For more reviews from the sixth ATA Film and Video Festival, check out this week's film listings. The fest kicks off tonight with an opening reception.

Piena En Mi Alexandra Cuesta’s short film “Piena En Mi” is an impressionistic portrait of Los Angeles, where, in addition to Quito, Ecuador, the filmmaker lives and works. Primarily shot from a bus that traverses the sprawling metropolitan, the film is told with the the city’s different neighborhoods, its sounds, and its patchwork of ethnic groups. It’s an honest portrait of  LA — economically depressed in most places, polluted, congested – but beautiful, nonetheless, and unapologetic. Cuesta treats her city with tenderness and it renders her film graceful and intimate. It’s sensitive to the very subtlties that make LA radiate with character, whether it’s odd haircuts, dirty bus windows, or bells on an ice cream carriage. It’s in these shots that the filmmaker’s background in street photography shows, and make it a highlight of the ATA festival. Program One, "City Symphonies" Read more »

Check out more coverage of the 10th San Francisco Documentary Film Festival in this week's Guardian.

Beaverbrook (Matthew Callahan, U.S., 2010) If you attended Camp Beaverbrook, which operated in California's Lake County from 1961-85, this film is required viewing. It offers an intensely wistful look at an old-fashioned sleepaway camp that thrived in an era before insurance companies started frowning on things like helmet-free kids galloping wildly on horseback. If you don't have Beaverbrook in your blood, however, watching 1979's Meatballs will offer a similar overdose of nostalgia, plus the huge added bonus of Bill Murray. Sun/16, 5 p.m. and Oct. 18, 7:15 p.m., Roxie; Fri/14, 7:15 p.m., Shattuck.

Heavy Metal Picnic (Jeff Krulik, U.S., 2010) Everyone's seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the 1986 Jeff Krulik and John Heyn short that became a pre-internet cult classic. Shot amid the beer-y, mullet-y, "party-as-a-verb" shenanigans that transpired before a Judas Priest-Dokken show, Parking Lot is a seminal document for metalheads and anthropologists alike. Twenty-five years later, the prolific Krulik, again with Hayn, returns to the subject matter that made him famous with Heavy Metal Picnic, a 666 ... er, 66-minute look at an notorious 1985 concert known as "The Full Moon Jamboree" — described as a "heavy metal Woodstock" by the nervous local press at the time. Basically, this is Parking Lot shifted to the Maryland woods; there's a concert going on in the background (the bigger acts were Pentagram and the Obsessed, but there's hardly any footage of them; local boys Asylum and show organizer Billy Gordon of Blue Rockers are prominently featured, however) but the main attraction is, as ever, the fans assembled for raucous raging.

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While I spent a good deal of time out of doors last weekend taking in, among other things, an obligatory pilgrimage to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a jaunt on the historic schooner Alma with the WE Players, the 30-year anniversary of the Sea Chantey Sing, and Chicken John’s book release party, it was the introspective medium of the cinema that captured my attentions most of all. From the Star of Tyche at ATA, to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Lost Weekend’s “Offline In-Store” Film Festival, I devoured a sumptuous visual feast the satiating effects of which still linger days after. Read more »

Check out parts one (here) and two (here).

21) Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, UK) Adapting Emily Brontë's novel from 1847 is a perfect project for the stark realist Andrea Arnold. Her previous films Fish Tank (2009) and Red Road (2006) have captured audiences with their brutal honesty and inspired storytelling. With perhaps the most visually poetic atmosphere since Lynne Ramsey and Claire Denis, Arnold manages to emphasize every snowflake in this austere tale of lost love without a single lazy hint of narration. Do not miss this for the world.

22) The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France/Italy) Can these Belgian brothers make a bad film? Seriously? Like their Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), and L'enfant (2005), this is yet another hypnotic neo-realist journey portraying modern-day youth like no other in cinema. Every character makes unexpected and inevitable decisions. No moment is false. The Dardennes create movies that make life feel more real.

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Check out part one here and part three here. More from the man who slept nary a wink at TIFF 2011 (or so it seems!) follows.

11) Twenty Cigarettes (James Benning, USA) Following the basic concept of 20 different people smoking an entire cigarette gives each segment its own time frame. It allows the viewer to get into a rhythm that becomes as addictive as smoking itself. Being a non-smoker, I found myself hypnotized by each person's physical stance and style as well as what each participant must have been thinking about during the five to eight minute process. Museum cinema at its finest.

12) La folie Almayer (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France) Adapting Joseph Conrad doesn't sound that exciting, even for fans of Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 1975). But there is something absolutely alluring about this experimental mood piece. Feeling abandoned and lost in the jungle becomes a state of mind here; the film sincerely builds towards two of the most beautiful shots Akerman has ever created. With an audacity that can infuriate even the most weathered cinephile, this 65-year-old French auteur has created a new work that is crisp, inventive, and quite alive. For anyone who was also ignited by Godard's most recent abstraction, 2010's Film socialisme — here's another from an innovator who we too often take for granted.

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Check out parts two (here) and three (here).

1) Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, Norway) This bleaker-than-bleak exploration of drug addiction hypnotically deconstructs the genre, exposing previous entries like 2000's Requiem for a Dream as oddly glorified and even romanticized. As with his surprise hit Reprise (2008), the soundtrack for Trier's film (Chromatics, White Birch) seals the colder-than-cold universe that lead character Øystein (played brilliantly by Anders Borchgrevink) inhabits. Not for folks who can't handle needles dangling out of arms.

2) This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, Iran) As immediate as a heart attack, this 75 minute documentary by prison-bound Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (who is serving a six-year sentence with a 20-year ban on directing films or even talking to the media), truly is not a film. What is it actually? How about a terrifying cry for expression from one of the most daring and political filmmakers alive. While the world waits for his hopeful release, go watch The White Balloon (1995), The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), Crimson Gold (2003), and Offside (2006) as soon as possible.

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Other Cinema kicks off its fall 2011 season Sat/24 with a bittersweet program: the local premiere of Helen Hill's The Florestine Collection — her last film, left unfinished after her 2007 death, completed thanks to the dedicated efforts of her husband, Paul Gailiunas. Hill was only 36 when she was shot to death by an intruder (still unidentified) who broke into her New Orleans, LA home; her husband was injured but survived, and the couple's toddler thankfully escaped unharmed.

South Carolina-born Hill made her first film at age 11, attended Harvard for undergrad, and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her unique animation techniques (including cut-out puppets) drew from the fairy-tale works of groundbreaking German animator Lotte Reiniger (whose remarkable filmography stretched from the 19-teens up through the 1970s) as well as DIY methods like hand-processing. She was continually inspired by her adopted hometown of New Orleans, as well as her chosen activist causes, including Food Not Bombs and animal rights. She also created the 2001 reference tome Recipes for Disaster: a Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet.

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The Red Vic closed this week, and a recent SFgate.com article reported that Balboa Theater owner Gary Meyer will be leaving the Richmond District landmark at the end of the summer. What's a small, independent movie theater to do in these troubled times?

The Roxie, San Francisco's oldest continually operating theater (it's had a few different monikers, but the Mission District space opened in 1909; it became a non-profit in 2008), has a plan, according to a press release that landed in my inbox this morning. It boils down to a four-letter word: BEER.

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Eichmann's End: Love, Betrayal, Death (Raymond Lay, Germany/Israel, 2010) Many documentaries rely heavily on historical reenactments to flesh out real-life events not caught on camera. Sometimes this effect can be corny, but in Eichmann's End, the powerful reenactments make the film. Interviews with actual eyewitnesses guide the acted-out tale of Nazi Adolph Eichmann's post-World War II life; despite his grim contributions to the Holocaust, he managed to escape to Buenos Aires, eventually settling down to a normal-seeming life with his wife and sons. Though he lived under an assumed name, his true identity was known by many, including a Dutch journalist who conducted a series of interviews with Eichmann in the late 1950s.

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