Noir City: the great San Francisco festival of film noir

I always look forward to the Noir City film fest, which is underway in San Francisco this week.  Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller.  The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD.  Here’s one of my experiences from a recent Noir City

Film noir, the genre of cynical stories that are starkly photographed to emphasize the darkness of the plots, originated in the US in the 1940s but was named by the French.  So it’s fitting that this year’s Noir City goes international, sampling film noir from France, Argentina, Mexico, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, Norway and Germany, along with some American noir set in the far East and South of the Border.  I’ll be checking out the Argentinian classics Never Open that Door and Hardly a Criminal, which are not available on DVD.

To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here.