PREVIEW Moving in its fourth year from autumn to an early summer slot, San Francisco’s CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival now provides an apt alternative-entertainment prelude to Memorial Day — because what, after all, is more patriotic these days than asking the question, "What are we fighting for?" Fittingly, the opener is about Big Oil. Sandy Cioffi (who’ll be present) at one point spent five days in the custody of Nigerian security forces while making Sweet Crude, an investigation of Shell Oil Corp. and other companies’ violence and environmental ruination in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Likewise, Robert Cornellier’s Black Wave documents the seemingly neverending efforts to exact justice from ExxonMobil over the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years ago. Other highlights in this year’s all-documentary edition of CounterCorp include Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, about the escalation of conflict and privatization around that most precious (and vanishing) natural resource; Steven Greenstreet’s Killer at Large, which analyzes the industrial agribiz/food processing causes behind an obesity epidemic that has begun reversing Americans’ previously steady trend toward longer life expectancies; and Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a "mash-up movie" about the wars between copyright law and free expression. No doubting where Gaylor stands on that issue: his entire movie is already available to download and remix yourself at www.opensourcecinema.org.
COUNTERCORP ANTI-CORPORATE FILM FESTIVAL Thurs/28–Sat/30, $5–$10. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.countercorp.org