A rarely seen film by the director of the Czech cult classic Marketa Lazarová; El Santo, the silver-masked wrestling hero in his most gonzo adventure with our hero battling a murderous mob of escaped lepers in a small town, resulting in a Western-cum-horror-cum-action picture, but with a twist; an intimate look at teenage girls in the first film directed by a woman in Sri Lanka; the realities of gay love in 1997s Guinea; stones rain, curses come true, and goats are not to be trusted in an era of great poverty and no little superstition in pre-Famine Ireland; and an unlikely duo of a wanderer on the run and reluctant monk, facing danger at every turn in a 1980s Thai actioner with thrilling fight scenes.
These restored and rarely seen films from the 1960s-1990s are just part of Re:Vision playing at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater September 24-27, 2026. Many are being screened at cinemas, museums and festivals around the world.
Going further back to the first half of the last century: A silent pre-pre-code or a proto-screwball comedy with skimpy costumes, gender play, and sexual innuendo; the Pre-code tale of a female-only school where men are forbidden but a star pupil discovers she is pregnant; and noir thriller on the trail of a serial killer on the streets of Copenhagen, targeting women named Sonja with surprise twists to solve the case.
Editor Gary Meyer note: The San Francisco Bay Area has long been a great place to see not only adventurous new movies from around the globe but also films from the history of cinema, both acknowledged classics and forgotten gems. Led by the year-round programming at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Roxie, Rafael Film Center, the Niles Essanay Silent Movie Museum, and the Stanford Theatre, with the recent addition of adventurous curation at CinemaSF’s Balboa/4-Star/Vogue group and the Orinda, we are reminded of the Golden Age of Bay Area Repertory Cinema. Spurred by the success of Mel Novikoff’s Surf (and later Castro Theatre) in San Francisco and Pauline Kael’s Berkeley Studio & Guild, there were well over two dozen rep houses in San Francisco and surrounding cities during the 1970s-1990s. With so much competition for our eyeballs (people can only see one movie at a time in theaters) they came and went with the advent of home video cutting into the audiences in a major way. Many repertory programmers (myself included for Landmark Theatres and later the Balboa) urged distributors to make new and/or often restored versions on 35mm prints for our theaters. As attendance and box office grosses declined, studios stopped making these prints resulting in the quality of a rental VHS tape often being better than beat-up old film prints. Theaters adapted or closed.
Those lucky to live here have choices from dozens of film festivals every year. Most focus on new works in a variety of exciting subjects. Only two have been committed to movies from the first half of the 20th Century, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Noir City. As they have grown with avid fans often selling out movie palaces, part of their mission has been to work with film archives to fund and oversee beautiful restorations to screen in their festivals and elsewhere.
I often thought it would be wonderful to host genre festivals as the rep houses used to do with a focus on horror/science fiction/fantasy or Pre-Code (the Roxie has a series coming up) or comedy, for example. And to include shorts on each program, a policy largely lost in movie theaters. For years I have watched with jealousy as New York’s MoMA presented their annual “To Save and Project” and UCLA’s “Festival of Preservation” but few of those movies were seen locally.
And now we get Re:Vision, presented by the San Francisco Film Preserve. This important addition will bring us a wide variety subjects and styles with 20 short subjects, one or two showing before each feature.
Jonathan Marlow has long been presenting a wide range of films both in theaters and as a founder of adventurous early streaming services, Green Cine and Fandor, as well as programming for festivals and specialty cinemas. He is on the Board of Directors for SFFP and I asked him to make a few comments about the lineup. Following that I add short reviews of the films I was able to screen in advance.
Why Re:Vision?
By Jonathan Marlow
Gehenu Lamai [The Girls]
The first Sri Lankan film directed by a woman. Sumitra Peries was an established editor when she took on a popular novel by local author Karunasena Jayalath. Kusum and her sister Soma live at home, their mother working hard to send them to college. A wealthy cousin Nimal tells Kusum that he is in love with her, suddenly proposing. She turns him down fearing she will endanger her relationship with his mother who Kusum works for. But her affection for him grows and there are difficult realties that come with the romance. Simultaneously Suma wins a beauty contest and has an affair with a movie director that goes bad. The film plays out with a series of unexpected directions for each central character.
The film has many small but powerful scenes that often break the traditions in South Asian cinema exploring class and gender.
Preceding The Girls is a short film by the great Indian director Satyajit Ray, Two. It plays as a perfect companion, a flip side about two boys from different classes competing from afar as to who has the better playthings. In 12 minutes it reminds us that a short story can be both powerful and beautiful with a simple narrative.
Lepers & Sex AKA Santo vs The Riders of Terror
The masked wrestling hero El Santo (Rodolfo Guzman) starred in around 50 features produced by the Calderon family. They were always outrageous action-packed and unbelievable stories with unexpected rivals from zombies, vampire women, other wrestlers (especially Blue Demon), evil brains, Satan, witches, the Mafia, Martians, spies, and more that required audiences to accept the time travel that brought him to various places and eras.
The person who did the restoration, Berkeley’s Peter Conheim, explained, “Calderon cranked out a handful of alternate “international” (read: sexy) versions of their popular films, generally an excuse for nude inserts to be shown in more permissive film markets, much to the chagrin of Guzman himself (who, along with his wrestling son, often denied they even existed). Los Leprosos y el Sexo became the stuff of legend, as it was rumored to exist but entirely unavailable and, indeed, was evidently never actually released in that form – until the keeper of the Calderon flame, Viviana Garcia-Besné, discovered the original negative for the surprisingly explicit insert sequences in the mid-2010s. The original “sexy” version was finally reconstructed by Cinema Preservation Alliance and Permanencia Voluntaria.”
And it is a hoot. El Santo finds himself in the old west where escapees from a local Leper asylum are running amuck. As the sheriff and townspeople set out to stop their crime spree, a gang of bad guys hatch a plot to use the lepers as a front for a series of robberies. The sheriff somehow gets Santo to saunter into town. Don’t ask how he got a message to our hero across decades and many miles. In fact don’t ask any questions. Just enjoy the stillness of it all. This luchador libre vs. the “chili western” reminds me of the low-budget Monogram Range Busters series where a trio of cowboys often were fighting the Nazis and Japanese in the old west. Instead of a wrestler we had one of the trio being a ventriloquist, Max “Alibi” Terhune with the smart alec dummy Elmer in the saddle with him.
Santo is never in the inserted sex scenes which are typical of that era’s softcore thrillers. They appear with almost no reason and while both parties seem to be enjoying it, there is one rape that is especially uncomfortable before it turns into mutual a good time, accompanied by a silent movie pipe organ score. In fact, the score shifts in each scene and could be from different musical sources.
Mordets Melodi [Melody of Murder]
This Danish film noir moves rapidly as a series of murders occur in the shadowy backstreets and boarding houses of 1944 Copenhagen. Each victim is named “Sonja” and neighbors hear a beautiful female voice singing a French tune around the time of the deaths. A local cabaret singer becomes a suspect. She wants to leave town which adds to the clues the police are looking for. When her estranged husband and ex-manager shows up with an offer to get her a better booking in Belgium, she doesn’t suspect his ulterior motives but lets it be known they will not become romantically involved again. The couple used to have a hypnosis act and is it possible that plays into the plot? I doubt that you will guess the outcome, but you should enjoy this atmospheric thriller.
Re:Vision – Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery, is being presented by the San Francisco Film Preserve at the Roxie Theater, September 24-27. Information and tickets at the Roxie site.
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Jonathan Marlow is an American film curator, programmer, producer, and executive known for his pioneering work in independent and experimental film distribution, streaming services, and physical media preservation. He co-founded Fandor, a subscription streaming platform dedicated to indie, international, and arthouse cinema, where he championed human-driven curation to connect audiences with films beyond algorithmic suggestions. His career spans early roles at Amazon and GreenCine during the rise of online video rental, leadership positions at educational streaming service Kanopy, and directing Paracme, an SVOD platform focused on artist-made and experimental films. Marlow’s involvement with Seattle’s Scarecrow Video dates to the early 1990s, when he was a customer and volunteer during his college years; he later established the Sanctuary, a microcinematheque for 16mm screenings and events within the store’s space. After periods living in Berlin and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he shifted focus to digital streaming, he maintained ties to Scarecrow through occasional screenings and observed its growth into a nonprofit with one of the world’s largest publicly accessible physical media collections. In 2025, he was appointed executive director of the Scarecrow Video Archive, marking a return to physical media advocacy amid his broader efforts to bridge analog and digital film ecosystems.
Gary Meyer started his first theater in the family barn when he was twelve-years-old. He directed a monster movie there and wanted to show it on the set. It became The Above-the-Ground Theatre screening dozens of silent films with music arranged from his parents’ record collection. Over 250 films were screened along with live productions, workshops and the publication of a literary/arts/satire zine, “Nort!” and a film newsletter, “Ciné.” After film school at SFSU he calls his first job as a booker for United Artists Theatres “grad school” that prepared him for co-founding Landmark Theatres in 1975. It was the first national arthouse chain in the U.S. focused on creative marketing strategies to build loyal audiences for non-Hollywood fare. After selling Landmark, he consulted on many projects including Sundance Cinemas and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas, created several film festivals including the Dockers Classically Independent Film Festival and Tube Film Festival for the X Games, and resurrected the 1926 Balboa Theatre in San Francisco. Meyer joined the Telluride Film Festival in 1998, becoming a Festival Co-Director in 2007-2014. He founded the online magazine, EatDrinkFilms.com in April 2014 and consults for festivals while offering pro bono advice to independent filmmakers and cinemas. He started EatDrinkFilms to give a voice to writers wanting to explore food, beverage and the movies from unique perspectives. Meyer, Editor/Publisher, also contributes articles.