SFFILM Festival: three international gems

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens on Thursday and runs through April 27. There are plenty of big events, including the opening night Rebuilding starring Josh O’Connor (Challengers, La Chimera, The Crown) and Andre Holland appearing to receive an award and present his latest film Love, Brooklyn. However, don’t overlook the international cinema at SFFILM – here are three gems.

• Magma: Marina Fois plays the leader of the scientific team that monitors the active volcano on Guadeloupe. She is seasoned, confident and not prone to panic. The government relies on her to counsel whether and when an upcoming eruption will force evacuation of island residents – and the politicians are not comfortable interpreting her probabilities. While no one wants to endanger lives, everyone remembers an evacuation that went horribly wrong in 1976. So, the stakes are high, and she is the public face of the decision to evacuate or not. When the government overreacts, her job gets much tougher. The clock ticks and the pressure builds in this taut 82-minute thrill ride, as director Cypriot Vial, who co-wrote, unspools the action. The performances by Fois and Theo Christine as her grad student assistant are fantastic. Magma won the SFFILM award for depicting science in a narrative film.
• Triumph: Looking for a new role after the fall of communism, Bulgarian army leaders follow a psychic’s advice to burrow into the earth in search of a portal to a space alien’s mothership. If this seems farfetched, look up the historical event called “The Tsarichina Hole” (illustrated in the closing credits). Following the East European filmmaking tradition of exposing the absurdities in communist bureaucracy, directors and co-writers Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov pile on layers of droll hilarity. The psychic gets everyone to adopt pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo like “deactimation“. The army commander in charge brings his disturbed teen daughter (Maria Bakalova of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), who has her own awakenings and begins to out-psychic the psychic.
• Rains Over Babel: In her stunning debut feature, writer-director Gala del Sol takes us into an imagined world of Cali, Columbia, bars connected to the Underworld (not the just criminal underworld), ruled by a sexy loan shark who is the Grim Reaper. Among the denizens are a sleek and smarmy bartender, a prudish preacher, a gangland enforcer who’s been dead for twenty years, a talking salamander and more drag queens than you can shake a stick at. The story, fraught with desperation and Faustian bargains, flies by. Del Sol says she marries magic realism with gritty realism, and Rains Over Babel is visually orgiastic. The intricate production designs of the interiors could be by a demented Wes Anderson. The sound design is jarring and totally original. As an auteur, Gala del Sol is thinking so far outside of the box that you can’t tell that there’s a box.