the 2005 hi/lo film festival!
April 14 to 17, 2005 at the Red Vic in San Francisco
& Oakland's Parkway Theater
Raves for the 2005 hi/lo Film Festival:
"The Hi/Lo Film Festival has its great ideas in place. It provides a sampling of works from all around the country [and] there is an eclectic selection here that personifies what being different is. And it's worth it." - Filmthreat.com Festival Preview
"Back for its eighth year of presenting "high concept/low budget" cinema, the Hi/Lo Film Festival packs three shorts programs and two documentary features into four days of free-thinking creative combustion." - San Francisco Bay Guardian Review
"Piece by Piece gets this graffiti culture completely right, in all its ways and arguments about crews, attitudes, and whatever else is on these artists' minds." -Filmthreat.com Review of "Piece by Piece" (hi/lo 2005 documentary feature)
What: the 8th hilo film festival
Where: The Red Vic Movie House - 1727 Haight St. San Francisco
Parkway Theater - 1824 Park Blvd. Oakland
When:
Shorts Program 1 - Thursday 7:15pm & Friday 9:15pm- Red Vic
Shorts Program 2 - Thursday 9:15pm & Saturday 9:15 - Red Vic
Shorts Program 3 - Friday 7:15pm - Red Vic; 6pm Sunday - Parkway
Documentary 1 - Skating is not... w/shorts - Saturday 5pm - Red Vic
Feature Documentary Piece by Piece w/shorts Saturday at 7:15pm - Red Vic
Tix: $8 at the door on buy at www.hilofilmfestival.com
Saturday 5pm screening of Skating is not... is a $5 show!
Info & Tix for the public: www.hilofilmfestival.com or 415.558.7721
What is the hilo film festival? Or Why $40 million can kill a good idea.
Originally organized in 1997 by the San Francisco production company and comedy collective Killing My Lobster the hi/lo film festival has evolved into a major West Coast showcase for independent low-budget film makers. The fest runs in the Haightâs historic Red Vic Movie House and Oaklandâs pizza & pub Parkway Theater for four nights of shorts, docs, narratives, experimentals and animations.
Now in its eighth year, the hi/lo film festival continues to prove that big imaginations are more important than fat wallets. Films featured range from animations, short narratives and abstract imagistic explorations to micro-features, documentaries, and uncategorizable creations. Though in most cases they are as different and distinct as night and day, the films all belong in the same festival. They are high concept works made on minimal budgets that place ideas and creativity over imitation and slickness and each, in its own way, proves that talented, dedicated people can bring their visions to the big screen.
Hi-lights of the 2005 hilo film festival:
40 films selected from over 500 submissions will be screened at the festival including:
8 Films by San Francisco filmmakers joining films from Florida to Oregon, Belgium to Burbank, London to Texas and a lot of places in between.
Documentaries about: SF's graffiti history, a Berkeley architect who moves his parents into an unlikely creation, an all-girl indie-rock band playing their prom, the windmills at Altamont, and a look at youth culture through the eyes of skateboarders across the country
Music Videos about electric can openers, girls who fly through space and an interpretation of the Nutcracker suite choreographed with lawn mowers and weedwackers.
Reality Video featuring a dramatic show down between a newspaper pilferer and his surveillance camera equipped neighbor.
And lots of beautiful, hilarious, soulful and insane low budget films that prove you donât need a lot of money to make a great movie!
What the Press has said about past hilo festivals:
The Hi/Lo collection of shorts revels in indie film at its silly strangest, but serious works find a place in this festival too. - San Francisco Bay Guardian.
The [hilo] films are charming, quirky, and far better than the major-budget pap that crawls out of Hollywood. - SF Weekly
The Hi/Lo Film Festival has returned to provide San Franciscans with a mix of high-concept and low-budget film genius. A rollicking good time is virtually guaranteed...films include singing ponies, Howard Roark, Air Supply, animated hot dogs, and an entire feature dedicated to cover bands. - SF Flavorpill.com
Screening times for specific films and film descriptions available on this site. Please call for a PREVIEW VIDEO!
Media Contact: Marc Vogl, hilo film festival organizer * 415.558.7721
info@hilofilmfestival.com * www.hilofilmfestival.com
Below are some great reviews of the 2004 festival starting with this nice bit of indy media analysis from Kitchensink Magazine.
Thanks to 7x7 magazine who put us in their top 5 "must-do" festivals. We're mentioned alongside the Film Arts Festival, the SF International, the Asian-American Festival and the SF Gay and Lesbian Festival.
hi/lo film festival is the SF Bay Guardian's Critic's Pick:
Proving that it doesn't take $100 million to make a decent movie, the seventh annual Hi/Lo Film Festival features
three days of "high-concept, low-budget" shorts and features. There just aren't enough films out there like Roger Beebe's
kitschy "Famous Irish Americans," a graphic lecture insisting that black celebrities with Irish last names really are Irish,
or Judy Fiskin's "50 Ways to Set the Table," which highlights competitive "tablescaping." If you're into parodies, director
Hanelle Culpepper replaces HBO's estrogen-powered coterie with curious toddlers in "Six and the City." Not surprisingly, quirky
humor is a top priority in this event presented by San Francisco comedy collective Killing My Lobster, but expect smatterings of
seriousness as well. Sonja Shah's "Something Between Her Hands" documents Cambodian sex-workers, and filmmaker Tom Putnam takes us on
a mind trip with "Tom Hits His Head," in which a genteel office worker suffers from a nervous breakdown. Though a few works on the bill
comply only with the "low-budget" part of the deal, most are good for at least a hearty laugh."
-Kimberly Chun, SF Bay Guardian, March 31, 2004
Monster Road is the SF Weekly's Pick For This Saturday Night:
"Sweatshops have nothing on stop-motion animation studios. Every second of a stop-motion film contains
24 individual shots, each of which must be painstakingly staged and lit. Consider the infinite patience it takes to produce, say,
just one freaking Gumby episode, and it's easy to understand why master Claymation technician Bruce Bickford is such an eccentric.
In his desolate Seattle-area home, his only friends his Alzheimer's-patient dad and those clay "little guys," Bickford has been making
underground flicks in his basement for nearly 50 years. Even his best-known creation, the 1979 Frank Zappa vehicle Baby Snakes, is utterly
obscure, and Bickford himself is practically a nonentity. But as Monster Road- a funny, moving cinematic biography of him -- proves,
he lives an inner life so rich and bizarre that he hardly needs adulation."
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-Joyce Slaton, SF Weekly, March 31, 2004
and the SF Bay Guardian recommends Monster Roadtoo:
"*Monster Road Clay animator Bruce Bickford doesn't claim to be God, but considering he's been
bringing clay figures to life for more than 40 years, the guy might as well be. Director Brett
Ingram's feature-length documentary explores the intriguing, often macabre world of Bickford's art,
while also delving into the artist's childhood and family background. The other major character is
Bruce's father, George, a retired rocket scientist living with his son in a home studio outside
Seattle. Intertwining a war-hungry U.S. culture, the Bickfords' philosophies, and the intricate
beauty of claymation, Monster Road is at once a private and public history, told in a somewhat minor
key. But gentle humor offsets the nostalgia and the younger Bickford's childlike inclinations prove
to be just as charming to watch as his livelihood."
-Kimberly Chun, SF Bay Guardian, March 31, 2004
San Francisco Bay Guardian
SF Weekly
San Francisco Chronicle
SF Flavorpill
"If you've forgotten that big imaginations are more important to the creative filmmaking process than, say, Miramax's big fat wallets, you might want to take note of the Hi/Lo Film Festival."
-- www.sfgate.com
"Films that you won't find at the multiplex."
-- www.sfstation.com
"Animation, claymation, documentary and 'uncategorizable' creations grace the screen in a communal effort to spit in the face of the increasing standardization of the movie business."
-- San Francisco Metropolitan
"Hûen a filmek kötségvetéséhez a jegyeket a festiválra csak 7 dollárért mérik, ami alatta van a szokásos belépõk árainak."
-- Index.Kalifornia
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