'A Cat in Paris': Stylish animated film at Kabuki

Parents who wistfully crave the great storytelling and artistry of classic cel animation might consider letting the gracefully nimble feline of 'A Cat in Paris' take kids on the adventure of a lifetime. The film is presented as part of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Created in stylish, hand-drawn 2-D animation by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli and set among the rooftops of Paris, the film is a noir-ish thriller for the 8-and-up set.

Though younger children might find the story a complex one to follow - the festival will be showing an English-language version of the 65-minute film - the imaginative tale of the young Zoé and her heroic cat, Dino, has a modern-day fairy-tale feel, complete with chilling villains and a nail-biting, high-stakes chase over the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral.

'A Cat in Paris': Stylish animated film at Kabuki...

Preview: San Francisco Dance Film Festival

Movement as seen through the prism of the camera's unrelenting eye is the subject of the first San Francisco Dance Film Festival, which opens tonight at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center in SoMa. Produced by Greta Schoenberg's Motion Pictures and co-presented by Dancers' Group, the two programs offered on the weekendlong festival highlight a veritable smorgasbord of dance film.

The event features seven short dance films, as well as screenings of the work of Karina Epperlein and Mitchell Rose, plus professional workshops taught by local videographer Ben Estabrook, and an interactive multimedia installation that unlocks the complex choreographic patterns of William Forsythe's ballet 'One Flat Thing, Reproduced.'

'It's gone from a one-hour showing of shorts on a hard drive to a full festival,' laughs Schoenberg, whose soft-spoken demeanor belies the energetic vigor she's put into launching this festival. A classically trained dancer and choreographer who grew up in Santa Cruz and has performed locally and internationally, Schoenberg took note of the symbiosis of dance and film while working in Europe in the late '90s.

Read more at Preview: San Francisco Dance Film Festival

Filmmaker trains camera on Paris Opera Ballet

Filmmaker trains camera on Paris Opera Ballet:

Real life is the script for Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker, who turns his lens onto one of France's grandest institutions, the Paris Opera Ballet, in his latest film 'La Danse,' which opens Friday. Taking the viewer into the nooks and crannies of the Opera's venerable Palais Garnier and Opera Bastille, Wiseman observes the company in a 'fly on the wall' fashion - dancers in rehearsal, at rest, meeting with administrators, costumers dying swaths of fabric and meticulously beading elaborate costumes - uncovering stories large and small in the process.

"A Beautiful Tragedy" and the life at the Perm State Ballet School

Dancers spend a lot of time on Youtube watching as many videos as we can, so when one of my students mentioned a dance film I hadn't seen, I was a little surprised. But after he sent me the link, I spent probably the better part of an hour watching clips of David Kinsella's beautiful and yet highly disturbing film. "A Beautiful Tragedy" follows the progress of a 15-year old girl named Oksana Skorik, a student at the famed Perm State Ballet School -- a place which has turned out some of the world's most refined dancers.

It's not unlike watching a terrible tragic accident: so upsetting that you can't look away.

In pursuit of a career in dance, (as much for her mother as for herself) Oksana works, starves, battles loneliness, and takes heaps of verbal abuse from her teachers, notably Lidiya Ulanova, who calls the girls idiots and angrily tells them they're insolent and stuffed dummies.

"Why would a teacher do that?" wonders my student aloud. "What kind of a person is that?"

I have no good answers. But almost more disturbing is the thought that so many people think this is the way to make good dancers. Skorik went into the Kirov Ballet, and her classmate Masha Menchikova went to the Perm company. Success came to them, but how much more beautiful could they have been without the abuse?

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You can order the film in both NTSC and PAL formats from Faction Film.

Family films at Frameline32

Two shows geared for the young ones make up a special matinee at the San Francisco International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival at the Castro Theatre on Sunday. They at last herald the arrival of children's media that blend non-traditional families into the fabric of the show.

First up is "Dottie's Magic Pockets," the brainchild of Tammy Stoner and Pink Pea Productions, which is designed not just to be gay- and lesbian-friendly, but also to feed a growing appetite for programming that introduces kids to the modern world's broad family range.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.