The 2015 Mill Valley Film Festival, running Oct. 8-18 at Mill Valley's Sequoia Cinemas, Throckmorton Center, Lark Cinema and Rafael Film Center, has an unusually rich lineup of queer films, plus a sizzling selection of American independent cinema and some likely award-season candidates.
The Danish Girl Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper guides Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne in the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to get gender reassignment surgery. (Century-Larkspur, 10/8)
An Act of Love Director Scott Sheppard's documentary tells the heartbreaking tale of a heterosexual Pennsylvania Methodist minister under fire from church leaders for officiating at his son's same-sex wedding. It's the latest chapter in the United Methodist Church's long-running civil war over same-sex ordination and equality. (Rafael, 10/9; Throckmorton, 10/12)
45 Years British gay director Andrew Haigh brings us uncomfortably close to an aging British couple (Tom Courtney & Charlotte Rampling) as they start in on each other when their 45th anniversary looms. (Sequoia, 10/9; Rafael, 10/12)
Code: Debugging the Gender Gap There's gold in the valley, Silicon Valley. Robin Hauser Reynolds explores how the California tech industry's notorious sexism can be overcome with an economic dividend in the form of skilled women filling over a million engineering jobs that lack qualified applicants. (Sequoia, 10/9; Rafael, 10/14; Throckmorton, 10/17)
The Girl King Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki attempts an English-language revision of the story of a 17th-century Swedish girl monarch who shakes her snowbound kingdom to its foundations before she's deposed by a male cabal. Malin Buska is the headstrong Kristina, with Sarah Gadon as her young lady-in-waiting and sometime bedmate the Countess Ebba Sparre. Michael Nyqvist is the bad guy Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, whose task it is to break up the women's taboo bond for reasons of state. The film is a powerful lesson in what it must have been like to be the queen of your people and a sexual outlaw at a time when neither the Pope nor his Protestant enemies regarded queers with any fondness. (This well-produced history is no replacement for Rouben Mamoulian's early-talkie 1933 classic Queen Christina, with Silver Screen icons Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.) (Lark, 10/9; Sequoia, 10/10, 15)
Youth (La giovinezza) kicks off with the meeting of a retired composer, Fred (Michael Caine), and his retired film-director buddy, Mick (Harvey Keiel). Youth is writer/director Paolo Sorrentino's second English-language film, a follow-up to his 2013 Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. The all-star cast includes Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, and Jane Fonda. (Sequoia, 10/16; Rafael, 10/18)
The Assassin Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien returns after an eight-year hiatus with a sophisticated martial-arts drama in which a female assassin (Shu Qi) is ordered to kill a political leader with whom she's been intimate. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (Century-Larkspur, 10/8; Rafael, 10/17)
Beyond Measure From Benjamin Franklin through philosopher John Dewey, Americans have been wrestling with how to craft an education system that serves prodigy, special-needs and average-Joe students. Viki Abeles delivers a compelling sequel to her exploration of the American education quagmire Race to Nowhere. Even at 85 minutes, this doc treads into highly contested waters. The press screening was followed by a lengthy lecture/Q&A from the filmmaker, who's likely to repeat the same following Festival screenings. (Sequoia, 10/11; Rafael, 10/17)
Dheepan French director Jacques Audiard is justly celebrated for terrifying excursions into subterranean pockets of his country's underground economy, where immigrants and social misfits do the dirty work that greases the wheels of a modern state. In Dheepan, a one-time soldier with the Tamil Tigers lands in a suburban Paris highrise ruled by white anti-immigrant thuggish youth. Dheepan is himself a fraud, entering the country with a wife and child who are not his. Audiard presents emotional and psychosexual scenes guaranteed to push anyone's buttons. This odd mix of Marx, Che and Mickey Spillane will stay with you. (Sequoia, 10/17; Rafael, 10/18)
Dogtown Redemption The term recycling once had all sorts of "save the planet" connotations. In their candid poke around Oakland's recycling hub "Dogtown," Bay Area co-directors Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush take a less enthusiastic view, showing us a big redemption center where homeless men and women make as much as $100 daily, while still not able to have a clean, dry place to rest their heads. (Rafael, 10/10; Lark, 10/18)
Hitchcock/Truffaut Conventional wisdom once regarded Alfred Joseph Hitchcock as little more than a creature of Anglo-American mass-media hype. French critic/New Wave director Francois Truffaut was discouraged by colleagues from undertaking a serious study of this master of fear. But Truffaut had a week's worth of in-depth conversations with Hitch about the foundations of filmmaking. Kent Jones distills 60 hours of Truffaut-Hitchcock chats into a complex 80-minute doc fleshed out with observations from Hitchcock disciples. In English, French and Japanese, with English subtitles. (Lark, 10/15; Rafael, 10/17)
Radical Grace Rebecca Parrish shines light on an undercovered skirmish in the liberal-conservative mud-wrestling over Pres. Obama's signature Affordable Care Act. While the US Conference of Catholic Bishops attacked "Obamacare" for reputedly funding birth control and abortions, a spirited group of American nuns, under the banner "Network," started to testify, agitate and tour the country on behalf of government-sponsored health care for women. Filmed as they appear at rallies across the country and travel in a bright green "Nun-mobile" fully-equipped bus, the middle-aged nuns describe the sources of inspiration for their work. Pointing to a portrait of the late leader of the American Farm Workers Union, one nun notes, "This guy taught me everything I know about organizing: Cesar Chavez!" The battle over women's health care in America transcends the ancient lines of authority in the Mother Church, lines that proscribe women from being ordained as priests or deacons. "My very first vocational leaning was in second grade, at mass. I was so attracted, struck, entranced by the beauty of the music, the incense. I thought, 'Oh, if I could, I'd love to be a priest. But I'm a girl, and girls can't be priests!'" (Sequoia, 10/12; Rafael, 10/14)
Taxi Banned by the Iranian government from pursuing filmmaking, Jafar Panahi pretends to be a Tehran cab driver, covertly recording his passengers' conversations via hidden dashboard camera. This witty excursion provides a unique eye and ear on a society where free expression is severely curtailed by religious censors. Some of his fares recognize him, some don't; some bluster and reveal their worst side, others are civilized and respectful of rights their society does not observe. An entertaining reminder that human kindness can still be found in the unlikeliest places. (Rafael, 10/13; Lark, 10/17)
Surviving Skokie Eli Adler and Blair Gershkow relate harrowing history through the indelible memories of a Holocaust survivor, Eli's tough Polish-Jewish dad Jack. They link Jack's close call at the hand of the Nazis in Poland with an eerie parallel tale, the emergence of a 1960s neo-Nazi movement led by an American Fascist with his own twisted roots. (Sequoia, 10/11; Rafael, 10/16)
One Floor Below Romanian director Radu Muntean's existential mystery is a pleasure for a couple of reasons. First, the story of a Romanian small businessman, Mr. Patrascu, is fascinating minimalist cinema: how does a middle-aged man with a wife and teenage son find himself embroiled in the question of who killed Laura, his 20something neighbor? Was it the suspicious-looking man he saw coming out of her apartment? The film also whets our appetite for a rebirth of the Romanian New Wave. (Lark, 10/10; Throckmorton, 10/12)
Interwoven V.W. Scheich spins out multiple tales from the denizens of an apartment building. Indian-born brothers are following their mom's favorite recipe while one attempts to collect overdue rent from a violinist whose playing is upsetting the neighbors. (Rafael, 10/9, 11)
The Automatic Hate Justin Lerner's twisted dark family comedy kicks off when a young man (Joseph Cross) encounters a stranger claiming to be his cousin. The pecking order in this family is strange enough to make incest feel worthy of an Olympic sport. (Sequoia, 10/15; Lark, 10/17)
A Light Beneath Their Feet Vale Weiss's drama puts a young woman, Beth (Taryn Manning from Orange is the New Black), in the uncomfortable position of having to choose to get on with her own life at college or perpetually care for her bi-polar mom. (Sequoia, 10/10, 14; Rafael, 10/12)