Sixth Annual San Diego Women’s Film Festival

Rachel Getting Married is the opening night feature for this year's San Diego Women's Film Festival (Sony Pictures Classics)

There's something of a festival bunch up this weekend as the San Diego Women's Film Festival and the San Diego Italian Film Festival (more on this later) compete for audiences this weekend. The San Diego Women's Film Festival kicks off its sixth season today with two youth outreach programs at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. Then the festival goes into full swing tomorrow at the Reading Gaslamp Theaters downtown with the San Diego premiere of Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married starring Anne Hathaway and written by Sidney Lumet's daughter Jenny. The festival is Southern California's longest running women film festival and this year plays host to fifty films including five features. The goal of the Festival is to empower young women through positive film media and promote women filmmakers and their films. This year the festival also boasts a new curator, Citizen Video's Holly Jones. You can also listen to this morning's These Days discussion of this year's festival with Holly Jones and I.

Flow

The documentary Flow: For Love of Water (Osilloscope)

In Flow: For Love of Water (opening September 19 at Landmark's Ken Cinema), filmmaker Irena Salina tackles what she calls the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - the world water crisis. And she's certainly not alone in identifying this as a major global concern. Like An Inconvenient Truth, her documentary Flow is designed to be a kind of wake up call for mainstream audiences who may be peripherally aware of the problem but not seeing it as a major concern. As long as clean water comes out when they turn on the tap, most people don't see a crisis.

NOTE: Following each of the prime evening screenings of Flow there will be a panel discussion about the film and water issues.

Benefit Screening of Iron Jawed Angels

The San Diego Film Critics Society and the San Diego Women's History Museum present a special benefit screening of Iron Jawed Angels on Saturday August 30 at 5:00 pm at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. The event is part of an annual celebration of Women's Equality Day. The film, directed by Katja von Garnier, serves up a passionate tale of the amazing efforts of fierce young suffragettes fighting for a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. The film stars Hilary Swank as Alice Paul, and Frances O'Connor Alice Burns - real-life women who challenged Congress. In 1912, Paul and Burns take the reins of the National American Women's Suffrage Association's (NAWSA) committee in Washington, D.C., where they organize a landmark parade on President Wilson's inauguration day. The march is violently disrupted by men on the sidelines. Anjelica Huston won a Golden Globe Award for Supporting Actress as one of the old guard in the women's movement. With the Democratic Convention concluding and a historic presidential election ahead, maybe this is exactly the kind of film we need to get people fired up about exercising their right to vote.

There will also be a raffle to raise funds for the San Diego Women's Film Festival, whose event is coming up October 2-5 at Reading Gaslamp. The raffle basket will contain DVDs of films directed by women as well as books, t-shirts and other movie goodies. I hope you will come out and show your support for these three non-profit organizations. Tickets are a $10 tax deductible donation. You can check out the trailer above.

You can reserve tickets by emailing me at filmclub@kpbs,org.

Elegy / Interview with Isabel Coixet

Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz star in Elegy, the adaptation of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal (Red Envelope Entertainment)

Elegy (opened August 22 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas) is based on Philip Roth's book The Dying Animal and focuses on aging academic David Kepesh and his affair with a student. The character of Kepesh has appeared in two other Roth works: The Breast and The Professor of Desire. As with most of Roth's books, the focus and the perspective are distinctly male. But what gives the new film adaptation of The Dying Animal a fresh spin is that it has been brought to the screen thanks mainly to a pair of women: actress Penelope Cruz and director Isabel Coixet.

SDWFF Fundraising Screening of The Gits

The San Diego Women's Film Festival will be screening the music documentary The Gits as a fundraising event Wednesday August 20 at 9pm at the Whistle Stop Bar (2236 Fern Street, 619-284-6784). Entering its sixth year, SDWFF will kick off its 2008 festival on October 2. But the Festival, like so many non-profits this year, needs your help in raising funds so that it can continue to build on its past successes. The Gits will have its San Diego sneak preview at the Whistle Stop and will have its theatrical premiere at the Festival in October.

Directed by Kerri O'Kane, The Gits is the rousing and heartbreaking story of Seattle band The Gits, whose promising start was cut short by the tragic murder of lead singer Mia Zapata (who was rumored to have been descended from Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata).The documentary mixes musical history with murder mystery as it weaves a tale about a punk band that was beginning to distinguish itself.

Tickets are a suggested $5 donation (of course you can always give more!). I have served on the SDWFF selection committee since the Festival's inception and I value the work it has done to highlight films by women so I hope you will come out and support the festival and quality films by women by coming out to the Whistle Stop. You will also be supporting the Festival's new, dynamic curator Holly Jones whose passion for film has already been proven with her Citizen Video store. Com'on, it'll be like going to see the band play live at a bar -- you couldn't ask for a more perfect setting for a film like this.

Water Lilies

The three young stars of Water Lilies (Fox Lorber)

Water Lilies (opened August 15 at Landmark's Ken Cinema) opens against the fitting backdrop of the summer Olympics. As athletes compete in the oft-ridiculed synchronized swimming (remember the Martin Short SNL skit?), Water Lilies uses the sport as a focal point in its tale of sexual awakening among a trio of teenage girls. The film marks the feature-directing debut of France's Céline Sciamma.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The new documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired opens August 15 at the Reading Gaslamp Theaters. I just want to take a brief moment to say something about the change of ownership down at Gaslamp, which had been a Pacific Theater. When I asked publicist Jo Ellen Brantferger about the new owners and their seeming commitment to showing indie, foreign or art house films on at least one screen, here's the statement I got back: "Since Reading operates the Angelika Film Center in New York City, our film programmers are very familiar with the variety of art, independent, and foreign films that are available theatrically to U.S. audiences. Reading intends to continue showing first run commercial films at the Gaslamp 15, but hopes to enhance its programming with some art, independent or foreign films that otherwise might not have come to San Diego. In fact, in the next few weeks, Reading is opening both Man from Pearl and Sixty Six." That sounds like good news and the fact that they are finally bringing the Polanski documentary (which aired on HBO) to the big screen in San Diego is definitely a plus.

Directed by Marina Zenovich, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired recounts the scandalous events of 1977 involving Roman Polanski and a 13-year-old girl who accused the famous director of giving her alcohol and Quaaludes and then raping her. All that most Americans remember about the case is that Polanski fled the U.S. to avoid punishment but the film reminds us that the circumstances of his flight were a little more complicated than that -- he actually did serve prison time and had entered into a plea bargain but fled when the judge became more interested in publicity than justice.

American Teen

The 1985 poster for The Breakfast Club and the initial poster designed for American Teen (Paramount Vantage)

The new documentary American Teen (opening August 8 at select theaters) is something of a real life Breakfast Club (you remember that John Hughes film about "a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse..."). American Teen focuses on five teens representing such school cliques as jocks, geeks, and the popular set. I spoke with director Nanette Burstein about capturing contemporary teen life for her film. You can listen to my radio feature or read the extended interview.

Teen Critic Interviews American Teen Filmmaker

We all remember that iconic and epic film The Breakfast Club. Either you were born watching it or your parents got you into it or even the latest fad of being retro required you to have a large knowledge of whether you were a princess, a brain, a criminal, etc. So when you walked down the theatre aisle and saw this new movie poster for the latest documentary directed by Nanette Burstein, American Teen, you probably had to take a second look, to make sure that it isn't a remake. This documentary has been compared to the most famous 80s movie, but this film is most definitely not a remake. This movie, being a documentary, takes a world that has been displayed in fiction, and in over-dramatic television "reality" shows, and it offers a more in depth and sincere look at the lives of the modern high school teen. The film includes the cliques, struggling to graduate, and teen heartbreak. Overall this film is a great model of what preteens have to look forward to, what teenagers have to live through, and what adults have successfully survived. After I had seen this film I had the great opportunity of meeting and interviewing the director, Nanette Burstein. In the way she spoke of her subjects, I saw the love she had for them and it assured me that this director only had the truest intentions in what that life is like, and I was grateful that this woman chose to deliver this message.

-- Candace Kavanagh just graduated from Mount Miguel High School. She spends her life absorbing celluloid images. She loves every type of film from so-called "chick flicks" such as My Fair Lady and Legally Blonde, to mind bending thrillers like Mulholland Drive and Hard Candy -- with every zombie movie, action flick, musical, and comedy in between.

Jellyfish/Meduzot

The mermaid and the princess? Jellyfish (Zeitgeist Film)

After suffering through the excruciatingly bloated Sex and the City last week, the trim Jellyfish/Meduzot (opening June 6 at Landmark's Ken Cinema) arrives like a breath of fresh air. Light on its feet, deeply human, and fresh in style, this French-Israeli co-production serves up an engaging tale about a group of women struggling with daily life in contemporary Tel Aviv. This isn't the glamorous, fashion and beauty obsessed world of the gals from Sex and the City but rather a much more relatable story about a diverse array of woman coping with disappointments and relationships, and yet still holding out for something better.