Since its 2014 rebirth as a community-oriented events and food space, Second Act at 1727 Haight has been curating a regular events calendar, highlighting everything from fog music to comedy nights. This Saturday, June 13th, Second Act will be paying tribute to its Red Vic roots as the host of the third day of the San Francisco Black Film Festival.
As many of the films are shorts, tickets for the festival are sold in blocks of time instead of by film, with the ticket good for the entire block. (For example, tickets for the noon block are good for all films shown through 2pm.) There are several blocks throughout the day: noon, 2pm, 4:15pm, and 8pm. A feature film, In an Ideal World, will be shown in the 6pm block.
You can see the full film list here. It's a wide-ranging offering, with films about #blacklivesmatter, modern-day noir, black trans men, minor-league baseball in the 1940s, and a whole lot more.
In an Ideal World, the 6pm feature, is offering free admission to anyone "who's been touched by incarceration." It follows three men incarcerated in a California prison over the course of seven years, and features no experts or narration. Here's SFBFF's description of the film:
A white warden at ease with authority, a separatist mafioso and a black gangbanger: all three men come from different worlds. Yet all have spent their entire adult lives in prison, sharing a culture of race and power that has, in just that time, institutionalized the American racial landscape in ways that we are only beginning to understand, and that may prove very difficult to undo. Each came into the system very young, learned the convict/cop “codes” from their groups, and over three decades, gained power and influence in prison. At the same time, crime control in the U.S. came to rely almost exclusively on locking people up, increasingly and disproportionately people of color.
The San Francisco Black Film Festival as a whole will take place from June 11th-14th in venues all across town, but organizer Kali O'Ray is excited to have the second day of the festival at Second Act. "Since many of the filmmakers are coming from out of town, the Haight offers a great destination point. The history is great, the films are great and the vendors that are present offer more to the experience than popcorn. Second Act is a venue that the San Francisco Black Film Festival will use again and again. What a hidden gem."
The festival is now in its 17th year, and tickets are available here.
