San Francisco Independent Film Featival, Feb. 6-18, 2025

[Chris Knipp]

San Francisco Independent Film Featival, Feb. 6-18, 2025

"SF IndieFest is the one festival of the year where you should throw a dart at the program and take a chance. Not because you’re guaranteed a masterpiece, but because it’s the best fest to see something that would never, ever breach your filter otherwise." -Michael Fox, KQED

AMONG NEIGHBORS (Yoav Potash 2024)
[IMDb:] Seven decades after the end of World War II, award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash uncovers the lost Jewish history of a small Polish town by the name of Gniewoszów. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews peacefully coexisted in this little-known enclave. Today, this sleepy farm town has not a single Jewish resident, and even the Jewish tombstones are gone, having been stolen from the cemetery to be used by locals as grindstones and building materials. . . (Documentary)

ENCRYPTED (Miyoni Nelson 2024)
[Imdb:] We follow a young woman named Gia, as she pushes her way through a brand new journey of self-discovery when she is placed in therapy and is forced to face her inner child for the first time. Her world takes an unexpected turn when she suffers loss, and her mother, whom she has difficult relationship with, insists on help from a professional to address her underlying issues. Across 3 sessions in this purgatory-like office, Gia opens the door of her daunting past, reluctantly peeling back layers of her guarded self.

FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS (Javier Horcajada Fontecha 2024)
[IMDb:]Guns, explosions, musical numbers, zombies, tanks and Youtube. Thousands of hours of Youtube videos turned into a bizarre cocktail to show us the most extreme, wild and crazy gun-loving Americans. But what if they are just ordinary Americans?

INFIITE SUMMER (Miguel Llansó 2024)
[IMDB] Three young women's week at the beach turns into a transhumanist mystery romp in one Estonian summer.

KCSM 91.1 THE BAY AREA’S JAZZ STATION TO THE WORLD
KCSM Jazz 91 - A Documentary Film Celebrating 60 Years of Broadcasting and Jazz

THE KARAMAZOVS (Anna Brenner 2024)
[IMDB] The estranged Karamazov siblings return home to see their dying father and settle a financial dispute, but nothing goes as planned and they find themselves in the middle of a murder case and questioning everything they have inherited.

THE LEGEND OF THE VAGABOND QUEEN OF LAGOS (The Agbojowo Collective 2024)
A young mother from a waterfront slum in Lagos stumbles upon a horde of corrupt blood money.

THE PAPER BAG PLAN (Anthony Lucero 2024)
Oscar has dedicated his life to the well-being of his disabled son, Billy. When Oscar is diagnosed with cancer, he forges a plan to train his son the intricacies of bagging groceries in the hopes of landing Billy his first job and beginning a life of independence.

TIMESTALKER (Alice Lowe 2024)
[Eye for Film] f you’re interested in the idea of toxic relationship cycles that repeat themselves but thought Betrand Bonello’s The Beast rather lumbering and arthouse, then you might find Alice Lowe’s Timestalker hits the spot. In it she tackles the same topic with considerably more comedic snap and crackle not to mention a fair amount of electropop.

Reviews:

[Chris Knipp]

PELAGIA RADECKA

YOAV POTASH: AMONG NEIGHBORS (2024)

A detailed documentary using intervirews and animations recounts the fate of of Jews in Poland during and after WWII, focusing on a single town

[IMDb:] Seven decades after the end of World War II, award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash uncovers the lost Jewish history of a small Polish town by the name of Gniewoszów. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews peacefully coexisted in this little-known enclave. "It was a Jewish town!" says an oldtimer. Today, Gniewoszów has not a single Jewish resident, and even the Jewish tombstones are gone, having been stolen from the cemetery to be used by locals as grindstones and building materials. . . Jews were murdered in this town six months after the end of the war.

Throughout the country, Jewish tombstones have been used as grindstones, as well as for paving, for foundations of buildings, and many other things - part of an effort to forget about Jews and about the harm that was done to them in Poland under the Nazis, before the Nazis in turn began wiping out the Poles. It's recounted in this film how the Germans came to burn down every single house in Warsaw. Yacov Goldstein saw this happen. He was a boy who tells his story here. Yacov survived from Gniewoszów and wound up living in Israel. Toward the end of the war he was given by his parents to be hidden by a Polish (i.e., Christian) family (why were the Jews in Poland not considered as Polish?). This family fled the rampaging German burning Warsaw and left the boy in a loft where they had made him live for over two years, not seeing sunlight, his legs atrophying, tormented by cockroaches at night. Yacov recounts that he survived this harrowing experience largely through the oldest daughter of the Polish family bringing him books to read from the library every day. He couild escape, temporarily, through the world of the imagination found in books.

Eventually after leaving, and waiting a long time in a hospital after being spared by German soldiers from execution by police, Yacov met his mother again, briefly. All this is recounted using flickering hand-drawn black and white animation. A Polish woman named Peligia Radecka, a neighbor of Yacov's family who remained in Gniewoszów after the war also appears in this tale. Six months after the end of the war she was witness to the murder by Polish people of five Jews, which included the mother and father of Yacov. Eventually, she spoke up to filmmakers, and was reunited to Yacov.

It's a complicated story, but the important part to recognize, which has been depicted in films before, is that the Jews in Poland were still persecuted and murdered after the end of the war. But as Yoav Potash, the filmmaker, reveals, and various historical spokesman explain, there are conflicting forces here. The recently ousted right wing government institutd a law (later reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor) prohibiting blaming the Poles for antisemitism or collaboration with the Nazis. Of course the Poles collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. But there were dissenters, and people can be teased out, like Pelagia Radecka, willing, indeed compelled, to remember the wrongs commited against their Jewish friends and to speak about them all these years later.

Yacov eventually is reunited with Pelagia Radecka, then herself in a wheelchair. And when an event was staged to restore the Jewish cemetary of Gniewoszów, hundreds of people showed up, and the school was closed to attend.

All this goes over ground touched on more indirectly by Jesse Eisenberg's much admired new movie A Real Pain, starring Eisenberg himself and an Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin who play Jewish cousins whose grandmother escaped from Poland and from a concentration camp there and came to America. A Real Pain includes a scene exactly like one shown in Among Neighbors, where Jewish visitors from America,"Holocaust tourists," come to a lady in Poland living in a small house that survived the war and asking, "Is this a Jewish house?" and her answering, "Yes."

It's touched on in Among Neighbors that "Make America great again," is code for erasing the ugly side of American history. Potash states that every country has a dark history it would like to erase. Poland's is the treatment of the Jews. America's is slavery. A final onscreen caption is "Nationalist efforts to whitewash Poland's Jewish history ramain popular and active." This film is a valuable record particularly because the living record is disappearing: most of the elders who were interviewed here have since passed away.

Among Neighbors is a painstaking documentary packed with information. But A Real Pain is the movie that many will go to see, and through it glimpse the Polish branch of the history of World War II and the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

Yacov Goldstein, like Pelagia Radecka, both died at the age of 91 after being reunited. Yacov, who became a celebrated historian, and wrote his own memoir Against All Odds, searched for his little brother Ezra all his life. What happened to him was never learned.

The story of Yacov Goldstein can be compared with Herbert Heller's flashback memories of surviving the Holocaust in Avenue of the Giants (2023), which in turn have something in common with Lajlos Koltai's Fateless (2005). There are also several films about Jews who survived in Europe by posing as gentiles such as Agnieszka Holland's 1990 Europa Europa.

Among Neighbors, 100 mins., debuted Nov. 10, 2024 at Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. It was screened for this review as part of SF Indiefest, where it shows at the Roxie Theater Feb. 18, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

MIYONI NELSON: ENCRYPTED (2024)

A young black woman struggles with a burden of traumas

We follow a young woman named Gia (played by the director, Miyoni Nelson), as she pushes her way through a brand new journey of self-discovery when she is placed in therapy and is forced to face her inner child for the first time. Her world takes an unexpected turn when she suffers loss, and her mother, whom she has difficult relationship with, apparently insists on help from a professional to address her underlying issues. Across 3 sessions in this purgatory-like office, Gia opens the door of her daunting past, reluctantly peeling back layers of her guarded self.

Following a young black woman's sessions with a therapist is enlivened, you might say, by flashbacks to the moments she talks about, starting with her warm interactions as a child with her father. But then he is removed by tragic circumstances, and a scene of clashes with the mother appear. After the loss of her dad, Gia closes down; her mother turns to drink, gets into rehab. A boorish, crude new man comes for mom who Gia hates, but the little brother who arrives as a result turns into Gia's best friend. Following that, a fun moment with her two best friends whom she's since drifted apart from. And then: Elijah (Khyjuan Youngblood), of whom she says they've become each other's only friend. Gia seems to maintain a small world. At the end we learn just how small it has become. . .

THe therapist, Rhonda (Andrea Bluford), is another "only." It's interesting how the relationship develops, the way Gia gradually loosens up. It feels, at this point as if Rhonda loses her professional reserve; perhaps this is what a good patient-therapist relationship is like. (Or perhaps it's not a professional relationship at all.) With Elijah, it's hard not to be one step ahead: Gia pretends to Elijah that their friendship is so special getting closer would "spoil" it, because she's traumatized by losing her favorite person, her dad. And then, as she loosens up to Rhonda, Gia reveals another trauma, of abuse this time. She tries to get back with her two former female best friends, but when she's on the verge of opening up, both get phonecalls and have to go. Privacy invaded by smartphones.

And things get worse still. Why were there so few sessions with Rhonda? The director, star, editor flips the deck, with a surprise that turns everything around. It seems Gia wasn't able to overcome her abandonment issues and trust anyone close to her, including the one who really loves her, Elijah, enough to be helped. This is a "no exit" tale of emotional trauma that the victim never finds relief or escape from, and merely represses and hides until she can bear it no more. Director Nelson is working with a very limited, bleak palette here - but one where the simple emotions feel strong and real.

Encrypted, 51 mins., was part of SF Indie Fest 2025.
Showings:
[Available February 6, 12:00 AM - February 18, 11:59 PM, 2025] Stream online...
Sa.t, Feb. 8, 2025 4:30 PM @ Roxie Theater House 1

[Chris Knipp]

GIRLS WELCOME VIEWERS TO A GUN RANGE IN FROM MY DEAD HANDS

JAVIER HORCAJADA FONTECHA: FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS (2024)

A dishearening found footage portrait of American gun culture

The video that runs through and pulls together this collection is one of a couple of guys listing the virtues of gun ownership and celebrating gun lore. Advocates not only assemble collections of weapons addictively - there are never enough. Gun ownership is a disease of more. Afficionades also deeply immerse theselves in the mythology and lore of guns, reveling in all the varieties of them, which seem almost endless. It's doubtful that the makers of the bookending pro-gun video, if the have any sense (but that's a big "if") would like the found footage that is interspecrced here between moments of their little talk. To start with thre are some clips of people having accidents and shocking, scaring, hurting, or even shooting themselves. And they signal an overriding impression here about these people: they are dumb.

They're also childish sometimes, and sometimes they are simply drunk. Numerous clips show people playing with their weapons, who may be drunk on weaponry itself. It is, obviously, exciting to hold a gun; to shoot a gun; to brandish a flame-thrower and use it to clear the snow off the path to your house. In one or two clips, the number of different weapons being fired out in a field recreates a terrifying feeling of armed combat. One guy, acting very srange, keeps grabbing different weapons, including one mounted atop a tank, and firing them. Not only is he endangering himself, and possibly others; he is being crazy. By the way: there are no clips of people hunting.

Most disturbing perhaps is the children's section. A couple of girls are making a little video inviting viewers along with them as they point to the many different kinds of weaponry, clips, holsters, etc. of a very heavily supplied firing range, inviting visitors. A black man has his pre-teen daughter, who is blindfolded,, assemble a weapon, all the while reciting answers to a personal catechism of questions he poses to her to show off her adfherence to and understanding of his right wing ideology of living ready for civil war. This includes reciting the "meaning" of the second and forth amendments.

There is quite a bit of bad homemade music, with songs and jingles to advocate firearms. These inlclude a busty blonde in a shiny, low cut gown with a musical-comedy voice singing an extended rhymed sermon in favor of the armed-to-the-teeth life.

An aged, "distinguished" represenative of the National Rifle Association gives a ponderous, self-important little speech to a NRA convention about patriotism and how those who oppose ubiquitous weaponry are the enemy, who want to take away our freedoms, our liberty. He raises up an old rifle and the crowd applauds and cheers.

The last big section of clips involves weapons to use against zombies. Which weapons to use, where to aim. Are there really people who believe zombies are a thing? It would seem so. Do the heavily armed live in a fantasy world of dangers that do not exist?

In case we have any doubt, an AI-prompted statement reassures us that the facile, mindless, cultish advocacy of firearms does indeed encourage one of this country's greatest problems. It reads: "Yes, the United States is considered the most heavily armed country in the world, and it also has a significantly higher rate of deaths by firearms outside of combat compared to most other developed nations; meaning it has more deaths from gun violence than most other countries, even when not considering combat situations." On gun violence, the United States is an outlier.

So this little film contains valuable lessons. But I do't know if this will be anything other than preaching to the converted, providing fodder for head-shaking and tsk-tsking. But for many of us this is a reminder of what we would like to forget: that America's obsession with guns is real. The most misguided among us are armed and dangerous. Sure, some intelligent people may be equipped with arms. Maybe they even need them. But what we have is a dangerous situation that seems inexplicable and perhaps irreparable. From My Cold Dead Hands is very bad news.

From My Cold Dead Hands, 104 mins., debuted Jun. 24, 2024 at London (Raindance) and Jun. 27 at Montreal (Fantasia). Screened for this review as part of the Feb. 2025 SF Indiefest.
Showings – select to order tickets:
[Available to stream onlline Feb. 6, 2025 12:00 am - Feb. 18, 11:59 pm, In parson: Sat, Feb 8th, 12:15 pm @ Roxie Theater House 2.

[Chris Knipp]

CHRIS CORTEZ, SONY BUXTON, DICK CONTE AT KSSM

WADE SHIELDS, JASINE WANG, DANNY MONICO: KCSM 91.1 THE BAY AREA’S JAZZ STATION TO THE WORLD (2024)

Short feature celebrates the San Francisco bay arera's 24-hour jazz radio satation, now online

As a loyal supporter of and daily listener to KCSM, located at 91.1 on the dial, the Bay Area's 24-hour jazz radio station, I'm plelased to see this short documentary film celebrting it. The film consists of talking heads. Happily they include favorite deejays of mine like the gruff, anecdotal, vibrant 80-something Sonny Buxton, Jayn Penningill with "cohost Duke," and the very mellow Dick Conte, as well as imortant other staff members such as Tiffany Austin, Leslie Stoval, Clifford Brown, Jr., Jesse 'Chuy' Varela, Keith Hine, Greg Bridges, Harry Duncan, and the silky-voiced Kathleen Lawton. Early and present programmers like Alisa Clancy and Melanie Berzon are also herard from. Another regular I like is the learned Englishmann Michael Burman, not seen here. This is not a complete listin on my part.

The film talls us that the station is celebrating sixty years. Howeverr, that isn't my experience so I can't comment. All I know is that I was an equally loyal supporter of KJAZZ, 92.7 FM,, the San Franfcisco-based commercial jazz station (KCSM is based down the penninsula, at the College of San Mateo), which existed, moving its studios to Alameda, until circumstances caused it to fold in February 1996 (see cChronicle columnist Herb Caen's lament ("Oh woe," it began; he gave KJAZZ's age as 35).

It was sometime after that, searching the dial, that I discovered the existence of KCSM, which I'd never heerd of during the KJAZZ years. So for me at least, the age of KCSM is close to thirty than sixty years. And while the library, which they claim is the largest in the world and benefits considerably from the addition of KJAZZ's, goes very deep both in vinyl and digital, there doesn't seem to have been programming of the level of Bob Parlocha (1938-2015) of KJAZZ in his heyday, especially his "Black Masters" series, some of which have been heard on KCSM by permission of Parlocha's widow. The Miles Davis one is available online in the Internet Archive.

If Bob Parlocha was sans pareil, there is nothihng to compare with the Saturday midday broadcasts of the venerable Sonny Buxton, who is notable for his enthusiasm and the many anecdotes about jazzmen that often come from his own rich life, which included running a jazz club through which he got to know many of the legends and geniuses of jazz.

It's great that KCSM is commercial-free and listener-supported. As noted in this film, that provides more freedom of time to the deejays and they are free to choose exactly what they want to play. Something significant that KJAZZ didn't have is that KCSM is online - because there is an online, which means it has liteners and supporters all over the world.

After a slightly rough first half things deepen with footage of the deejays at work. We also learn how the station benefits from being anchored on the College of San Matteo campus, and how it is working to "grow" jazz by developing new genertions of fans. Among them are interns like the tellingly named Coltrane Frenton, who's got a jazz giant in his own name. This is a music that's less known and less widely disseminated, but its vibrancy, its richness as music, its complexity, and its evident flexibility (just listen to Miles in different decades; early and late Coltrane), and its popuilarity in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world, make it a lot more immportant than you might realize so tune your radio or your computer to 91.1.

A nice tribute to an invaluable institution.

KCSM 91.1 the Bay Area's Jazz Station to the World, 57 mins., was screened for this review as part of SF Indiefest.
Showings – select to order tickets:
Sat, Feb 8, 2025 6:45 pm @ Roxie Theater House 1
Also available for online streaming Feb. 6, 2025 12:00 am - Feb. 18, 11:59 pm, 2025] Stream online...

[Chris Knipp]

ANNA BRENNER: THE KARAMAZOVS (2024)

Russian-based family drama is attractive, but not deeply involving

Anna Brenner, using the same ensemble cast, has made a film adaptation of her theater piece inspired by Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, seeking to compensate for the fact that the original March 2020 New York stage production was cut short by the Covid-19 lockdown. Due to the availability of a large house there, the shoot took place in the dead of winter at Martha's Viheyard. The cinematography by Tatiana Stolopovskaya (the editor Yana Biryukova too was appropriately Russian) provides nice views of the local landscape and the film has a tranquil mood to which the quiet score by Jordan McCree contributes, though once or twice it drowns out the voice of the unseen Fyodor. By the same token, even when voices are raised, the action never becomes deeply involving.

The siblings aren't three brothers at all but two sisters, Alyosha (Rachael Richman), Viv (M.K. Tuomanen) and and a brother, Dimitri (Ross Cowan) from a different mother. When they arrive in thick, hooded coats and furry hats, everyone wearing boots, it might feel like Russia for a minute. The basic premise resembles the book. Their father, Fyodor (Ezriel Kornel, heard but never seen), is deathly ill. Instead of the illegitimate son, Pavel, whom Fyodor employs as a servant, there is a mannish woman called Liz (dancer, thespian and TV veteran Rami Margron) who is his faithrul housekeeper, here the off and on narrator, sometimes direct to camera, always with a sad, put-upon expression. Perhaps she is speaking not to the audience but to herself.

The estranged Karamazov siblings ostensibly have returned home to settle an unspecified financial dispute, but if so, things don't go as planned. Dimitri has found he has a seven-year-old son (or was it daughter?), and suddenly owes money for child support, which motivates him to try to rob his father's stash of cash.

The film's website summary says "Aly (Richman) has found refuge in religion, Viv (Tuomanen) is a queer artist, and Dmitri (Cowan) is a charismatic schemer" but explains that apart these roles "each is in the midst of their own personal crisis" and that following Fyodor's murder the film becomes "part murder mystery" and "part spiritual quest." The screenplay doesn't make a very heavy meal of any of that. The novel is more eventful and takes place of a longer period of time, but Brenner's work isn't meant to be an adaptation of it. But what it is meant to be isn't very clear. Brenner is clearly not making a turbulent, deeply absorbing family drama on the order of Eurgene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night or Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. This is drier stuff, parhaps more inspired by Chekhov or Pirandello.

Those familiar with Doeteovsky's novel will remember Dimitri competes for the same woman with his father at one point, and then later is accused of murdering him. These aspects do carry over.

The settings, especially the wintry exteriors at Martha's Vineyard, are cool, limped and pleasing to the eye (the production designer Claire Deliso also deserves credit), but the action lulls most of the way, and then is rushed to a thin partial resolution, with most of the excitement crammed into the last twenty minutes. The murder? We don't see it. The trial? We glimpse only surreal clips of Dimitri's absurd confession and never learn its outcome.

Prior to that, most of the philosophical questing about the nature of life is condensed into a few sentences spoken between Liz and Alyosha over fish soup in a food shop. After Fyodor's death Liz gets to deliver her big defiant speech, but it is of the predictable "I did all the work around this house" kind and contains no revelations. I was hoping she would reveal she was Fyodor's illegitimate but favorite daughter. Dimitri's black and white "dream" with Russian dialogue and the chopped-up final sqeuence suggest this film finally wants to define itself as an art piece. But no: it's meant to be Liz trying to make sense of her memories of the strange week of Fyodor's death.

The Karamazovs, 86 mins., debuted and has shown at a number of small indie film festivals, including Nice, Arizona, Allentown, Chicago, NYC and Manhattan Screened for this review as part of the Feb. 2025 SF Indiefest. San Francisco showings:
[Available February 6, 12:00 AM - February 18, 11:59 PM, 2025] Stream online...
Fri, Feb 7th, 6:15 PM @ Roxie Theater House 2.