This is the second of a series of articles on films screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, held April 9-18. The first part was posted April 13.
The recent San Francisco film festival had an almost inevitably schizophrenic character. Many of its official pronouncements, and this is the case at every festival at present, speak to the current obsession with identity politics in sections of the middle class. To a certain extent, however, the best filmmakers suggest the source of our problems lies elsewhere, in the harshness of life imposed on men and women of every ethnicity and gender by global capitalism.