• GREGORY CREWDSON:
  BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
• Friday, January 18 at 7:00 and Sunday, January 20 at 4:00
• Trailer

An acclaimed photographer with the eye of a filmmaker, Gregory Crewdson has created some of the most gorgeously haunting pictures in the history of the medium. His meticulously composed, large-scale images are stunning narratives of small-town American life—moviescapes crystallized into a single frame. While the photographs are staged with crews that rival many feature film productions, Crewdson takes inspiration as much from his own dreams and fantasies as the worlds of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Edward Hopper and Diane Arbus. Shot over a decade with unprecedented access, Ben Shapiro's documentary beautifully bares the artist's process—and it's as mesmerizing and riveting as the images themselves. (2012, 78 min.)
On Friday night only, the film will be introduced by internationally recognized photographer Renata Breth.

• THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
  (Auf der anderen Seite)
• Friday, January 25 at 7:00 and Sunday, January 27 at 4:00
• Trailer

Fatih Akin, the critically-acclaimed director of SOUL KITCHEN (SFI 2011), was born in Germany to Turkish parents in 1973, and his best work explores these double origins. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN weaves overlapping tales of friendship and sexuality into a powerful narrative of universal love. Six characters are drawn together by circumstances—an old man and a prostitute forging a partnership, a young scholar reconciling his past, two young women falling in love, and a mother putting the shattered pieces of her life back together. Akin's piercing sense of the human condition and contemporary world events charge these hyperlinked stories into a multicultural powder keg. A.O. Scott of The New York Times says, "It has a cumulative power, both intellectual and emotional... by the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new." (2007, 116 min., in German and Turkish w/English subtitles)

• CROSSING THE BRIDGE:
  THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL
• Friday, February 1 at 7:00 and Sunday, February 3 at 4:00
• Trailer

"Crossroads between Europe and Asia, eastern and western cultures, as well as the former seat of a major empire—it's little surprise that Turkey's greatest city has developed an astonishingly rich and varied musical scene. Award-winning director Fatih Ak?n takes us on a breathtaking tour of the sights and especially the sounds of Istanbul: you get to meet and hear Turkish rappers, Roma jazz musicians and traditional Kurdish singers, not to mention neo-psychedelic bands such as Baba Zula and various street performers. And then there's the remarkable Müzeyyen Senar, a great diva of sultry popular music who introduces herself by saying that 'My voice and I are 86 years old.' Whatever your taste in music, CROSSING THE BRIDGE is a sheer delight, and a fabulous introduction to one of the capitals of the 21st century." - Film Society of Lincoln Center (2005, 90 min., in Turkish, German, Kurdish and English w/English subtitles)

• THIS IS NOT A FILM
• Friday, February 8 at 7:00 and Sunday, February 10 at 4:00
• Trailer

"The internationally acclaimed director Jafar Panahi (THE WHITE BALLOON, THE MIRROR), a supporter of the 2009 election protests in Iran, was arrested in 2010 for 'certain offenses' against the Islamic Republic. He was sentenced to a six-year prison term and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, and has since been awaiting the verdict of his appeal under house arrest in Tehran. During this time, he collaborated with documentarian Mojtaba Mir Tahmaseb to film a day of this experience (on a digital camera and, at some points, an iPhone). The result, THIS IS NOT A FILM, was smuggled into The Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive hidden inside a cake. Panahi attempts to stay in front of the camera in order not to disobey his sentence, while Mir Tahmaseb 'directs' this underground project—a dangerous undertaking, for he was arrested on September 17th for allegedly spying for BBC Persia. This film, a work of great courage, humor, and self-reflection, is an example of how art in Iran flourishes despite the nation's ever-restricted circumstances." – New York Film Festival (2011, 75 min., in Persian w/English subtitles)

• REMORQUES
• Friday, February 15 at 7:00 and Sunday, February 17 at 4:00

Iconic French star Jean Gabin plays a tugboat captain working the storm-battered coast of Brittany. After a harrowing rescue, he falls into a passionate affair with the enigmatic Michèle Morgan in this classic from this neglected French master Jean Grémillon (LE CIEL EST A VOUS (SFI 2012). Co-written by Jacques Prévert and boasting sumptuous production design by Alexandre Trauner, REMORQUES projects a striking vision of a world where nature suffuses human activity and lends a lingering lyricism to such ordinary events as a walk along the beach or in the country. "It remains an outstanding film and one of Grémillon's best."— Bertrand Tavernier (1941, 84 min., in French w/English subtitles)

• LUMIERE D'ETE
  (Summer Light)
• Friday, February 22 at 7:00

Another masterpiece by Jean Grémillon. With its complex script by Jacques Prévert, LUMIERE D'ETE stands alongside CHILDREN OF PARADISE as the high point of French cinema during the German Occupation. "Suppressed by the Vichy regime for 'counterproductive' attitudes and its lightly veiled attack on Vichy values — Grémillon's influential masterwork has often been compared to THE RULES OF THE GAME. Like Renoir's masterpiece, LUMIERE D'ETE focuses on the uneasy relationship between two classes in an isolated location: a group of corrupt rich people, including an imperious lord, an opera singer, an alcoholic painter and his girlfriend, who are sequestered in a chateau on the edge of a precipice; and a group of workers who are building a dam in the valley below. At a lavish costume ball, the class tensions explode." – Toronto International Film Festival With Paul Bernard, Pierre Brasseur, and Madeleine Renaud. (1943, 112 min., in French w/English subtitles)

• MARGARET
• Friday, March 1 at 7:00 and Sunday, March 3 at 4:00
• Trailer

"The film maudit of last year and in some critics' estimation, one of the best. The story of self-involved teenager Lisa's emotional turmoil after witnessing (and perhaps in some way causing) the death of a pedestrian hit by a bus, MARGARET was shot in 2005, and then spent years in the editing room as writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (YOU CAN COUNT ON ME) battled with producers and the film's eventual distributor, Fox Searchlight, over its running time. Flawed and uneven though it may be, MARGARET, whose title is derived from the poem 'Spring and Fall: To a young child' by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is a film of risk-taking ambition that deserves its due as a fascinating and often wrenching drama of moral crisis in post-9/11 New York. The acting alone is worth the price of admission, beginning with Anna Paquin as Lisa, and continuing through J. Smith-Cameron as her mother, Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick as two of her teachers, Mark Ruffalo as the bus driver, and, above all, Jeannie Berlin, who practically steals the movie with an indelible performance as the dead woman's justice-seeking best friend." – Film Society of Lincoln Center. (2011, 150 min.)

• REBELS WITH A CAUSE
• Friday, March 8 at 7:00 and Sunday, March 10 at 4:00
• Trailer

Award-winning filmmakers Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto partnered with local PBS affiliate KRCB to document the extraordinary efforts of the ordinary citizens who saved the lands of the Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area from development. Narrated by Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand, REBELS WITH A CAUSE is a gorgeously shot and inspiring documentary feature about how, between the 1950's and the 1970's, when California was the fastest growing state, a determined bunch of conservationists, ranchers, farmers, government officials launched a grassroots movement to preserve our natural wonders and curtail the destructive forces of development. (2012, 75 min.)
Filmmakers Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto will be present at the Friday screening to introduce the film and answer questions afterwards.

• DODES'KA-DEN
• Friday, March 15 at 7:00 and Sunday, March 17 at 4:00

By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa's first work in color is a stylized, experimental work produced independently on a very small budget. Mixing reality and fantasy, Kurosawa weaves together the lives of a group of Tokyo slum dwellers; in its semi-allegorical narrative, DODES'KA-DEN offers an impassioned affirmation to life and to man's overcoming all adversities through hope and dreams. The title "DODES'KA-DEN" (doh-dess-kah-den) comes from the sound a trolley makes ("Clickety-Clack") and is chanted by a mentally challenged boy who spends his days driving imaginary streetcars through the streets. (1970, 140 min., in Japanese w/English subtitles)

• Closed for Spring Break

• WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?
• Friday, April 5 at 7:00
• Trailer

"On the summer night of June 19, 1982, during the height of the auto recession, a young Chinese American draftsman was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a Chrysler foreman and his stepson. It happened during a time when emotions ran high in Motor City against Japanese auto imports and the Japanese. Nine months later, Vincent Chin's killers were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 3 years probation and a $3,750 fine. The decision sparked a nationwide campaign for justice and resulted in the first criminal civil rights prosecution involving discrimination towards Asian Americans. WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? attempts to unravel the complex web of fact and emotion that surrounds Chin's death and the subsequent legal case. Through eyewitness accounts, the film reconstructs the night of Chin's death, revealing a Rashomon-type quagmire of conflicting accounts." – San Francisco International Film Festival Directed by Christine Choy. (1987, 87 min.)
The film will be introduced by Frank Wu, Chancellor and Dean of UC Hastings College of the Law. Dr. Wu is currently writing a book on the Vincent Chin case and will remain after the screening to answer questions.

• FERLINGHETTI
• Friday, April 12 at 7:00 and Sunday, April 14 at 4:00
• Trailer

Christopher Felver's feature documentary about Lawrence Ferlinghetti: the iconic poet, Beat publisher, and founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco. This sharply wrought portrait reveals Lawrence Ferlinghetti's stature as one of the preeminent figures of postwar American political activism and literature. Felver's long-time friendship with Ferlinghetti resulted in some great, rare interviews with his subject, along with testimonials from Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Dennis Hopper, Amiri Baraka, Dave Eggers, Jack Hirschman, and others, which are interspersed with archival photos, video and audio. "Chris Felver has captured this wonderful man's spirit and vitality across a long and illustrious lifetime. This film is full of joyful moments." – San Francisco International Film Festival (2009, 73 min.)

• THE LONG GOODBYE
• Friday, April 19 at 7:00
• Trailer

Elliott Gould is a scruffy, laid back Philip Marlow in Robert Altman's eccentric version of the Raymond Chandler detective novel. Totally unsuccessful at the time of its initial release, THE LONG GOODBYE can now be seen as one of the most venturesome films of the '70's. Vilmos Zsigmond won the National Society of Film Critics Award for his spellbinding cinematography of a sun-drenched, washed-out and neon lit Los Angeles; the screenplay is by Leigh Brackett (THE BIG SLEEP, RIO BRAVO and THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK); and the cast includes Sterling Hayden and Nina Van Pallandt. (1973, 112 min.)
Sonoma State University Professor Emeritus Jonah Raskin will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.

• SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
• Friday, April 26 at 7:00 and Sunday, April 28 at 4:00
  Trailer

Danny Boyle's 2008 Oscar-winner is the tale of eighteen-year-old Muslim tea-boy, Jamal (Dev Patel). Raised in the poverty of Mumbai, he becomes a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Simon Beaufoy's script skillfully weaves together the flashbacks that explain how this 'slumdog' knows all the answers. (120 min., in English and Hindi w/English subtitles)
On Friday night, Sonoma State University Hutchins School Professor Dr. Ajay Gehlawat will discuss his recently published book The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology and introduce the film. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.