The San Francisco International Film Festival has announced its lineup of 22 films, ten narrative features and twelve documentaries which will screen during this year's festival. Held each spring for 15 days, the festival prides itself on showcasing cinematic discovery and innovation.
The ten narrative features from 12 countries including Peru, Colombia and Argentina to name a few, have been selected to compete for the New Directors Prize, which includes $15,000. The the twelve documentaries chosen will compete for the Golden Gate Award which is comprised to $20,000.
Making its rounds once again is the Peruvian film Adrian Saba, El limpiador / The Cleaner, a story of Eusebio, a forensic cleaner who sterilizes the apartments of the dead and discovers and eight-year-old boy hiding in an uninhabited house during a devastating epidemic. Also included are Habi, la extranjera / Habi the Foreigner, an Argentine-Brazilian co-production directed by Maria Florencia Alvarez, a first-time feature about a young Argentine woman assuming a fake Muslim identity, from Colombia, France and Mexico William Vega's La Sirga, about a Colombian refugee trying to rebuild her life at a guest house located on the shores of a great lake in the Andes. Also chosen is the Brazilian film, They'll Come Back / Eles Voltam (pictured) directed by Marcelo Lordello, in which an upper-middle-class child learns how Brazil;s other half lives when she and her brother are left behind by their parents in a rural backwater.
Selected for the documentary competition is Mexican director Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio's Inori, about Kannogawa, a small mountain community in Japan where the laws of nature have changed what used to be a lively town. While younger generations have left for bigger cities, the few remaining inhabitants perform their everyday activities on their history and the cycles of life.
The New Directors section will also include 19 out-of-competition films which will be announced April 2nd. The San Francisco International Film Festival will take place from April 25 through May 9. For more information, visit www.sffs.org.
