Sunday, June 8, 2014

Jason goes to Docfest--Opening Night

SF Indiefest's Docfest started up last Thursday, starting with a little pre-party get together at the Brava Theater featuring wine from Dark Horse and Spicy Wines. So that gave me a good little buzz going into the opening night feature

ACTRESS is the story of Brandy Burre, a once-promising actress on THE WIRE, who quit acting to raise a family in upstate New York. There her neighbor happened to be documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, who made a movie about his fascinating, maddening neighbor. Intentionally playing with the form of cinema verite, he makes it obvious that while what you see is true, it's also performed. The thing is, she's not a very likeable person. She cheats, she gets falling down drunk, and she's horribly self-absorbed. So it ended up being more interesting for how it played with the documentary form, because I was not at all interested in the subject.

The Q&A was much better than the movie. Robert Greene is getting a Vanguard award in the festival, and on Saturday there was a retrospective of his work (which I'm sorry I missed, I was busy in Niles) but I've confirmed from a few friends that pretty consistently his Q&A's are more fun than his movies.

Then there was a big after party with Lagunitas beer and...other drinks. But I was drinking Lagunitas up until I had to catch the BART home. And that's how Docfest 2014 started.

Running Time: 82 minutes
My Total Minutes: 364,904

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