by Gary Meyer

Medianoche is a type of sandwich that was created in Cuba and is popular in late night clubs, especially in Havana and Miami.

A handful of places in the San Francisco Bay Area make good Cubanos but when restaurant vets Madelyn Markoe (Tacolicious, Tres, Boxing Room) and Jessie Barker (Nopa, Tres) took their first trip to the island in 2015 they came back with a new appreciation of the culture, music and especially the cuisine.

The result, Media Noche opened in early 2017 and will also be making its Eat Drink SF debut. The annual food, wine and spirits event celebrates world class chefs and restaurants August 24-27 at Fort Mason. There are several “Grand Tastings” and Media Noche will be offering tastes of their deliciousness on Saturday night.

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An excerpt from Stories Make the World by Stephen Most

Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.

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A review by David L. Brown

Stories Make the World: Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary, Stephen Most’s new book, is smart, well-written and engrossing. The author is a documentary writer/producer whose professional life is full of storytelling – for stage, page and screen.

Filled with fascinating detail and insight into a very broad range of storytelling, Stories Make the World is an important addition to the books on documentaries and on storytelling in general. It will be very valuable for all students and makers of documentary films and for everyone who cares about the power of documentary to tell dramatic stories and to enhance our understanding of the world.

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by Gary Meyer

“The cliché is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down. To me, life is going up until you are burned by flames.” * Jeanne Moreau

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By Gary Meyer

When Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar opened in 2014 we asked bay area projectionist Chris Rasmussen (a cinematographer and technician who installs, maintains and projects digital, 70mm and 35mm) to watch the movie in a variety of projected formats and he offered an insider’s view. We also told a story of a 70mm IMAX screening gone very wrong. 

But between all his work and watching it in five different formats his insightful story also took a week to get finished and published. And we know that you want to make a decision about where to see Nolan’s Dunkirk now.

Nolan shot Dunkirk on both 70mm (actually 65mm with the other 5mm left for soundtrack information) and IMAX film. You can choose to see it on IMAX 70mm film, IMAX with Laser, IMAX Xenon, traditional 70mm, 35mm, and DCP ( standard “digital cinema package”).

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Jonathan Demme passed away on April, 2017. We present clips from his last two music films, two complete short documentaries plus a trailer and tribute for the very last thing he directed, an episode for Shots Fired. As bonuses there are classic music videos from “Gidget Goes To Hell” to Bruce Springsteen plus two wonderful and rarely seen early television shows. Enjoy.

His last film premiered in July at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.  More than a film it is a multimedia experience called The Power of Rock. Here is a trailer.

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