It probably doesn’t need to be said that the presence of local filmmakers in this year’s edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (opening tonight) is most pronounced in the documentary section. You should be well aware by now that the Bay Area is one of the world capitals of nonfiction filmmaking; even still, you might be astonished at the number of docs produced here year in and year out. Of this year’s output, no fewer than six feature-length documentaries made the SFIFF cut.
It’s no surprise that all but one adopt a social-issue (or social justice, if you prefer) orientation, for that’s the characteristic that distinguishes Bay Area documentary makers. The lone outlier, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s Something Ventured (Get Movie Showtimes), a bouncy history of the Northern California marriage of venture capitalists and technological innovators/entrepreneurs, isn’t intent on changing the world so much as saluting a generation of men (and a lone woman) who did.
“Better This World”
The most ambiguous, and therefore most interesting, doc I previewed is Better This World (Get Movie Showtimes), Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway’s sobering look at two idealistic young Texans arrested for possessing Molotov cocktails in Minneapolis during the 2008 Republican National Convention. Their defense attorney and the filmmakers contend, more persuasively than do the lads, that the activist who enlisted the defendants — an FBI informant, it turns out — pushed and prodded them into actions they would not have otherwise undertaken.
This isn’t as clear-cut a case of, ahem, overzealousness as the FBI’s nefarious COINTELPRO campaign of infiltrating and sabotaging antiwar groups in the 1960s. Consequently, we (liberals, that is) are denied both self-righteous outrage and cathartic satisfaction. In lieu of a moral lightning rod, we’re given a sobering warning: The permanent “war on terror” has invested the DAs and administrators of the Federal justice system with absolute power and shocking hubris. Trespass at your own risk.