3:00 PM screening, 5:15 PM seminar
Kabuki 8 Theatres
1881 Post Street (at Fillmore)
$30 for film and seminar
In association with the San Francisco International Film Festival
Writer/director Bent Hamer and writer/producer Jim Stark speak with author Stephen Elliott about the process and challenges of adapting literary work for the screen, following the San Francisco International Film Festival’s screening of their new film, Factotum. Topics in this special one-hour edition of the 826 Writers’ Seminars for Adults include the difficulties of adapting Charles Bukowski's books, writing roles for specific actors, working collaboratively and much more.
Tickets are available through the San Francisco International Film Festival box office.
About the artists:
Bent Hamer was born in Sandefjord, Norway in 1956. He made his feature debut later in life than most directors, as he was approaching 40. Eggs (1995) premiered at Cannes, as did his deadpan opus Kitchen Stories (2003). Factotum is his fourth film. "I don't do regular rehearsals," Hamer says. "I don't do much directing either. But I talk a lot to the actors."
Jim Stark first became involved with film when he helped Jim Jarmusch finance, produce and sell the low budget independent hit Stranger Than Paradise (winner of the Camera D’Or in Cannes and the U.S. National Society of Film Critics’ award as Best Picture of the year). He went on to act as a producer on three more Jarmusch feature films (Down by Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth), as well as two short films. Jim’s producing credits also include Alex Rockwell’s In the Soup (Grand Prize, Sundance Film Festival), Gregg Araki’s The Living End, Christopher Munch’s Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day and Adrienne Shelly’s I'll Take You There. Jim co-wrote and produced Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever.
Stephen Elliott is the author of the novels Jones Inn, A Life Without Consequences, What It Means To Love You, and Happy Baby, and the memoir Looking Forward To It Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The American Political Process. He is also the editor of two anthologies, Politically Inspired and Stumbling And Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction. On the second Monday of each month he hosts the Progressive Reading Series, a literary benefit at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco, to support progressive congressional candidates nationwide.
About the film:
Factotum
Norway 2005, 93 minutes
Directed by Bent Hamer
Screenplay by Bent Hamer and Jim Stark
CAST Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei, Fisher Stevens, Adrienne Shelly, Karen Young, Didier Flamand
Bent Hamer brings his offbeat Scandinavian sensibility to the seedy American underbelly in this droll adaptation of writer/barfly Charles Bukowski's 1975 novel of the same name. A portrait of the artist as a young alcoholic, the film imagines Bukowski as an unapologetic failure buoyed by a reservoir of dignity and self-styled integrity. Matt Dillon, fresh from his gripping role in Crash (SFIFF 2005), gives a calm, calibrated performance as Henry Chinaski, the author's thinly veiled alter ego. Hank has three hobbies-drinking, screwing and writing-which he sustains through an endless parade of menial jobs. (Webster's defines "factotum" as "a person having many diverse activities or responsibilities" and "a general servant," and both fit Chinaski.) Committed to nothing and no one, except for the stories he's driven to write and send off to a distant magazine, Chinaski anesthetizes his alienation with alcohol. And yet, incredibly, Hank views his life with bemusement rather than desperation. When he falls into a relationship with hard-living Jan (Lili Taylor, in a startlingly vulnerable turn), who also survives on the fringes, a shot at some kind of normal life seems to be in the cards. Their complicated affair is an amalgam of tenderness and brutality, like Bukowski's prose, and presented with the same bluntness and lack of sentimentality. Set in a Minneapolis stuck somewhere in time, not unlike the director's native Norway, Factotum exposes the urgency-and the impossibility-of two people connecting in an indifferent world. -Michael Fox