I'm Going Home
La Spagnola
Millennium Mambo
Musa the Warrior
Pistol Opera
Read My Lips
Sisters
Veloma
Details
April 18 to May 2
For festival information, call 931-FILM
www.sffs.org
For tickets, call (925) 275-9490
Screenings take place at the AMC Kabuki 8 Theater (1881 Post at Fillmore); the Castro Theatre (429 Castro near Market); the Pacific Film Archive (2575 Bancroft at Bowditch, UC Berkeley campus); and Landmark's Park Theater (1275 El Camino Real near Valparaiso, Menlo Park)
Related Content
More About
Sisters(Russia, 2001)
This entertaining film from Sergei Bodrov Jr. reworks John Cassavetes' Gloria, as two young half-sisters take it on the lam from the Russian Mafia. Bodrov provides a realistic, unsentimental patina to this fable, in which the girls -- 13-year-old Sveta, a poor relation practicing for a career as a sniper in Chechnya, and the pampered 8-year-old Dina -- bicker as they flee St. Petersburg, where Dina's dad has double-crossed the mob. They seek refuge in the countryside, but the peasantry is now as corrupt as the townsfolk, as we see when the girls fall in with such representative specimens of post-Communist society as a league of child beggars. "It doesn't have to sound right, it has to sound pitiful," the Artful Dodger of the gang tells Dina as he hands her a violin. Bodrov, the film-star son of a well-established Russian filmmaker who had cast him in his Prisoner of the Mountains, makes a sure-footed directorial debut using a script co-authored by his father. The picture's a real crowd-pleaser, the shootouts are exciting, and the entire cast is excellent. The image of a completely ruined country is ultimately belied by a lone honest cop and by Sveta's final decision, which suggests that there may be hope for Mother Russia after all. (Gregg Rickman)
Friday, April 19, 5 p.m., AMC Kabuki; Monday, April 22, 1 p.m., AMC Kabuki; Tuesday, April 23, 9:30 p.m., Castro
Veloma(France, 2001)
A round-the-world sailor (Patrick Pineau, looking as if it hurts to breathe) is lost at sea, and equally lost on land. He's so edgy and weird that it's a relief when he bundles his little son onto a train with a stranger and takes to the ocean again, where he can resume his favorite pastime of staring at angry waves. Marie de Laubier's good, consistently surprising film comes to focus not on this lost boy but on his father's too-patient girlfriend (Julie Depardieu) and her seemingly mad faith that her lover is not long past all aid. Veloma -- the title is an African greeting that means "Go live" -- works as both a character study and an allegory of smart women, insane choices. But it starts taking on water in its long third act, when de Laubier sends the wrong character to Madagascar and then opts for an open ending rather than the final confrontation we crave. (Gregg Rickman)
Friday, April 19, 9:45 p.m., AMC Kabuki; Sunday, April 21, 4 p.m., AMC Kabuki
