Director Katie Halper chats about Commie Camp, her doc about a progressive kids camp, and how Rush Limbaugh indirectly helped spark the making of the film.

Lebanese director Ziad Doureri discusses his award-winning "quiet political mystery" The Attack, banned by the Arab League. Amin, a Palestinian-Israeli surgeon living in Israel, struggles to discover the truth: Was his wife really the suicide bomber responsible in the cafe explosion that killed 17 people, including herself?

Doueri explains the real reason he cast an Israeli actress as a Palestinian woman, why the Arab League is "pathetic," and how making this film changed him profoundly. He also provides the ultimate, definitive once-and-for-all answer as to whether he is Quentin Tarantino's protege.

[Music from The Ballet, Humpback Comeback, and Joey Perr; Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli music.]

Summer's midpoint means it's time for two things in the Bay Area: wild blackberries and the San Francisco Jewish Film Fest (sfjff.org), opening tonight, July 18th.

Pirate Jenny speaks with Jackie Krentzman, originator and producer of An American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco. The documentary traces the route by which Jews, the "ultimate outsiders," not only became integral to their adopted city in the 19th Century, but also helped shape its design and its future. Jackie also discusses her own route by which she came to make the film, as a non-observant culturally Jewish journalism instructor, and how it changed some of her perceptions. And listeners get some peeks inside the process of documentary making, including some of the fascinating bits that had to be left out of the film.

An American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco has its world premiere Wednesday, July 31st, 6:15 at the Castro Theatre, and also screens Saturday, August 3rd, at CineArts in Palo Alto.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival runs July 25th-August 11th in San Francisco, the East Bay, San Rafael, and Palo Alto.

PLAYLIST
Limonchiki - The Amsterdam Klezmer Band
Fly away יובל בן-עמי
Kamti Be-Ashmoret (I Rise At Dawn) - Cantor Isaac Algazi
Habanera de Zlabya - Olivier Daviaud
Le chat du rabbin - Olivier Daviaud
Modzitz tune from 1917 (Judaica Sound Archives)
California Here I Come (1924 ) - Al Jolson

Today on Depth Perception: Director James Marsh (Man on Wire, Red Riding Pt. II, Wisconsin Death Trip) discusses his feature Shadow Dancer. Though set in 1993 Belfast, with a protagonist blackmailed into informing on her family's IRA cell—a deadly-dangerous balancing act—it's as much character study as thriller. Marsh acknowledges a bent for the macabre, and opens up about being perpetually tagged Man-on-Wire-guy. And breaking the Directors' Secret Oath, he reveals which of his films is his favorite.

Also: Director Rama Burshtein and lead Hadas Yaron discuss Fill the Void, a feature set in contemporary Tel Avi's Orthodox Chasidic community. The story of an 18-year-old girl pressured by her community to marry her recently deceased sister's widower has been interpreted in a variety of ways, from a feminist excoriation of arranged marriages and sexism to a heartfelt defense of the same. Burshtein, who converted from unobservant to Orthodox as an adult, talks about her own background and spiritual jounrey, and her own concept of the film's focus.

PLAYLIST
Desperation Song - Carbon Leaf
Too Late To Turn Back Now - The Mahones
Hunters Map - Fionn Regan
Noah (Ghost In A Sheet) - Fionn Regan
Change The Locks - Fionn Regan
Cold Water - Damien Rice

The third annual San Francisco Green Film Festival opens tonight, running May 30-June 5. Rebels with a Cause, the opening night film, traces how the activism of "ordinary citizens" created the Point Reyes National Seashore, permanently protecting the area, and saving it from an especially hideous development. Director Nancy Kelly shares tales from the film as well as some deep background on the making of the doc
Interview previously aired 10/4/12; music is all new!
For more info: http://sfgreenfilmfest.org/

PLAYLIST:
The Mountain - Tracy Grammer
Mountain's Sunrise - Annwn
At the Bottom of the Sea - The Thermals
Mother Earth's Revenge - Karan Casey
Rising River Blues - Paul Geremia
Movers & Shakers -Valerie Orth

Karl Cohen (Forbidden Animation) and Martha Gorzycki (animator) join Pirate Jenny for a roundtable on animation at SFIFF 56, focusing on the Shorts #3 program and the lovely feature Ernest and Celestine.

Ernest & Celestine screens
Sunday, April 28, 12:30 p.m., at the Sundance Kabuki
Wednesday, May 1, 7:00 p.m., at the Sundance Kabuki.

The Shorts Program #3, Animation screens
Sunday, April 28, 1:00 p.m. at the New People Cinema
Wednesday, May 8 7:00 p.m. at the New People Cinema.

Playlist:
Quite, Careful

Another two-hour Depth Perception special!
Part I of San Francisco International Film Fest 56 coverage.
In a live interview, director Kaylanee Mam discusses A River Changes Course (winner, Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize). The documentary traces the impact of development and globalization on Cambodians in three rural villages where the predominant occupations of fishing, farming, and are rapidly being destroyed. Mam, whose family fled Cambodia when she was a toddler, describes what it was like to visit her homeland for the first time as adult; the challenges of filming in such isolated and inaccessible locations; and why she left lawyering to become a filmmaker.

A River Changes Course screens
Saturday April 27, 7:00 p.m. at the Sundance Kabuki;
Sunday April 29, 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley
Sunday May 5, 1:00 p.m., at the New People Cinema.

PLAYLIST
(All songs written by David Mendez, from A River Changes Course)
Ferry
Factory Girls Struggle
Adrift

[2-hr. Special].
Two top Southeast Asian directors have new films in CAAM Fest 2013 (formerly the Asian American Int. Film Fest) and Depth Perception has them both! Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, Salaam Bombay) talks with Pirate Jenny about The Reluctant Fundamentalist, some unusual casting decisions, the Pakistani and Sufi soundtrack, and the reaction of Mohsin Hamid, author of the novel on which the film is based, to Nair's creation of a new ending. "Ordinary lives," Nair believes, "are extraordinary."

[Start: 53:10]
Groundbreaking director Deepa Mehta (Water, Hollywood/Bollywood, Earth, Fire) discusses filming the epic-scale adaptation of the novel Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. She describes the working process by which she and Salman created the screenplay together, his two uncredited contributions to the movie, and how she handled another country's demands that the Sri Lankan government shut down the shooting of the film.


Music by Nitin Sawhney, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mujhe Aazmane Waale, Samidha Joglekar.


PLAYLIST coming soon.

Director/musician Vincey Keehan drops by with his guitar to play some songs and discuss his music doc Nights in Shanaglish. The multi-media project of the same name (DVD, CD, & archival-quality vinyl LP with extra tracks) has its American release party Wed., 3/14 (live performance!), as part of the 10th Annual Crossroads Irish American Festival. A marvel of sound engineering, the 60-min film captures the music (surprisingly diverse), storytelling, and community spirit in the County Galway pub Whelans of Shanaglish. Vincey annotates several of the cuts he and Pirate Jenny choose, which include traditional reels, country-western, & an acapella ballad, as well as the very funny 2-minute yarn "The Sugar Bowl," which explains more than you might think.
The release party for the CD/LP/DVD takes place March 14 at the Plough & Stars on Clement St., S.F.
For more information, visit: http://www.irishamericancrossroads.org/

PLAYLIST
The Drunken Landlady (lilt & dance) - Vince Keehan
The Coalminer, Gan Ainm (Reels) - Paddy Egan
Apples in Winter, the Carraroe Jig (Jigs) - Séamus Keehan
Sweet Ballyvaughan - Rosie Keehan
Going Down the Road - Vincey Keehan (LIVE in studio)
The Sugar Bowl [yarn] - Joe Kearney
The Boys from the County Armagh - Vincey Keehan (LIVE in studio)
Tadhg Beag -
Delia's Gone - Anthony McGrath
Blue River Waltz - Paddy Egan, Paul O'Driscoll & Anthony McGrath
Argentina - Vincey Keehan [LIVE]
(All songs available on CD/DVD except The Boys from the County Armagh)





[LP/CD cover by artist Emily Durtnell, who is expected to attend Crossroads.]

Director Pablo Larrain discusses his his feature film No, a finalist for Best Foreign Language Picture. Based on a true story, No stars Gael Garcia Bernal as the anti-political ad man who finds himself helming the progressive side's media campaign for Chile's 1988 referendum on dictator Augustus Pinochet.The campaign's success forced Pinochet out of office. Pic on right is an original image from that campaign.

Music from la nueva cancion, including Victor Jara, Isabel Parra, Violette Parra, and Manuel Garcia. Playlist to come.
[podcast]9810[/podcast]

Director Dror Moreh discusses his Oscar-nominated doc The Gatekeepers: Israel Confidential, and its profound impact in reversing Israeli opposition to the two-state solution. Interviewed for the first time ever, each of the six surviving heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret domestic counterterrorism agency, reveals past decisions with bone-chilling frankness—and each reaches a unexpected conclusion about what Israel must do now. Pirate Jenny ("zhydovka") and Dror also talk about misguided belief of some American Jews that Israel ia haven, the equally misguided and somewhat anti-Semitic belief among non-Jews that all Jews are pro-Zionist, and what it feels like to achieve every documentarian’s dream. Check out other Oscars- 2013 podcasts below, and tune in next week for Oscars-interview #4, with Pablo Larrain, director of No, up for Best Feature Film, which oddly enough is being released next week rather than this.

WINNER, BEST DOCUMENTARY: SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN
#1. Rodriguez and director Malik Bendjellou chat about Searching for Sugarman http://bit.ly/1376P6i
Also, a spcial hour of all-music hour of Rodriguez songs: http://bit.ly/YvLBXQ

#2. Nicolaj Arcel on A Royal Affair (Best Foreign Language Film) http://bit.ly/15JdyTu

*Bonus Oscars 2013: Roundtable chat about the Best Animated Feature FIlms and Best Animated Shorts:
http://bit.ly/125qwMm

Oddball/s monthly Strange Sinema series celebrates its 5th anniversary tonight, January 24th, with a program that, as usual, will be highly unusual, involving the rare, the forgotten, the the quirky, the repurposed, the never-intended-to-be-seen, and the distinctly odd indeed. Stephen Parr, curator of the 50,000-film archive Oddball Films and friend of the show, drops by to talk about building a career via following his obsession with rare, orphaned, and abandoned films & film scraps. Now in demand with numerous directors and institutions internationally, he explains his commitment to creating "a one-time only experience for audiences [screenngs] rather than a product [the DVD collections he won't make]..
Among the films in tonight's program discussed are the trippy Match Your Moos [a 7-min. '60's ad for psychedelic refrigerator covers!]; Airplane Wing Tests (1960s) with music from Bill Frisell; the Oscar-winning 'beatnik' animation about the development of music, Toot, Whistle, Plunk, Boom (1953); the surreal Le Monde du Schizophrene (The World of the Schizophrenic, 1969) was produced by. . . Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of LSD?and The Cat Who Drank and Used Too Much. Stephen recounts discovering Carson Davidson/s Monty-Pythonesque Help, My Snowman is Burning Down (1964, Gerry Mulligan & Bob Brookmeyer score), and his subsequent contacts with Davidson.

Playlist:
Think - Bill Frisell
Match Your Mood [excerpt, by Jam Handy Films]
score from Le Monde du Schizophrene [excerpt, incl. samping from Brubeck]
Sonic Oddities - Stephen Parr [excerpts]
Good Dog, Happy Man - Bill Frisell
Egg Radio - Bill Frisell

Two-hour DP special!
Karl Cohen (Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoon and Blacklisted Animators in America) and Martha Gorzycki, both senior animation faculty at SF State, chat with Mara about The Rabbi/s Cat and other animation up for various honors in the annual Silly Season of award madness. (Included: Brave, ParaNorman, and Frankenweenie, and shorts Paperman, The Longest Daycare (Maggie Simpson at Ayn Rand Daycare), Adam and Dog, and Fresh Guacamole.

The Rabbi/s Cat [Le Chat du Rabbin] is set in the Algerian Jewish community in the late 1930s, and centers on said cat, who, on becoming gifted with speech, demands to be Bar-Mitvahed--after all, is he not a Jewish cat?

Is he? Mara, Martha, and Karl ponder this question and others, including whether Disney really put 80% of the work on Brave into the heroine/s glorious hair, why male directors don/t notice women are missing, and what makes a film Jewish, anyway?

We play most of the great Ladino/klezmer/Andalusian soundtrack of The Rabbi/s Cat, composed by Olivier Daviaud and performed by Enrico Macias and the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, plus tracks from Macias solo and a rare piece by his late father-in-law, Cheik Raymond [Raymond Leyris].

PLAYLIST

Le chat du rabbin (debut)
Alger la blanche

Habanera de Zlabya

Je veux faire ma Bar Mitzvah

Au cafe Carbodel

l'entrainement a la dictee

Le reve du Chat
La langue francaise

Le Malka des Lions

Le spleen du Rabbin

Les deux Amis

Conversations autour d'une caisse de livres

Au Hammam

Apparition de Vastenov

Autochenille
Le Cheikh Mohammed Sfar

Un jeune reporter Belge

Les Geants

Priere orientale

Kolomeika - Amsterdam Klezmer Band

Ma Habibi (excerpt, pt.2)
Cheik Raymond

Non je n'ai pas oublie - Enrico Macias

"It's not the First Amendment for no reason, it's the FIRST Amendment!"
Documentarian extraordinaire Ken Burns discusses his new film, The Central Park Five. The delineates the combination of ignorance, corruption, and racism that led to the fale conviction of five black and Latino teens for the gang rape of the Central Park Jogger.

Unlikely People Finding Love in Unlikely Places
Director Travis Fine discusses his latest narrative film, Any Day Now, which, based on a true story, portrays a gay couple trying to adopt their foster child n 1978. Lead Alan Cumming is getting some Oscar buzz for his excellent ptrtrayal of Rudy.

Prison on Route 41, Iron & Wine
Freedom, Axis Of Justice
Let Freedom Ring The Nightwatchman
waving flag [Knaan cover], Mando Diao
I Shall Be Released, Joe Cocker
[Take It Easy San Francisco, Emily Wells]

Interviews with writer/director Patrick Wang (In the Family)
and
Belgian director Bavo Defune (North Sea Texas).

Patrick Wang, who wrote, directed and also plays the lead, discusses In the Family, a richly and subtlely textured narrative about a gay man's custody fight for the seven-year old child he has raised with his late lover. Choosing to set and film the story in Martin, Tennessee; length vs. pacing as factors in cumulative impact in longer films; and just how much of a risk it was for a first-time film director to debut with a 169-minute film.
Patrick Wang won the Emerging Filmmaker award at both the S.F. Int. Asian-American and San Diego Asian Film Fests; the film received the Jury Award at San Diego.

Beginning at minute 27:00,
Bavo Defune in conversation about his first feature-length film, North Sea Texas. What hooked him about the novel he adapted for the film; finding parents who could be truly supportive of their son playing an adolescent in love with another boy; and his goal as director: "to show what you can see when you close your eyes. North Sea, Texas took the FIPRESCI Prize and the Silver Zenith at the Montreal World FF) and the Alice in the City award (Rome FF).

Play List
Fuck All the Perfect People, Chip Taylor

The first in an episodic series on unusual venues for film.
Programmer Linda Blackaby chats about Luna Fest, a traveling film festival "by, for, and about women," which this year for the first time screens at the Celebration of Craftswomen, the major annual fundraiser for San Francisco's Women's Building..

Play List

Biking Home, Lisa Gerrard
Don't The Moon Look Fat And Lonesome, Joy Of Cooking
Moon Shadow Kate Rusby
Menulis, Alina Orlova L
Last Quarter Moon, Chiara Civello
Luna De Miel, Julieta Venegas
At The Feet Of The Moon Parachute Club

Celebration of Craftswomen continues Dec. 1-Dec. 2, 1- a.m. -5 p.m.
www.celebrationofcraftswomen.org/
Luna Fest screens at noon and 2:15 on Saturday Dec. 1; buy a ticket to LunaFest and get free admission to te Crafts Fair, or buy a ticket to the CraftsFair and see Luna Fest free.
(Also Dec. 1, a separate event at 7:00p.m.: San Francisco Premiere of WONDER WOMEN! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, preceded by a 5:00 p.m. reception and silent auction.)

Danish director Nicolaj Arcel in conversation about A Royal Affair, a historical drama set in the 1770s, and based on true events: Manipulated by his wife and his personal physician, "the Mad King," King Christian VII of Denmark, becomes a great liberal reformer, even as the doctor betrays his own political ideals "for the good of the country." And then the affair between Queen and doctor is discovered . . .

Arcel discusses his childhood obsession with the American blockbuster that first hooked him on film; a more recent obsession with contemporary American politics--and the parallels to be found in A Royal Affair; director "tricks" he's used but since forsworn; and the underlying theme common to all of his work.

A Royal Affair stars Mads Mikkelson, Alicia Vikander and Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, and is Denmark's submission this year as Best Foreign Language Film. The film has already earned two Silver Bears at Berlin: Best Screenplay (Arcel & Heisterberg) and Best Actor (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard).

Interview with Swiss director Ursula Meier, who discusses her film Sister; including her surprise at the constant comparisons drawn between her work and that of the Dardenne brothers; why the French title L'enfant d'en haut was changed (hint: *not* related to any Dardennes film); and the original inspiration for the story & what it taught her about the mysteries of the creative process. Sister (L'enfant d'en haut) is Switzerland's submission this year for Best Foreign Language Film.

Co-director Michael Galinsky (with Suki Hawley) and Daniel Goldstein discuss the documentary Battle for Brooklyn, in an interview recorded earlier this year. When the highest-density real estate development project ever proposed in the U.S. begins bulling its way through his Brooklyn neighborhood, Daniel refuses a buyout on principle. As his neighbors succumb, community organizations are corrupted into collusion, and his girlfriend departs, the accidental activist finds himself the sole resident of his 31-unit building—and, as the last holdout, the only thing standing in the way of the rapacious development. Through his (now purposeful) activism, Daniel meets the woman he will marry, and their wedding is followed by a final showdown in court with the developers. .

Music Playlist
Stand Up (and Be Strong), Keb' Mo'
Stand Up, Ferron
Snowing in Brooklyn, Ferron
Brooklyn Blurs, The Paper Raincoat
The Gauntlet, Dropkick Murphys

It's OK to Say 'Indian': The 37th Annual American Indian Film Festival.
Mike Smith, director of the American Indian Film Festival joins us for discussion including his inspiration for founding the festival, why San Francisco can be grateful for a car crash, and what's on offer at this year's festival, which runs November 2-10th.
This show is dedicated to the memory of Russell Means November 10, 1939 -October 22, 2012


Music Playlist:

Akua Tuta, Kashtin
Kassinou, Florent Vallont
Utei Teu Etalan (Here with Me), Kashtin
Dawn of a New Day, Crystal Shawanda

Actor Matthew Lillard adds director to his credits with the feature film Fat Kid Rules the World—one of the rare features to treat a fat lead respectfully—and reveals just how little you have to reveal to get slapped with an R rating.
The Waiting Room is the kind of movie Studs Terkel would have made if he'd chosen film instead of print. Beginning at Director Peter Nicks discusses making the documentary, filmed entirely in the waiting room of Oakland's Highland Hospital.