The 69th San Francisco International Film Festival
Now in its 69th year, the San
Francisco International Film Festival, the longest-running
film festival in the Americas, returns April 24 through May 4,
2026, for eleven days of cinema spanning the full breadth of
human experience. This year's program brings together 79
programs from 40 countries, a genuinely global slate ranging
from intimate family dramas and experimental poetry films to
crackling genre thrillers, urgent political documentaries, and
animated adventures for the youngest moviegoers.
Across narrative features and documentaries alike, filmmakers
grapple with displacement and belonging, addiction and
recovery, colonial legacy, queer identity, ecological grief,
and the quiet heroism of ordinary people. There are films
rooted in Gaza hospitals and Scottish villages, Congolese
refugee camps and suburban Tokyo, the streets of San Francisco
and the highlands of Montenegro. Several titles carry the heat
of the present moment, touching on immigration, the
Palestinian conflict, and political resistance, while others
find their power in the timeless: grief, ambition, and love in
all its crooked forms.
Opening Night returns to the newly restored Castro Theatre with an
audacious double feature. Director Kent
Jones's "Late
Fame" (USA 2025) sets a warmly witty tone before
director Olivia
Wilde's "The
Invite" (USA 2026), a San Francisco-set story
screening on 35mm with the director attending in person,
closes the evening on a wilder, more transgressive note as a
genuine hometown celebration.
Fraternal twin brothers Amir (Hadi Putra)
and Ali (Idan Aedan)
grew up in the shadow of their mother's death in childbirth,
and as teenagers find themselves displaced again when their
father remarries and takes a new wife. Left to fend for
themselves, the brothers work for a local fisherman who
provides them with basic shelter.
The two could not be more different. Amir is a young man of
few words who communicates largely through animal names, yet
his deep love of books forges an unlikely bond with Lara
(Dian
Sastrowardoyo), a new English teacher carrying wounds of
her own. As that connection grows, Ali's jealousy quietly
festers, and what began as two brothers against the world
slowly curdles into something more painful and
complicated. Against a backdrop of human trafficking and
their father's murky schemes, a looming kite flying
competition becomes the test where everything between
them finally comes to a head.
Woo Ming Jin
captures the tenderness, rivalry, and fierce love between
the two brothers with extraordinary sensitivity. These
performances, naturalistic and unguarded, are the film's
beating heart. The storytelling is captivating and at times
genuinely heartbreaking, grounding its fable-like quality in
the textures of a world, rural Malaysia with its sand beach
and shadowy undercurrents, that cinema rarely visits. If the
ending feels somewhat deflating given the emotional stakes
so carefully built, it is a minor frustration in an
otherwise arresting piece of work. This film is exactly
the kind of film a festival like SFFILM exists to bring to
light.
Filipiñana
(Singapore/UK/Philippines/Netherlands/France 2026 | in
Tagalog/English | 100 min.)
"Filipiñana"
is a visually sumptuous and thematically rich debut
from Rafael
Manuel, using the manicured lawns of a Manila golf
club as a subtly damning canvas for exploring class,
colonialism, and power in the Philippines, and there
are moments where its slow-burn atmosphere genuinely
crackles with intrigue. But the film too often lets
its deliberate pace tip into stagnation, and a handful
of tonal missteps, comic beats that sit awkwardly
against the film's otherwise cool, unsettling mood,
keep it from fully cohering into the sharp social
fable it clearly aspires to be. It's the kind of film
that will find devoted admirers on the arthouse
circuit, and rightly so, but for all its creative
vision and impressive cinematography, it ultimately
remains a little too remote and uneven to leave the
deep impression it deserves.
The film is slated for a later theatrical release by
Kino
Lorber.
Elder
Son (Hijo mayor | Argentina/France 2025 | in
Spanish/Korean | 118 min.)
Winner of the Best Emerging Director
Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2025,
director Cecilia
Kang's debut feature "Elder
Son" comes to the SFFILM with
considerable festival pedigree and an ambition that is
immediately evident on screen.
Structured in three distinct parts, the film is
clearly a deeply personal excavation of the
filmmaker's own identity and family history. The first
part centers on a young Korean Argentinian teenager
Lila (Anita B
Queen) grappling with her sense of belonging,
caught between two cultures, two languages, and two
worlds. The second shifts into a reenactment of her
father Antonio's (Sang Bin
Suh) journey, a young Korean man who left his
homeland behind and built a new life in South America,
capturing the particular loneliness and quiet resolve
of the immigrant experience. By the third part, the
director abandons narrative filmmaking altogether,
moving into documentary territory as if the weight of
the story could no longer be contained by fiction
alone.
That structural boldness is both the film's greatest
strength and its most significant liability. The
intimacy of Cecilia
Kang's inquiry, watching a filmmaker
search for herself through the lives of those who came
before her, gives the film its most affecting
moments. Yet the film drifts constantly between its
three registers without always giving the audience
enough emotional footing to follow. The meditative
pace occasionally tips into inertia, and the episodic
structure, while intentional, creates a detachment
that keeps viewers at a distance precisely when
closeness is most needed.
Cecilia
Kang's visual instincts are assured and the
Locarno recognition is well deserved. But as a
cinematic experience, this film feels more rewarding
as a personal artistic statement than as a story that
draws you in and refuses to let go.
Two
Pianos (Deux pianos | France 2025 | in
French | 115 min.)
"Two
Pianos" is a film that promises a duet but
delivers a solo, following the brooding Mathias
(François
Civil) as he returns to Lyon and confronts the
unresolved mysteries of his past, a journey that is
intermittently compelling but ultimately too opaque to
fully resonate. Director Arnaud
Desplechin crafts the film with his characteristic
literary sensibility, drawing on a story rooted in
impossible love and the weight of solitude that
connects all his characters, yet the emotional payoff
feels elusive. The title itself proves a little
misleading: rather than a true two-hander between
Mathias and Elena (Charlotte
Rampling), the legendary pianist who serves as his
former mentor and guiding force, the film is largely
consumed by Mathias's inner turmoil, leaving
Charlotte
Rampling's formidable presence as little more than
an afterthought, never given enough screen time to
justify her place as the so-called second piano of the
title. François
Civil carries the burden of the story with
magnetism as Mathias, but the film around him never
quite rises to meet the depth it reaches for.
The film is slated for a later theatrical release by
Kino
Lorber.
Directed by Yael
Bridge, the documentary "Who
Moves America" embeds itself within the
lives of UPS Teamsters as they inch toward a potential
historic strike, marking it as one of the more
essential portraits of contemporary America in this
year's lineup. Following workers across California,
New York, and Kentucky, the film foregrounds the grind
of organizing, not as a triumphant march but as
something more tangled: a tug-of-war between solidarity
and self-interest, between collective hope and
individual survival. Archival fragments from the 1997
strike echo through the present, giving the story a
sense of cyclical struggle, like footsteps retracing
and reshaping an old path.
The film succeeds most in humanizing the "brown
uniform" workforce, turning what is often an invisible
labor force into a mosaic of specific lives. You begin
to see the delivery not as convenience, but as
consequence. In that sense, it accomplishes its core
mission: to make the audience reconsider the hands
behind the packages.
Yet for a story rooted in one of the largest labor
negotiations in North America, the film oddly pulls
its punches when it comes to scale. We're told these
workers are vital to the U.S. economy, that their
decisions could ripple across global supply chains,
but the magnitude remains more stated than felt. The
documentary stays close to its subjects, sometimes so
close that the broader picture blurs out of view. A
wider lens could have better conveyed just how deeply
these workers are woven into everyday consumer
expectations.
There's also a lingering sense that the film could
have dug deeper into its own characters. The access is
there, the stakes are there, but the storytelling
doesn't always press hard enough to uncover the more
revealing contradictions or emotional
undercurrents. As a result, the narrative can feel
less gripping than its subject matter promises,
occasionally settling into observation when it might
have benefited from sharper excavation.
This documentary is a thoughtful, well-intentioned
look at labor in motion, one that sparks reflection
even if it doesn't fully ignite. It opens the door,
but doesn't quite walk us all the way through.
