The Global Lens Initiative is back to spotlight nine fiction features and an international short film program at the Roxie Cinema and venues in eight neighborhoods around San Francisco, from Nov. 1-16. The assortment of local screens ranges from the Bayview Opera House to the San Francisco Art Institute and the Chinese Cultural Center. There are films from Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, Croatia, Indonesia, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Mozambique. Here are some highlights.
Fine Dead Girls Croatian director Dalibor Mataanic (with co-writer Mate Matisic) creates a disturbing metaphor for his country's recent upheavals in a Zagreb apartment building whose residents become unhinged after the arrival of two happily coupled young lesbians. The building is under the thumb of elderly harpy Olga, her mentally unstable sexual-predator son Daniel, and her laid-back older husband. Olga's kingdom, meant to mimic the dislocation and madness afflicting Croatia during the Yugoslav civil wars, has a feisty menagerie of tenants including a female prostitute, a desperately abused housewife, a religious fanatic who's keeping his new deceased wife around the way Norman Bates kept his mom, a mentally retarded handyman, a war-crazed ex-soldier who keeps the building in an uproar with Midnight martial music concerts, and a jolly elderly abortionist who's working overtime.
There's something about the openness and normality of Iva and Marija's relationship that infuriates Olga, whose weather-beaten countenance is the face of intolerant, inborn Fascism the likes of which is seldom found on our shores. Olga begins a one-woman witch-hunt against the lesbians that soon escalates into rape, murder and kidnapping.
This erotically driven horror fest is at times hard to watch, especially considering the film's ending, which plays with an especially diabolical, bloody and ironic spin on the term lesbian bed death. Not for all tastes, but smart, chilling and thought-provoking. As with Rosemary's Baby, you don't have to believe in witches to fear winding up in a coven. (Roxie, 11/8)
The Sacred Family Chile's Sebastian Campos provides a lyrical, sensual look at how his country's middle-class is coping with the next wave of the sexual revolution. The visit of a pushy new girlfriend creates tensions between an architect and his restive son; the girlfriend's drug stash adds an extra tang to their sex, as well as proving a disturbing catalyst for first-time fucking for two male law students. Director Campos gets delectably close to his talented cast with hand-held camera shots that capture the moistness on some very white teeth, as well as fresh, life-like dialogue improvised by the actors that keeps us off-guard about where the story may be going. (Roxie, 11/7)
A Wonderful Night in the Split Arsen Anton Ostojic gives a slightly more whimsical slant on post-Yugoslav Croatia with his Night on Earth-style anthology about how several lonely people pass the last two hours of New Year's Eve. In the opening story, an unmarried couple's raucous fucking on a kitchen table causes a young boy to reach for his dead Dad's loaded pistol. Ostojic's lovely black-and-white photography, with its awesome shadows cast across worried faces, gives his upside-down-cake cityscape the sweetness of a romantic fable combined with the sinister if delectable aftertaste of the best film noir. (Roxie, 11/8)