Program Guide - San Francisco International Film Festival - San ...

Big Nights
58
UnMaDE BEDs
WeST coaST premIere
EnGLanD
2008
92 Min
DiR Alexis Dos Santos
PRoD Soledad Gatti-Pascual, Peter Ettedgui
sCR Alexis Dos Santos
CaM Jakob Ihre
ED Olivier Bugge Coutté
CasT Déborah Francois, Fernando Tielve,
Michiel Huisman, Iddo Goldberg, Richard Lintern
PRinT soURCE The Bureau Film Company, 2nd
Floor/18 Phipp Street, London EC2A 4NU,
UK. FAX: 44-20-7033- 0555. EMAIL: mail@
thebureau.co.uk.
In English, Spanish and French with English
subtitles.
The youthful, sensuous and beautifully assured second
feature from Argentine filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos
(Glue, 2006) is a lyrical tale of two solitary expats,
wayward young souls crossing paths in the cosmopolitan
art-rock milieu of a sprawling East London squat. Twentyyear-old
Axl (played with striking, reckless innocence
by a superb Fernando Tielve) has come from Spain to
find his long-lost English father. Raised traveling, Axl’s
rootlessness has become a restless way of life. He drinks
himself into forgetting at night, awaking like a promiscuous
foundling among another set of nonchalant hosts and
lovers. Meanwhile, posing as a student in need of housing,
he hires his realtor father but hovers on the edge of
revealing himself. Vera (an achingly vulnerable, gently arch
Déborah François) is a wounded French-speaking beauty
who oozes continental ennui at her bookstore job—where
she’s not above discouraging a customer from buying
a book she finds ridiculous. Responding to a stranger’s
flirtation by wrapping caution and control in adventure
and mystery in pursuit of a casual affair, she finds herself
falling (like him) desperately in love. Visceral yet dreamlike,
Unmade Beds lolls moodily and infectiously in a fluid
visual style, heightened by a stirring soundtrack featuring
cameos by contemporary U.K. bands. When Axl and Vera
finally meet, the encounter is both decidedly low-key and
deeply resonant, a drunken tête-à-tête between strangers
wearing costume animal heads. It is Dos Santos’ sly, pitchperfect
nod to both our most basic natures as well as the
masks we hide them behind.
-Robert Avila
CLosinG niGHT
THUrSdaY, maY 7
FiLM
7:00 pm caSTro THeaTre
429 caSTro STreeT (Near marKeT)
PaRTY
9:30 pm–1:00 am
mezzaNINe
444 JeSSIe STreeT (aT mINT)
Join us for an extraordinary closing night celebrating the
wrap of another great Festival. Following a screening of
Unmade Beds, the exuberant feature from Argentine
filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos (with actors Déborah
François and Fernando Tielve and director Santos in
person), mingle with fellow film lovers and dance the night
away at Mezzanine, one of SOMA’s hottest clubs. You
must be 21+ to attend the party.
aLExis Dos sanTos
Alexis Dos Santos’s first feature was 2006’s internationally
hailed, multiple award–winning Glue, an improvisationfueled
coming-of-age story set in a small town in his
native Argentina. Having studied film in Buenos Aires and
Barcelona, Dos Santos came to London’s National Film
and Television School in 1998, honing his craft under
Stephen Frears and making several shorts, including
the award-winning Sand. It’s striking, if appropriate, that
his second feature, a film about people trying to find
themselves in a chaotic and uncertain world, comes
grounded in such confident cinematic instincts.
THU maY 7 7:00 caSTro UNma07c FIlm oNlY
THU maY 7 7:00 caSTro cloSe FIlm & parTY
THU maY 7 7:00 caSTro cloSev vIp FIlm & parTY