DOWNSIDE UP tells the story of the impoverished, working-class community of North Adams, Massachusetts (hometown to filmmaker Nancy Kelly), where a group of outsiders move in and transform a shuttered factory on the wrong side of the tracks into this country’s largest museum of contemporary art. The Kelly family’s kitchen-table wisdom becomes the way to understand urban renewal, gentrification, community survival and the disappearance of the working class. DOWNSIDE UP is ultimately a story about how the power of art can transform lives and give hope to a town many had written off as hopeless. DOWNSIDE UP is a presentation of the Independent Television Service (ITVS).ORDER TICKETS NOW

Co-presented by: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

This program is a provocative, political and visually explosive collection of short works that re-interpret and re-envision American culture. African-American filmmaker Jerold Howard's beautifully animated film See Truth challenges the viewer to rethink “family values” concerning racial bias and tolerance; Angel Vasquez' hypnotic experimental film Change of Faith explores the emotional impact of America's war on terrorism; Dubya's Big Day, a pointed satire by Paul Van De Carr, presents an “alternative” version of the presidential inauguration; Koto Ezawa's animated film The Simpson Verdict re-interprets the final moments of OJ's criminal trial while making a powerful statement about American justice; Live At Five is an indictment of American television journalism - filmmaker Andy Schocken edited national newsclips collected by fifty people across the country to formulate a treatise on the American media landscape; and finally, Cassandra Herman and Katy Shrout's provocative film American Exile tells the story of former Black Panther Pete O'Neal and his twenty-year political exile in Tanzania. In total, these films create a candid and unapolagetic statement about life in America, the importance of political consciousness and the power of media culture.
ORDER TICKETS NOW

Co-presenters : Mother Jones and AK Press

Six films, six different expressions of masculinity. ManHandled presents films by men about the textured and complicated experience of manhood, from the poetic to the sexual, the nostalgic to the schizophrenic. In Bill Basquin’s LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER, male hunters convene around a carcass in a primal study of men’s bodies, rituals and gestures. PINNED is a bittersweet exploration of high school wrestling, the metaphor of competition, and filmmaker Dan McKinney’s personal struggle with his father’s cancer and the need to be a champion. CURVE BALL is a personal documentary about two brothers, one a schizophrenic, the other, the filmmaker. John Neely turns the camera on his brother, who began hearing voices at the age of 20. The film is a complicated, emotional story of a young man who desperately wants to be “normal.” John Killacky waxes romantic in TOP 40 LOVE, a two and a half-minute journey through a boy’s memories of sex, politics and pop music. In GUYS AND DOLLS, Rock K. Schroeter takes a wacky, offbeat look at men who collect dolls, and in the political documentary OUR BROTHERS, OUR SONS, videographer Jim Arnold explores a shocking generation gap in the gay male community and the young men who choose “bare backing” in spite of the risks of AIDS. ORDER TICKETS NOW

Co-presenter : Microcinema International

Don’t miss the Bay Area premiere of Teddi Dean Bennett’s narrative feature LOVE WILL TRAVEL. Six years in the making, financed through Teddi’s employment as a house painter and bartender at the local racetrack, LOVE WILL TRAVEL is a gorgeous Baghdad Café-style road movie, an urban fairy tale in a Nevada ghost town. It is the story of Lena, a young German woman, her American boyfriend Levon and her little sister Katrin. Lena and Katrin’s parents are killed in a car crash and the trio escape on a freighter headed to America to avoid relinquishing young Katrin to German authorities. Life is tough in urban L.A.-style America for this unconventional family and, as they flee city life, escaping an aggressive strip club owner/loan shark, they manage to gather a collection of misfit friends who help them survive in this strange, mystical and sometimes brutal territory. Sumptuous cinematography by Joplin Wu and original music by Jonathan Segal, a member of the band Camper Van Beethoven who also performs with Cracker, Sparklehorse and Eugene Chadbourne.
ORDER TICKETS NOW

Co-presenter : S.F. IndieFest