By C.J. Hirschfield What if health providers and practitioners prescribed ceremonies, rituals, festivals and other community activities as medicine to treat trauma? The excellent new documentary A Place To Breathe would argue that distressed refugees, in particular, would benefit greatly, and the film effectively argues this route as a way to foster resilience.
By Frako Loden The tagline for DocFest, the 19th San Francisco Documentary Festival, is “Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction”—a saying we all appreciate more than we’d like during these days of COVID-19, wildfires, racist domestic terrorism and unhinged presidential campaigns. But however much we might want to hide from some of these truths, we […]
by Frako Loden In all my filmgoing career, spotting a female name for the cinematographer credit has been a rare and confounding experience. First, its rarity makes me take notice. (Rachel Morrison was the first woman nominated for a cinematography Oscar, for 2017’s Mudbound. The first woman invited to join the American Society of Cinematographers, […]
by Frako Loden The African Film Festival National Traveling Series stops at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive this spring for its 25th year, acquiring some other film-festival notables on its way. True to its mission to present the best of recent films from Africa and the African diaspora, this year’s edition features dramas and […]
by Frako Loden This past week has been an exhilarating and deeply moving experience for me as I’ve explored the films of French director Jacques Becker for the first time. For my teacher I have another French writer/filmmaker, Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de Torchon, Life and Nothing But, The Princess of Montpensier), whose 2017 documentary My […]
by Frako Loden On the 100th birthday of Sweden’s most famous film director Ingmar Bergman, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive is presenting three programs of films. One program, The Early Years, is screening five of his 1940s works in Theater 2 or the “salon,” the much smaller room downstairs that’s previously been used for film […]
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