By Jeffrey M. Anderson
The first Saturday of the SF International Film Festival is usually loaded. This year, the broad array of movies included some disappointments: the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts showed that Phil’s a genius with wide-ranging talents and interesting friends, but it lacked drama; Ermanno Olmi’s One Hundred Nails was a letdown from the director of the masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).
The Castro had the day’s best films, starting with Carlos Saura’s magical Fados, so far one of my favorites in the festival. Fado has recently come back in a big way and Saura does little more than stage several music videos back-to-back with no commentary. But each segment overflows with its own narrative and emotional power, aided by Saura’s expert staging and cinematography (the screen fills with huge squares of bold colors).
Carlos Saura’s Fados completes a trilogy by the director