A disturbingly alienated Japanese man, a zombie-like stranger to his wife and sons, preoccupies himself with his curious business. An Indian poet of enormous empathy is likewise estranged from her husband and children, paying the price every day for her determination to express herself. A trio of dedicated professionals, careening around Bulgaria’s capital in a van treating medical emergencies, coalesce into a chain-smoking family. The aging residents of a dwindling Japanese mountain village maintain their placid routines in the shadow of mortality. Finally, in Haiti, the post-earthquake invasion of a veritable army of international “helpers” — like unwanted guests who won’t leave — freezes the country in a kind of arrested development.
These excerpts from the typically robust documentary program of the San Francisco International Film Festival, beginning tonight and continuing through May 9, 2013, upend the familiar function of documentaries as chronicles and exposés of overarching social problems. Instead, the filmmakers approach their subjects, and societies, from the oblique angles of an individual, or group of individuals. The viewer is asked to read between the lines (of dialogue), and extrapolate the bigger picture. It’s fascinating fun, albeit more than a little unnerving, for those in the mood for an eye-opening challenge.
Rent a Family Inc.
Danish director Kaspar Astrup Schroder follows his oddball 2009 portrait, The Invention of Dr. Nakamats, with an even more intimate study of another autocratic Japanese male. Rent a Family Inc. (Friday, May 3 and Sunday, May 5 at the Kabuki and Tuesday, May 7 at the Pacific Film Archive) starts out as a bizarro view of Japan. In it, the obsession with rituals and “face” compels people to hire surrogate parents and relatives to fill out wedding parties and fulfill other functions. But the film quickly morphs into a disconcerting study of the compartmentalized owner of one such business, whose desperate suburban existence calls to mind narrative filmmaker Laurence Cantet’s devastating 2001 masterpiece Time Out. We may not be sure what to take away from Rent a Family Inc. in regards to Japan, but we will not soon forget Ryuichi Ichinokawa. Indeed, we’re so amazed by Ichinokawa’s candid participation in the film that we half-expect him to be revealed as an actor.
British director Kim Longinotto also returns to the setting of her previous film, Pink Saris, to profile another Indian icon engaged in the uphill struggle for women’s rights. The woman at the center of Salma (Thursday, May 2 at the Kabuki, Saturday, May 4 at the PFA. and Sunday, May 5 at the New People Cinema), like many Muslim women in South India, was pulled from school by her family once she reached puberty, and locked up until she agreed to marry the man they had chosen. After she’d been married for a few years, Salma enlisted her mother’s help in getting her poems to a publisher. Longinotto presents scene after scene of Salma gently encouraging the women in her family to pursue more freedom and richer lives, but the romantic delusion of a heroic pioneer (which the filmmaker never subscribes to) is eclipsed by the painful realization that change is a long way off for the vast majority of Muslim women.
