Two returning longtime film festivals top the slate this week. Also recommended are two stellar new releases.
The 30th Arab Film Festival kicks off Thursday and runs through Nov. 14, presenting more than 30 events featuring genuine Arab stories and experiences across the Bay Area. Venues include AMC Kabuki 8, Castro Theatre, and Roxie Theater in San Francisco; The New Parkway Theater in Oakland; and Alamo Drafthouse Valley Fair in San Jose.
Films from 26 countries are screening, with some showing virtually.
“El Sett” opens the festival at the Kabuki Thursday. Filmmaker Marwan Hamed profiles revered Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum in this sweeping narrative portrait starring Mona Zaki. Egyptian producer Mohamed Hefzy will be honored during the evening. Also highlighted is “Edward Said: Between Worlds,” an archival documentary in which Said, the late cultural critic and advocate for Palestine, takes us through Palestinian history. A panel talk with director Maiken Baird and others follows the screening. Other selections range from the documentary “Citizen Osama,” which follows a war journalist in Gaza, to “In a Whisper,” a drama about a Paris-based engineer forced to address her own double life while visiting her native Tunisia for the funeral of her closeted uncle.
Presented by the Arab Film and Media Institute, the Arab Film Festival is the nation’s oldest and largest festival of Arab cinema. More information and tickets are at aff30.arabfilmfestival.org.
Doc Stories is back with its 12th annual celebration of the documentary as an essential filmmaking form. Screenings take place Thursday through Sunday at the Vogue Theatre in San Francisco. The lineup includes 10 feature films, 11 shorts, and three “Doc Talks.” Many filmmakers will attend.
Ava DuVernay’s “14th” is the Opening Night feature. The film examines the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, covering issues such as birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law. “Tutu” closes the festival. Sam Pollard’s documentary profiles Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop, moral voice, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Also on the bill are “All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea,” about an English fisherman who leads a community fight for answers when thousands of dead sea creatures wash ashore; “Black Sunflowers,” about young Ukrainians coming of age during the Russia-Ukraine war; “Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been,” a portrait of the R&B and soul singer; and two short-film programs.
Doc Stories is presented by SFFILM. Visit sffilm.org for more information.
On an August afternoon in 1972, more than two dozen surviving Harlem Renaissance luminaries partied at the home of jazz giant Duke Ellington, invited there by filmmaker William Greaves. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” currently in Bay Area theaters, is a remarkable new archival documentary put together by Greaves’ son, David, from material captured on film by the senior Greaves at the 1972 gathering.
The film documents the conversations and camaraderie that flowed among the party’s attendees. Their terrific stories transport audiences to the Harlem of the 1920s and ’30s, when the Manhattan neighborhood was home to a significant, exhilarating movement of African American art, culture, and thinking.
Greaves’ guest list was to die for. Audiences meet painter Romare Bearden; poet Arna Bontemps; pianist Eubie Blake; painter and muralist Aaron Douglas; openly gay painter Richard Bruce Nugent; journalist Gerri Major; actor Leigh Whipper; photographer James Van Der Zee; and poet and civil-rights advocate Frank Smith Horne, who served in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s informal “Black Cabinet.”
As these and other revelers reminisce, drink, break into performance (Van Der Zee sits at Ellington’s piano and performs like a pro), and reflect on art, politics, and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, something clearly extraordinary is happening. Many thanks to the two Greaves for preserving the magic and embracing some precious history. Photographs shot by Van Der Zee during the Harlem Renaissance era, picturing Harlem denizens both legendary and everyday, enhance the picture. Ellington, who was ill and couldn’t be at the party, is represented on the jazzy soundtrack, which begins with a composition of his, “Black Beauty.”
“Fatherland,” filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest modestly scaled black and white drama set in postwar Europe, is showing in Bay Area theaters. Cowritten with Hendrik Handloegten, Pawlikowski’s fact-inspired story centers on a 1949 visit made by exiled author Thomas Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) from Los Angeles to his native Germany to receive the Goethe Prize. Joining him in a black Buick is his daughter Erika (Sandra Huller, excellent), a writer and actor who, like her father, has been a prominent anti-Nazi voice and antifascist activist. Grief, relating to the suicide of son Klaus (August Diehl), pervades the emotional dynamics of father and daughter as the two navigate East-West divides in the changed country and, transcending personal differences, connect meaningfully. “Fatherland” is a graceful, somber gem about politics, identity, moral choices, love, and family.
The third annual Studio 8 Film Festival, celebrating the filmmaking of San Francisco Art Institute alumni, faculty, and staff, presents its primary program 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Saturday at the 4-Star Theater; and 12:30 p.m. Sunday at the Roxie Theater. Visit sfaa.art for more information.
In “Hold On To Your Music: A Mother’s Legacy,” concert pianist and author Mona Golabek shares the journey of her mother, Lisa Jura, child-prodigy pianist and survivor of Kindertransport when thousands of children, mainly Jewish, were rescued from Nazi-controlled territories and brought to Great Britain in World War II. The documentary, directed by Josh Aronson and Adam Wood, screens at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco at 5 p.m. Sunday. The event includes a live performance by Golabek. Visit jccsf.org for more information.