.Keeper of the Crown Jewels

Reeling in the years with the SF Film Society's chief programmer, Linda Blackaby.

For Linda Blackaby, the festival never ends. Her job —
providing films to show at the society’s multitude of events —
must seem like a Möbius strip, a perpetual reel of celluloid with
no beginning, numerous finales, and scant downtime. The San Francisco
Film Society’s director of programming is constantly looking for films
to fill her organization’s ambitious schedule, which used to ebb and
flow with the regular springtime arrival of the San Francisco
International Film Festival. No more. These days, a serious, major film
festival means year-round programming.

“The festival is the jewel in the crown, the tip of the iceberg,”
explained Blackaby in a phone chat from her office at the Film
Society’s headquarters in the Presidio. But with such ongoing
calendared minifests as the SF International Animation Festival, New
Italian Cinema, French Cinema Now, and the SFFS Screen at the Sundance
Kabuki on her desk, it takes what Blackaby calls a small army to dig up
enough films to make the necessary splash.

She’s at the head of that army. Alongside her staff of two
programmers and input from Audrey Chang, who runs the Golden Gate
Awards (the competitive component of the SF International fest), the
effort also involves platoons of movie production and distribution
people from all over the world, plus two special consultants, one each
in Europe and Asia. Then there are the opinions and predilections of
the film society’s charismatic executive director, Graham Leggat. “The
festival happens once a year,” says Blackaby, “but now we’re developing
a pipeline that operates full-time. It adds to the complexity.”

Blackaby reads the trades, talks to sales agents, and watches
hundreds of films every year, often on a computer screen but sometimes
at other film fests. “I went to Thessaloniki for the first time this
year,” she noted. “Also to Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastian, and
Vancouver. I took some time to go to Locarno last summer. Oh, and
Sundance and Rotterdam, too.” That’s one heck of a lot of film
festivalizing. “It’s not much compared to some other festival
programmers.”

As in the past, when it comes to struggling national film industries
around the globe, Hollywood is still the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in
the room of marketing. It’s hard to make a dent in Brad Pitt. But not
all state-sponsored cinemas are obliged to justify their existence
commercially — for instance, some countries have regulations on
the percentage of national films that must be shown on local screens.
According to Blackaby, among the ever-shifting hot spots for
festival-style films are countries in the combined UK, the former
Yugoslavia, Turkey, and the Scandinavian nations.

A film festival obviously needs narrative-feature premieres for
publicity, but Blackaby has a built-in fondness for documentaries,
perhaps stemming from her background in progressive politics and
university film societies in Oregon (she grew up in Portland, where
“our family went to movies a lot”). Since Blackaby joined the SF Film
Society in 2001, the feature documentary category has become one of the
highlights of the festival each year. “The level of prize money has
gone up,” she observes, “and the result has been gratifying. We’re
starting to get a higher level of work submitted.”

The SF International has long been championed for its lack of
pretentiousness and its ground-level appeal to the Bay Area’s
sophisticated audience. People don’t go the SFIFF to buy and sell or to
be seen, but to simply feast on the smorgasbord of world cinema. For
Blackaby, the festival also functions as a meeting place for the
creative community. “When filmmakers come here, they can go to ITVS, to
Dolby, and meet other filmmakers, socially as well as for business. I
don’t like the word ‘networking.'” She’s especially looking forward to
again hosting French director Claire Denis, an SFIFF regular, and her
film 35 Shots of Rum this year, and has fond memories of
greeting Argentine auteur Fernando Solanas (Argentina Latente)
and his filmmaking son, Juan Diego Solanas, in 2008. Another thrill
from the past: last year’s opening-night reception for director
Catherine Breillat. “She was so happy, absolutely joyous. She had this
wicked laugh,” Blackaby recalls.

What kind of movies does the programmer of the longest-running film
festival in the western hemisphere watch for fun at home? “I read,”
admits Blackaby. “I have a hard time watching DVDs for pleasure. Not
even Blu-Ray. I don’t have one of those megascreen home video theaters.
I’d rather go watch anything in a movie theater, like going to the
Castro and seeing The Exiles or watching The Turquoise
Necklace
. I went to Iron Man last summer and, surprisingly,
I liked it. I’m really looking forward to the restored Once Upon a
Time in the West
we’re getting this year. It’s always amazing to me
how much better a film is on a big screen than on a little one.”

As a Film Generation veteran who has taught and organized festivals
all her career (she founded the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema
before moving to the Bay Area to take a job at the SF Asian American
Film Festival), Blackaby’s list of favorite filmmakers has a classic
tinge: Cassavetes, Bergman, René Clair, Chaplin, the
aforementioned Denis, and local legend Francis Coppola. “I’m a
generalist,” she explains. “I like a well-made narrative based on a
play just as much as a good documentary.”

In Blackaby’s eyes, the epitome of the film festival experience
would probably resemble something that happened to her one evening in
New York when Emile de Antonio, the leftist maker of such
antiestablishment docs as In the Year of the Pig and
McCarthy: Death of a Witch Hunter, took a group out for sushi
— then a novelty cuisine. Blackaby had never had sushi before,
but de Antonio held forth and offered a course on the subject, how to
order it and what to avoid, and charmed his colleagues. Blackaby
swears: “I’ve loved sushi ever since.”

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