February is the month of couples, romance, and intimate passions. Mood-killer alert: It’s also the month when the Academy Awards are handed out (Sunday, February 24, 2013) in a ceremony that often has the unintended effect of reminding us that filmmakers and actors of previous generations far exceeded the current crop. If you’re a movie lover, you’ve learned to embrace the long view: Great works stand the unforgiving test of time, and our favorite screen stars are blessedly immortal. In other words, memory is a function of love (and resentment, yes, but we’re taking the high road here), and films help us remember — and reflect.
Along with all the pink and red tributes to St. Valentine, February brings a celebration of black history. The African American Center of the San Francisco Public Library presents a trio of free Sunday afternoon screenings and discussions, beginning February 3 with contemporary Bay Area shorts and music videos curated and hosted by San Francisco documentary filmmaker Kevin Epps. Films about the visionary Marcus Garvey and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. anchor the February 10 program, with an adoring salute to the courageous and unyielding Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, among other black women, slated for February 17. (In related news, keep an eye out later this year for Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, Shola Lynch’s documentary about Angela Davis’s arrest and trial in the early 1970s.) For more information visit sfpl.org.
If we view enthusiasm as a manifestation of love, the rabid audiences for the annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival (February 7-21, 2013 at the Roxie, Shattuck and other venues) are perennially smitten. Their appetite for adventurous date flicks is rewarded this year with a raft of offbeat yarns including a pair of edgy narratives about couples with strangely fierce loyalties. British wunderkind Ben Wheatley (Kill List) treats Bay Area filmgoers to the U.S. premiere of his eagerly anticipated and willfully discomfiting murder comedy Sightseers (February 9 and 11 at the Roxie, February 12 at the Shattuck). Actress and producer Amy Seimetz — note that name for future reference — makes her feature directorial debut with Sun Don’t Shine (February 15 and 16, Roxie), an intense road movie about Florida lovers on a mysterious mission. The world premiere of Gregory Hatanaka’s Blue Dream (February 16 and 20, Roxie), starring James Duval as an L.A. journalist discombobulated at the end of an era, is another hot ticket. For more information visit sfindie.com.
Michio Okake, Still from Kurejii Rabn (Crazy Love), 1968.