Movies With Butter

One of two niche festivals put on by San Francisco’s IndieFest (the other is horror fest HoleInTheHead), SFDocFest runs every summer in San Francisco and Oakland and this year features a slate of films that focus on geniuses who hit hard and run fast.

The festival’s opening night film, Actress is the newest by NY docmaker Robert Greene, who’s previous films about independent pro-wrestlers (Fake It So Real) and his young cousin (Kati with an I) have earned him respect from all echelons in the doc making community. Kati which will play alongside Fake It So Real and Actress as part of a retrospective of the young producer’s work, gained instant attention when it premiered at the Maysles Center in Harlem. The Maysles Center is founded by the remaining Maysles Brother, Albert, who with his late brother David won and was nominated for multiple major awards including the 1974 Best Documentary Oscar (nomination: Christo’s Valley Curtain) and multiple primetime emmys (TV docs Soldiers of Music in 1991 and Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic in 1987). Greene's films question the ability of a camera to capture reality when the content it follows is incomprehensible or self-decieving. He will be in attendance for the premier and to receive the festival’s NonFiction Vanguard Award.

In step with SFDocFest's interest in young geniuses is the fest's centerpiece film. To be distributed by FilmBuff beginning June 27, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is about internet activist and Reddit inventor, Aaron Swartz, a prodigy who began coding before puberty and eventually became an activist for free information. Swartz famously fought against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and for the Protect IP Act (PIPA), winning victories publicly as well building a legacy of work to make public domain documentation (court reports, for example) accessible to the public. This earned him multiple felony charges and a lengthy FBI investigation that ultimately lead to his suicide at the age of 26. When news of his death went public, the online community swiftly rose to express their loss. Director Biran Knappenberger will attend the fest.

Closing night is a fest favorite called Rich Hill. A doc excavating modern poverty among young families in Missouri, Rich Hill won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize before going to a number of other high profile fests. Other notable SFDocFest13 events include the west coast premier of AJ Schnack and David Wilson’s newest We Always Lie to Strangers, the world premier of Back Issues: The Hustler Mazagine Story and the west coast premier of Zombie-101 Doc of the Dead.

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