Science fiction’s open secret is that it has never really been about the future. As William Gibson explained to an interviewer in 2007, echoing earlier genre criticism by writers such as Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ, science fiction is, at its heart, “speculative fiction, but you don’t really have the future to work with, so you are always working with history and with the present.”

Gibson’s ecumenical gloss on genre fiction provides a helpful rubric under which to view some of SFIFF’s odder ducks. Although each of the following films slot differently genre-wise — apocalyptic road movie, surrealist fantasy, cybernetic thriller — the “what ifs?” posed by their imaginings of alternate presents (and in one case, an alternate past) certainly qualify them as speculative fictions. To what degree their directors are skilled at telling such stories remains open to speculation.

Films about our species’ enduring capacity to be inhumane toward its own are perennials at film festivals (and, one can suppose, they will continue to be so as long as sides are drawn, wars are waged, and violence is sanctioned as the most expedient solution). This is certainly the case with the San Francisco International Film Festival, which offered visceral stopovers at the Sri Lankan civil war (Between Two Worlds); the Rwandan genocides of a decade ago (The Day God Walked Away); the Third Balkan War (Ordinary People); the 2008 Russian-Georgian war (Russian Lessons); and the various battlefronts, past and present, that have gripped the Mid-East (Budrus, Lebanon, Port of Memory), including those which have become outposts in our own government’s “War on Terror” (Restrepo, The Oath). […]

At last year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, in his State of Cinema address, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly spoke of a media landscape inundated with screens, in which you’re as likely to watch a movie on your PDA, or even a grocery checkout screen, as you are in a theater. The message was clear: the way in which we create and consume films is changing. To some extent, we have been living in this brave new world for some time, so SFIFF’s choice of photographer Mary Ellen Mark to deliver this year’s State of Cinema address carries with it an implicit nostalgia for cinema’s old world. […]

“Last year we celebrated our past, but tonight we begin our future,” commented San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat in his opening night remarks of the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. Leggat was referring to the Film Society’s plans to expand its identity into a more far-reaching and consistently present local force in terms of education outreach and year-round exhibition. But the promises, and more pointedly, the potential perils of what lies ahead in the larger scheme of things, seemed to be on many filmmakers’ minds as well. […]

One of the greatest pleasures of the 50th SF International Film Festival was Forever, Heddy Honigmann’s 2006 study of the living among the dead at Paris’ Père-Lachese cemetery. Between footage of the sun-dappled necropolis in all its hushed, springtime glory, Honigmann (who received last year’s Persistence of Vision award) profiles several regular visitors, who in the course of discussing an attachment to a particular resident — whether that dweller be Frédéric Chopin or a deceased husband — reveal a great deal about how we commune with memory in our daily lives. […]

In his recent book Poor People, William T. Vollmann writes, “For me, poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state. It therefore remains somewhat immeasurable.” Despite the enormity of such a disclaimer, Vollmann attempts to calibrate a calculus of misery. Portuguese director Pedro Costa seems motivated by a similarly conflicted impetus. Over the past decade, Costa has made a trilogy of films with the working poor of Fontainhas, a sprawling slum outside Lisbon. Trading Vollmann’s pained self-consciousness for a meticulous formalism that favors rehearsal over reportage, Costa’s remove sets into relief the humanity of his subjects, rather than objectifying or patronizing them. […]