This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival will be the event’s fifty-second year of independent, international films which have not previously been released in the United States. The 2009 festival will be held April 23rd, through May 7th. The longest running independent film festival in North America will showcase two hundred films to a target audience of nearly one hundred thousand industry representatives, journalists, filmmakers and lovers of film over the fifteen day event.
This year’s honored guest and award recipient will be Robert Redford, who will receive the Peter J. Owens Award. The award is given out in memory of Mr. Owens, a long-time patron of the arts and philanthropist in San Francisco, with the intention of honoring actors which represent brilliance, integrity, independence, and brilliance in cinema. As part of the celebration of Mr. Redford’s contribution to film, there will be a live interview on the theater stage by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editor-at-large, Phil Bronstein, as well as the premier of a digitally restored version of one of Robert Redford’s best known and most well received efforts, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.
While the event will be held at multiple venues throughout San Francisco, two of those are of particular note. One of the host venues will be the Sundance Kabuki Theater – one of the theaters in the Sundance Theater group which Robert Redford started, which, like his Sundance Film Festival, is named after character in the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And if you’ve done any San Francisco tours or saw the recent film, Milk, for which Sean Penn won an Academy Award for best actor, you’ll both recognize and be thrilled to know that the fabled Castro Theater will figure prominently into the festival’s schedule.
