful abstract images recalling a vision behind closed eyes or perhaps a memory of the senses—breath gives rise to form. —Kathy Geritz & Irina Leimbaher    more...

Bolshoi Ballet is a celluloid record of one of the world's most famous dance groups. It was made while the ballet appeared in London and was photographed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden    more...

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The French president (Jean-Louis Trintignant), stonefaced father to the nation, learns one day he’s also daddy to a little bastard he’d sired ten years earlier by former mistress Catherine Deneuve    more...

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Bonnie and Clyde was so stirring and important in its day that maybe now it is taken for granted. A celebration of the career of Arthur Penn is the ideal opportunity for rediscovering the stunn    more...

This is the second feature film by Francis Mankiewicz and its success at home and abroad has attracted attention to him as one of the brightest talents in the new group of Canadian directors. Les B    more...

Director Cristián Jiménez brings a keen comic sense to Chilean author Alejandro Zambra’s contemporary classic novella Bonsái, crafting an existential romance with deep insight into the psy    more...

The discovery of a collection of his father’s forgotten negatives leads a son on a path of intense reflection and, ultimately, reconciliation with the painful memory of his father’s death. —K    more...

A directorial debut by one of Sweden’s most famous actors, Jarl Kulle (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Devil’s Eye, Dear John). Mr. Kulle is also a distinguished artist of the S    more...

On the eve of their high school graduation, driven students Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) realize they’ve excelled at academics and failed at fun. They plan to erase that mistake     more...

New York City in the 1970s was fractured, dynamic, and the perfect time and place for prolific graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to begin his famous SAMO tags around the city. Chronicling his life     more...

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The modern history of San Francisco is marked by booms and busts and continuous reshaping. Whether it delights or disturbs is open to debate. This variety program addresses that ever-burning San Franc    more...

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Iranian cinema has become an art of metaphor couched in the real; thus many a film speaks to an adult’s experience while centering on that of a child. Little Samaneh lives with her mother in a one-r    more...

A captivating look at the people, music and culture behind the New York Jamaican dance hall scene, this story is told from the point of view of an aspiring female artist. Booyaka! is also a sti    more...

Subjects once reserved for the more daring members of Eastern Europe's New Wave have become the property of a new generation, who have replaced cloaked metaphor with expansive exposition. Yugoslavs, l    more...

Camiel Borgman just wants to “play.” Unfortunately for well-heeled couple Marina and Richard, his funny games involve complex psychological warfare and tend to accumulate an alarmingly large numbe    more...

Pablo Trapero, whose use of nonprofessional actors has been a hallmark of his previous work, has changed tactics for Born and Bred. He cast a young veteran of TV melodrama, Guillermo Pfening, f    more...

The self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in the concept of a "criminal class" was realized in India in the late 19th century, when British rule prescribed internment camps for tribes that the government     more...

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The Disney name has long been associated with finely crafted nature documentaries, beginning in 1948 with Walt Disney’s pioneering early experiments in the Academy Award-winning True Life Ad    more...

Early in his film career, Ousmane Sembène established himself as a master of the short narrative form. In his first film, Borom Sarret, we spend a day with a poor horse cart driver and see him    more...

Wu Nien-jen, the screenwriter of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (SFIFF 1990) and The Puppetmaster (SFIFF 1994), makes his directorial debut with A Borrowed Life, a personal    more...

Young filmmaker Bobby Roth has written and directed his first 35mm feature on the subject of family responsibility and a generally unheralded economic problem—employee theft within large businesses.    more...

In an Albanian town where the residents claim nothing ever happens, secrets simmer just below the surface and the past is always present. Down-to-earth Juli, entrepreneurial Ben, and free spirit Nora     more...

This fictional collage explores the struggle to emotionally balance the difference in cultures.     more...

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This wacky musical about a soldier down on his luck combines contempo-music, a surreal sense of humor and a dame from the front lines.    more...

This famous couple has made a number of avant-garde films, most of them strenuously bizarre, some of them exceptionally original and provocative. Their work is uninhibited and devoted to absolute free    more...

The admiration for the work of Alfred Hitchcock continues to express itself in French cinema. Close upon the heels of Truffaut, the work of Claude Chabrol, especially in recent years, has glittered wi    more...

Bound by the Wind is a documentary on the international citizens' campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing, and the controversy surrounding a comprehensive test ban. The video examines the stro    more...

What to do when your father is a completely irresponsible parent, an unapologetic pot dealer, and also needs a ride down the coast after being kicked out of his senior home? That's the dilemma facing     more...