60th San Francisco International Film Festival Program Guide Welcome Note

San Francisco International Film Festival Program Guide
April 5, 2017

Welcome to the 60th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival! We have been planning to celebrate this birthday party with the city and region we call home for a while now and cannot wait to share it with our Bay Area friends and guests from around the world. Many different kinds of films and film events, new and old, will contribute to this rich and varied festival experience. Look out for a series of high-profile tributes, a greatly enhanced music and film schedule, new programs involving the technology world, and special screenings that connect global thought leaders with films and filmmakers exploring the key issues facing us today.

We are presenting all of this work in a newly compressed schedule, with a first weekend of parties, special events, and major new films, followed by a week of international and Bay Area cinema mixed in with our signature blend of cross-media explorations, culminating in our 60th anniversary commission, Guy Maddin, Jacob Garchik, and Kronos Quartet’s special collaborative project The Green Fog – A San Francisco Fantasia.

You will also see us launch a complete overhaul of our look and feel as an institution. Our new name, SFFILM, speaks to how integrated we feel within the community that supports us and enjoys our offerings.

While film festivals must foremost be a celebration of our ever-surprising and inspiring art form, this year we are touched by and must acknowledge the unsettling course of current events. Like many others, we have been dismayed by restrictions on the freedom of artists to travel and the denigration of national arts funding structures that have delivered so much good to so many communities. We also fear for the most vulnerable within our Bay Area community and anticipate new attacks on the spirit and values of our city and region. 

The value of film culture rests in large part on the multiple ways audiences around the world interact with the medium. Whether films provide simple escapist delight or invigorating messages of social change, the artists who make this work open our eyes and minds to other ways of seeing the world and the vast network of threads that bind us together.

For our part, we stand as allies to those who resist attacks on this shared purpose and seek to encourage the making and presentation of cinema that seeks a better world for generations to come.

I encourage you all to use the opportunity of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival to lean on the impressive filmmakers represented in these pages and their work. Let them help provide comfort, new challenges, and inspiration in these dizzying times.

See you at the movies!

Noah Cowan Executive Director SFFILM