The 59th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, or SFIFF for those in a hurry, kicks off this Thursday and runs through May 5th. The festival's made a big change this year, moving its headquarters from the Sundance Kabuki to the newly opened Alamo Drafthouse at the New Mission. Films will also be shown at the Victoria, the Roxie on 16th Street, and at the Castro Theatre.

Tickets can be purchased online (click the Buy Tickets button on a film's info page), and at the Alamo's pre-festival box office located in the lobby, daily from 3-7 p.m. until the 21st.

Since the theaters are a little spread out this year, the festival has teamed up with Chariot for shuttle service between venues. Learn more about how they'll get you around here.

Here are a few of the films and events we're looking forward to:

Love & Friendship

The opening night film is from director Whit Stillman and reunites The Last Days of Disco stars Chole Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in a period piece based on the Jane Austen novella "Lady Susan." Beckinsale and the director are scheduled to make an appearance at the Castro Theatre screening. April 21, 7 p.m.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story

If you thought a documentary about the JT Leroy scandal already came out, you'd be right. The Cult of JT LeRoy, by local filmmaker Marjorie Sturm, played the Indie Fest last year, (and you can watch it online as well). But this latest doc, by director Jeff Feuerzeig, seems to have the support of "JT Leroy," aka Laura Albert herself. She's scheduled to join the director at a post-screening Q&A moderated by screenwriter James Toback. Castro Theatre, April 22, 9 p.m.

Peter J. Owens Award: An Afternoon With Ellen Burstyn: Requiem For a Dream

Some may only know Ellen Burstyn from her recent turn as Claire Underwood's mother on House of Cards, and that is a shame. The great Ms. Burstyn won an Oscar for 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and was nominated five other times, including for her devastating role in Requiem For a Dream (2000). She'll be discussing her career on stage at the Victoria before introducing a screening of the latter film. Victoria Theatre, April 23, 2 p.m.

Assassination Classroom

Part of the festival's Dark Wave program centered on late night screenings of the weird and the horrible, this Japanese live-action film is based on a popular manga series turned anime series. At the center of the story is an octopus-like alien turned-teacher to a group of Japanese students who are intent on killing him — with his help. Alamo Drafthouse, April 23, 11 p.m.

All These Sleepless Nights

Part of the festival's Vanguard series, this Polish-language film from director Michał Marczak is an experimental, free-form, year-in-the-life portrait of Warsaw art school students, their drunken revelries and all-night raves, deep talks, and sexual encounters, depicting modern-day Poland as well as the awkward but joyous transition between adolescence and adulthood. Alamo Drafthouse, April 24, 9 p.m.

Mel Novikoff Award: An Afternoon with Janus Films & the Criterion Collection

If you're a film nerd, you definitely have a handful of Criterion Collection releases in your library. This year the festival pays tribute to the company's work with a screening of the Coen Brothers' debut Blood Simple and an onstage interview with the Coens, in person at the Castro. Castro Theatre, April 30, 3 p.m.

The Watermelon Woman

Director Cheryl Dunye's 1996 debut — the first feature-length narrative film written and directed by out black lesbian about black lesbians — incorporates mockumentary-style filmmaking along with classic clips from movies that don't exist, to tell the story of a video store clerk working on a documentary about an obscure black actress she sees in a 1930's movie. Dunye, who is now a professor at SFSU, will be in attendance at the showing. Castro Theatre, May 1, 2 p.m.

Of course, these are just a small selection from the almost 200 films that will be presented at the festival. And remember, most screenings that are sold out will have rush tickets available. Just be prepared to wait in line; but hopefully, indoors, and with a cocktail from the Alamo's Bear Vs Bull bar in your hand.

There's been another cinematic coup for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, newly open at Mission and 21st Street. After scoring Star Wars: The Force Awakens for their grand opening and bringing in Lost Weekend Video plus the enormous Le Video collection, the cinema-bar-restaurant-video-rental concept will now serve as the main venue for the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 21 to May 5). In a Tuesday announcement on their website, the SF Film Society staked their 2016 claim on “San Francisco's newest (Alamo Drafthouse New Mission) and oldest (Roxie Theater) screens to bring the best of world cinema to Bay Area audiences.”

The festival’s opening and closing night screenings will still at be held at the Castro Theatre. “We love the Castro,” SF Film Society executive director Noah Cowan told SFist. "It’s been the home to our biggest nights over the decades.” Cowan noted there will be many additional film festival screenings at the Castro this year as well.

“But the Alamo Drafthouse will feel like the center of the festival, in many ways,” he said.

This marks a huge change from the SFIFF's traditional primary venue being the Sundance Kabuki Theater, which will not be holding film festival screenings this year.

The Alamo will now serve as the main hub for the festival’s 200+ screenings, with other shows at the Castro, the Victoria, the Roxie and in Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive. The festival is also adding the digital arts studio/hackerspace venue Gray Area on Mission Street for many of its non-screening events.

And it looks as though the Lost Weekend Video and Le Video collections will be available for rental when the film festival rolls around — recent visitors to the Alamo Drafthouse have seen the video racks under construction (the kiosk was earlier promised to be open by February).

The burning question on this primary venue change is whether festival attendees will have to stand outside in the howling wind whilst waiting for the theaters to seat them, as they did when screenings were held at the Kabuki. “We’ll do our best to ensure that most people who need to wait significant amounts of time at the Alamo Drafthouse will be able to do so inside,” Cowan said.

The full program of the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival will be released on Tuesday, March 29, with the opening film on April 21.

Avengers: Age of Ultron — Everywhere

By the time you finish reading this sentence, this sequel will have made another million dollars.

Far From the Madding Crowd — Embarcadero

Latest adaption of the classic Thomas Hardy novel stars Carey Mulligan as the independent and beautiful Bathsheba, who must choose between the three very different men who fall in love with her. Meanwhile, I will continue to be, as I have been since reading the book in high school, annoyed by the use of the word "madding" in the title. In fact, I'd say it's downright maddening.

Adult Beginners — Presidio

Those jonesing for some Nick Kroll after the conclusion of his "Kroll Show" in March need look no further than this indie comedy in which he plays an entrepreneur in New York who loses it all, leaves Manhattan, and ventures to the suburbs to live with his pregnant sister and her family. Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale co-star.

Misery Loves Comedy — Roxie

Documentary from comedian Kevin Pollack about stand-up comedy, being funny, and what fuels it. Over 50 famous funny people are featured in the film offering anecdotes and insights, but if you want to learn about comedy from a viewpoint that isn't primarily white and male, you should probably look elsewhere.

SFIFF — Multiple Venues

The San Francisco International Film Festival enters its second week, and there are still plenty of movies and presentations to see. Here are a few picks for the weekend:

Tonight: The fantastic documentary Romeo Is Bleeding gets its first San Francisco showing with director, Jason Zeldes, and the film's subject, Donté Clark, expected to attend for a Q&A.

Saturday: Actor Jason Segel and director James Ponsoldt are scheduled to appear at the screening of The End of the Tour, in which Segel stars as author David Foster Wallace.

Sunday: The documentary Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents, with the film's director and producers in attendance. (And maybe even a Resident or two, though would we ever really know?)

The San Francisco International Film Festival lineup was announced today, and it brings a wealth of cinematic treasures—some of which might not play in the Bay Area again. Running April 23 - May 7 at multiple theaters across both sides of the Bay, the 181 films in the program might sound like a daunting proposition. Here's our pick of the films to catch at SFIFF:

Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine
It goes without saying that a film about one of the Bay Area's most famous and influential sons gets our attention. The SF Film Society knows that, and has slotted it as the opening night film. Fresh off the heels of his work on a Southern California cult and onto a Northern California cult that has gone global, it'll be fun to see what the muckracking documentarian Alex Gibney has uncovered with this time.

Jauja
Viggo Mortensen stars in a mind-bending Argentinian Western that is as much The Searchers as it is Interstellar. After a 19th century Danish explorer officer's daughter goes missing, he must journey into the Patagonian wilderness to find her. Not a whole lot happens in it (at least until the last 20 minutes), but its worth seeing on the big screen to bask in the wondrous beauty of the wild.

Hill Of Freedom
In this Korean comedy, a Japanese man travels to Seoul to find a former lover and deals with the pratfalls of cultural divides. The prolific Hong Sang-soo is South Korea's greatest unsung filmmaker, and his latest is another modest entry in his large body of work finding the humor and absurdity of everyday human interactions.

Black Coal, Thin Ice
A surprise hit in China, Black Coal, Thin Ice marks a strange, twisted departure from what normally tops the box office in the second largest movie market in the world. A noir murder mystery set in a desolately cold outer province, it has drawn comparisons to Fargo. But to compare director Diao Yinan to the Coen Brothers is unfair. Black Coal, Thin Ice taps into a vein of paranoia and distrust rarely seen in mainstream Chinese filmmaking. For more fascinating perspectives from China, also be sure to check out Wang Xiaoshuai Red Amnesia and the J.P. Sniadecki documentary The Iron Ministry

The Look Of Silence
Joshua Oppenheimer follows up his terrifying documentary The Act Of Killing with its highly-anticipated sequel. While Killing had controversially given the perpetrators of Indonesia's genocidal political violence the dominant voice in that film, The Look Of Silence turns the tables and follows around a victim of the atrocity as he confronts these perpetrators—including one that killed his brother.

Romeo Is Bleeding
Premiering at El Cerrito High School, one of the locations in the documentary, Romeo Is Bleeding focuses on Bay Area poet Donté Clark's effort in confronting the gang violence of Richmond. Clark works with teenagers from the Richmond Art Wave to adapt Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet for their community.

'Tangerine' (Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society)

Tangerine
One of the most buzzed-about films at Sundance, Tangerine is a "madcap adventure" of two trans individuals making their way across the neighborhoods of Los Angeles usually unseen on the big screen. Shot entirely on iPhones, Tangerine is the other Apple film worth seeing aside from the Steve Jobs doc.

Be sure to check out the rest of the lineup, and dates and times, here.

Starved as we are for celebrity sightings that don't involve Mark Zuckerberg or Robin Williams, we bring your attention this a.m. to the very important news that Ryan Gosling was in San Francisco last night. In fact he may not have checked out of his hotel yet, or he may be here for more than one day.

Gosling has been keeping a very low profile lately, but he was at the Tuesday night screening of a movie he's producing, White Shadow, which first premiered at Sundance this year and got a Grand Jury Prize nomination. It's directed by Noaz Deshe and it's the story of an albino boy in Tanzania, not quite a teenager, who's being hunted by witch doctors who want to chop him up for his prized albino body parts.

After the screening, which was at the Sundance Kabuki, he managed to score a table at State Bird Provisions because celebs can do that, and it looks like he may have been dining there with director Deshe.

The photo comes via the cellphone of the uncle of Twitterer Camille Ruvalcaba. But somehow Beth Spotswood heard the news last night, because she's that tied to the pulse, ladies and gentlemen.

Here's the red carpet photo of a scruffy, under-dressed Gosling. Because, after all, it's just the San Francisco Int'l Film Festival.

[Popsugar]
[BethSpotswood/Twitter]

The San Francisco International Film Festival is here, and tickets to this year's films are going like hotcakes. If you're looking to soak up a little culture this weekend, here are our top 5 picks for films (with tickets still available!). And while you're at it, check out the full festival lineup to plan next week's films before it's too late.

Friday, April 26

Populaire. 6:00 p.m., Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

"French savoir faire and Mad Men-style retro flair combine in this crowd-pleasing tribute to the effortless glamour of ‘50s Hollywood, an audience favorite in France that’s already being touted as this year’s The Artist ... Filling the screen with an eye-dropping parade of sensational vintage outfits and chic hairstyles, as well as incorporating enough retro pop hits to fill the Brill Building, this My Fair Lady for the speed-typing set is further anchored by François’ performance, which turns her plucky ‘50s heroine into a winning “pre-feminist feminist,” all without missing a key."

Saturday, April 27

Thérèse. 3:00 p.m., Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

"Thérèse is not an exercise in stylish depravity so much as an affecting, simmering psychological melodrama that creates a portrait of a central character no less dark than Hitchcock’s heroines, just differently shaded ... Trapped in a loveless marriage, stifled by societal convention and jealous of her best friend’s passionate affair, Thérèse makes a snap decision to alter the course of her life, with potentially deadly consequences."

A River Changes Course. 7:00 p.m., Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

"A former child refugee from the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in the 1970s, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam returns to her native land to create a vivid, compassionate and moving picture of the vanishing world of rural Cambodian farmers and fishermen. With a patient and attentive camera, Mam tells the story of three different families struggling to maintain their traditional ways of life as the modern world closes in around them."

Sunday, April 28

Leviathan. 4:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

"A thrilling adventure both on the high seas and in documentary storytelling, Leviathan immerses viewers in the waterlogged toil of fishermen off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the setting of Melville’s Moby Dick ... Remarkable sound design—a heavy-metal mix of clanging machinery, moaning pipes, indecipherable utterances and the ceaseless swirl of stormy seas—further enhances this existential sojourn into the dead of night and the plight of labor."

The Kings of Summer. 9:30 p.m. Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

"High school freshman Joe Toy and his sarcastic, widowed father Frank do nothing but fight, while his lifelong best friend Patrick has had it up to here with his well-meaning but insanely chipper mom and dad. Unwilling to spend one more day with such frustrating parents, the boys and eccentric tag-along Biaggio retreat to the woods for their summer vacation and build a ramshackle cabin as a declaration of independence, oblivious to the panic their disappearance creates."

The San Francisco Film Society has released the lineup of their 56th annual International Film Festival, and with 200+ films on order, it's sure to be a cultural binge with the inevitable FOMO hangover. Truth be told, it's impossible to soak up all the goodness that the SFIFF packs into its April 25th to May 9th run.

The festival will feature newsworthy main event headliners (Steven Soderberg, Richard Linklater) as well as a host of thoughtful international films, but it's also a showcase of indie American films and documentaries you might not get a chance to see elsewhere. Our favorite SFIFF moments of recent memory have included Don Hertzfeldt's work, the Hunter S. Thomson doc Gonzo and the affecting war documentary Restrepo.

Check out the full festival lineup to find the international films that speak to you (and buy your tickets now! No, seriously, RUSH is hell). In the meantime, here are our 10 picks for films that hit a little closer to home (descriptions are courtesy of the SFIFF catalog.)

1. Big Sur

Five years after On the Road transformed the literary landscape and made Kerouac the reluctant face of the Beat Generation, he returns to San Francisco to reunite with old friends like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Anthony Edwards), Michael McClure (Balthazar Getty) and Neal Cassady (Josh Lucas) and to attempt to get sober in an isolated Big Sur cabin ... Polish’s seventh collaboration with cinematographer M. David Mullen yields spectacular results both in the paradise on earth that is Big Sur and in San Francisco where locations include Tenderloin tenements, City Lights Bookstore and Tosca in only the third screen adaptation of one of Kerouac's books and one that proves that the writer's dense, language-driven novels can, indeed, be gloriously cinematic.

2. Before You Know It

PJ Raval’s powerful documentary Before You Know It dares to tackle a subject rare in cinema—the relatively unseen world of aging gay men. There is Dennis, a lonely, still-closeted 76-year-old cross-dresser from Niceville, Florida, estranged from his family and drawn to a gay retirement facility in Oregon. There is Robert, 73, extroverted longtime owner of Robert’s LaFitte, Texas’s oldest gay bar and longest -running drag show where all visitors, regardless of sexual orientation, are welcome and feel at home. And there is Ty, the sensitive, 60-something outreach manager of a gay senior advocacy center in Harlem, New York, who works to provide a safe place for elderly people to talk about their needs amid the backdrop of the New York Senate’s groundbreaking vote on same-sex marriage.

3. Peaches Does Herself

You came here for a rock show; a big, gigantic cock show. And that’s just what you’re going to get, plus what we’ll call “added value.” This performance documentary/opera directed by and featuring internationally renowned pop anti-star Peaches is a spectacle of choreography, music and sexual exuberance. It would be disingenuous to say that Peaches merely confronts the supposed rules governing music, sexuality, age and femininity. In truth, she obliterates these edifices and more.

4. No More Road Trips?

Prelinger is a master at presenting participatory screenings, as evidenced by his raucously fun, sold-out adventures presented over the years at the Castro Theatre ... For this screening, Prelinger presents found home movie footage from a variety of sources that depict a road trip from New York to California, investigating the uniquely American penchant for movement and nomadism sometimes experienced as a fundamental entitlement: the right to freedom of motion.

5. The East

A corporate spy infiltrates a group of anarchists—and finds herself drawn to their charismatic leader—in this thought-provoking espionage thriller from Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, the duo behind 2011’s indie hit Sound of My Voice ... Boasting a talented cast that also includes Ellen Page, Patricia Clarkson and Julia Ormond, this ideological thriller is a thinking-person’s Bourne Identity, as pointed in its questions as it is slick in its thrills.

6. Animation Shorts

This mix of award-winning and eye-popping animated shorts feature a range of styles and subjects. From the hand drawn obsessiveness of The Deep End to the traditional cel animation of Eyes on the Stars to the moving and ingenious uses of stop motion in Lumerence and Social Satan, this program will delight and inspire you.

7. Prince Avalanche

In this adaptation of the 2011 Icelandic movie Either Way, Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play highway workers, complete opposites, whose job it is to paint centerlines on a rural Texas road circa summer 1988. Excepting the occasional visitor, such as elderly trucker Lance LeGault, it is a season spent in near isolation during which the two disparate souls build an unlikely friendship.

8. Venus and Serena

Dominating the field of women’s tennis for over a decade, the indomitable Williams sisters, with the help of their visionary parents, broke new ground for female and African American athletes. Venus and Serena takes an unfiltered look into the remarkable lives of the greatest sister-act professional tennis has ever seen ... Now in the waning years of their athletic prowess, the film presents Venus and Serena facing new challenges with their characteristic sense of humor and resilience.

9. Much Ado About Nothing

On a brief hiatus from production on last year’s superhero blockbuster The Avengers, Joss Whedon (Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse) gathered some of his closest friends and collaborators from his decade-and-a-half run on network television at his spacious Santa Monica home for 12 days to shoot a retro-cool black and white, modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare’s comedy of manners.

10. Google and the World Brain

Using H.G. Wells’ prophetic declarations of a “complete planetary memory for all mankind,” or a “World Brain” as his springboard, Lewis gathers library administrators, Google engineers and futurists to offer a big picture examination of the Google Book Scanning Project. Lewis travels the globe from the shiny Googleplex in Mountain View to the 11th-century Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia, Spain, to capture the vast undertaking that is Google Books and to contemplate the future of libraries, technology, money and intellectual property.

As part of their ever-expanding lineup of broad-interest events, the San Francisco Film Society has been bringing these film + music events to the Castro Theater for a few years now. A silent film accompanied by a live score just makes sense as a way to honor historically significant cinema while making it more accessible to a modern audience. So, it's important not to over think it even if the Film Society has been bringing in indie powerhouses like Stephin Merritt to score 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and more recently John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats to provide a soundtrack to Sir Arne's Treasure. This year though, the festival took a more modern approach by placing British Chamberpop band Tindersticks in front of a selection of scenes from French director Claire Denis' oeuvre.

In trying to get a sense of the crowd at last night's screening/concert at the Castro theater, we noticed more than a few people leaning in towards the stage from their seats on the balcony - not really the typical posture at a film screening, but it seemed indicative of a crossover crowd that had an interest in both the Tindersticks' performance and the work of Clare Denis. But the air under the Castro's ceiling still smelled like movie theater butter rather than pot smoke, so we'd hardly call it a concert by San Francisco standards. ("Performance" would be allowable though, we think.)

The band, which we weren't familiar with before last night, has scored four of Madame Denis' feature films to date and last night's program provided an introduction to the French director's work by splicing them together in to a loose narrative that was more atmospheric than it was lyrical. In fact, Denis' films - or the portions we were treated to at least - are mostly silent to begin with and each scene evoked its own very specific sense of desperation. The problem with forcing the Tindersticks' soundtrack to the forefront by putting the band onstage is that it often didn't seem to match the tension on the screen.

The scheme worked fine where the action needed embellishment from the band's string section - like most of the scenes lifted from 2001's existential horror film Trouble Every Day, where Vincent Gallo's presence seems to indicate a rape could occur at any moment. But more contemplative moments like the view through the front window of a commuter train from 35 Shots of Rum were undone by a score that felt cartoony and loose. That's a little bit troublesome because these aren't new scores (the oldest is from 1996), but at the end of the program there was a real sense that we needed to dive deeper in to the shots that firmly held our attention behind the music. So, in that regard at least, last night's program was a successful experiment in evangelizing foreign film.

In addition to tonight's opening night premiere of Beginners at the Castro Theater, the next two and a half weeks of the San Francisco International Film Festival are packed with screenings and events around town at venues like the Kabuki Cinema and New People in Japantown, to SFMoMA and the Palace of Fine Arts. To help you make sense of it all and figure out where to spot Ewan McGregor, here's our official, but far from comprehensive guide to the films and events we're looking forward to:

Check each film's festival page for screening times and tickets.

- The rise and fall of Nicolae Ceausescu is a fascinating one, due in part to the fact that the former Romanian leader and his wife trial and brutal execution are just a few clicks away on YouTube. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is a frightening piece of propaganda that, among other things, shows adoring crowds, lofty building projects, meetings with international figures like Charles de Gaulle and Jimmy Carter, and Ceausescu’s fascination with the political theater of Mao’s China and Kim ll Sung’s North Korea. Not seen? Romania’s mass poverty, starvation, or the sick and abandoned children who were the byproduct of Ceausescu’s laws against contraception. Kim Jong-il would be proud. -BK [Festival Page]

- Back in the 1970s, a leading man could be a) be a bank robber, b) have a transgender lover, and c) somehow manage to inspire a recession-stricken nation. Take, for example, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon, the classic humorous/suspenseful tale of would-be robbers Sonny and Sal who hold up a bank and make "Attica! Attica!" part of the national lexicon. Legendary screenwriter Frank Pierson will be interviewed onstage preceding the screening. -BK [Festival Page]

- Horror fans longing for the irony-free days before the Blair Witch Project became a running joke, will want to look for The Troll Hunter. Billed as a mix of that classic of docu-horror and Jurassic Park, the film is set in Norway where Christian-eating trolls are a bigger problem than zombies or vampires (and their real-world analogs) are back in the states. The raw documentary style has come a long way since the days of the camcorder-in-the-woods school of campy films, making it even more difficult to figure out just how tongue-in-cheek the filmmakers are being. Luckily, Director André Ovredal will be in attendance at both Saturday and Monday's screenings. -AD [Festival Page]

- In New Skin for the Old Ceremony the titular Leonard Cohen album provides source material for 11 short films by 11 directors, artists, musicians and animators. Screenings of the short films are followed by the 1967 documentary Ladies and Gentleman... Mr. Leonard Cohen. Local musicians Kelley Stoltz and Pale Hoarse perform live covers of several of Cohen's works. -AD [Festival Page]

- Director Oscar Godoy examines the life of a Peruvian immigrant in Santiago, Chile in Ulysses. More than a retelling or re-setting of Homer's Odyssey, the film meditates on the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that comes along with life as an immigrant, when simply moving forward it not enough to go on. -AD [Festival Page]

- Set in 1950's Buenos Aires and meticulously art-directed, the narrative of Alejandro Chomski's Asleep in the Sun follows the narrow, twisting streets of the city to weave an elaborate "Kafkaesque nightmare and political allegory." A housewife, stricken with lassitude, hides from herself in a local pet shop only to be committed to a mental hospital. Emerging from treatment, she discovers she has a sudden desire for oral sex, and the film takes a turn towards the genre of stolen-identity thrillers. -AD [Festival Page]

Brock Keeling and Andrew Dalton contributing.

For those just tuning in, the SF Int'l Film Fest is still happening and runs through this week. One of the centerpiece premieres at the festival, on Saturday at the Castro, was a certain celebration of B-grade horror and gratuitous blood spatter called All About Evil, written and directed by home-grown talent Joshua Grannell, a.k.a. Peaches Christ. It stars Natasha Lyonne, Mink Stole, and Thomas Decker (The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Nightmare on Elm Street), and suffice it to say it was a major event for local horror fans, Peaches fans, and Castro denizens alike. Most of the cast was on hand, as well as Peaches' idol John Waters, and about 1400 assembled others.

Francis Ford Coppola is this year's recipient of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Founders Directing Award.

The evening will start off with an on-stage conversation between Coppola and his longtime colleagues and collaborators George Lucas (who started as an intern on Coppola's The Rain People), film editor/sound deisgner Walter Murch and screenwriter Matthew Robbins, who will cover a variety of subjects.

UPDATE: SFIFF just announced they will also be screening The Rain People at this event.

There will then be an extended Q & A and a screening of the trailer from Coppola's upcoming film Tetro (starring Vincent Gallo), followed by a screening of a custom-built, 15-minute clip reel featuring on-set footage of Coppola over several decades.

"An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola and Friends" | SFIFF | Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St, SF | May 1, 7:30 p.m. | $20 members/$25 general, buy tickets