In This Issue

FILM DIRECTOR MORGAN Spurlock's face on the cover of this week's Bay Guardian is not stuffed with freedom fries – they're just McDonald's – but he's still choking on them. He ate them for 30 days straight in a film called Super Size Me, which made such a dramatic point about food in America that it won Spurlock the Sundance Film Festival's Best Director prize this past January. It also made him immensely ill. "By day 21," he told reporter David Fear, on page 57, "my liver was so fatty, like pâté fatty, that my doctor was worried about the organ shutting down."

Imagine if Spurlock had binged on Hollywood movies instead. Would it have been his brain that exploded? The San Francisco International Film Festival, which is playing Spurlock's fast-food saga among 175 films from 52 countries over 15 days starting this Thursday, gave us the occasion to raise questions about film consumption, creation, and distribution with a panel of experts – S.F. International Film Festival guest curator and film producer Roger Garcia, filmmaker and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism documentary program director Jon Else, and Bay Guardian contributor and international film festival programmer B. Ruby Rich, who gives the SFIFF's keynote address on the state of cinema April 18. Is the steady diet of American blockbusters on screens all over the world killing cinema? Could film festivals be considered a cure?

Rich argues that there's little doubt about how important foreign films should be to a country led by a president who'd rarely been off the continent before he took office, where much less than half the population has even secured a passport to indicate the vaguest interest in international travel.

Consider how laughable it is that our sole film contribution to the debate about the Middle East is, as Garcia points out, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

It's actually hard to talk about the state of cinema without talking about the state of the world, which is, as I write, in turmoil. "Our foreign policy is essentially being driven by a vision that doesn't see the world," Rich says, "only displacements of the United States. Maybe people would like to know something about other cultures before we bomb them."

Over the next 15 days, as the S.F. International Film Festival unspools, you'll have ample opportunity.