This year at the Sundance Film Festival, three films premiered as a pseudo-virtual tour of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. But this wasn’t an in-depth look into the glamorous gold-paved roads of Silicon Valley, nor did it feed into the image of being the liberal wonderland that most of the country — and the world, for that matter — hype it up to be. Beneath the shimmering veneer of tech money and rampant gentrification, lies a withered community broken, battered, and buried in struggle and daily strife. Amidst the turmoil, Fairyland, Fremont, and Earth Mama rise to the surface as three independent movies set in the Bay Area that focus on themes and issues specific to the region and highlight communities commonly underrepresented in film.
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The thematic similarities are not mere coincidence, for the Bay Area carries a deep history of social justice-driven spirit and an abundance of perspectives on life in America. The aforementioned films continue a legacy of Bay Area filmmaking which elevates stories Hollywood typically tends to ignore or misrepresent. While recent blockbuster movies such as The Matrix Resurrections (2021), Shang-Chi (2021), and Venom (2018) shot on location in San Francisco, Fairyland, Fremont, and Earth Mama offer a more delicate and self-preserving representation of the Bay Area and serves as a reminder that the spirit of the Bay is not dead.
Bay Area on Film
Sundance Film Festival
In his feature-length directorial debut, photographer Andrew Durham adapts Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir Fairyland. Produced by Sofia Coppola and American Zoetrope, the film centers around “a girl and her gay father in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1970s and ’80s” and has received praise “for its accuracy in depicting 1970s San Francisco and its handling of heavy topics." Captured beautifully on film, Fairyland retells a poignant story particularly specific to the Bay Area as the LGBTQ+ community is still affected by the impacts of AIDS.
With three feature films under his belt, Iranian director Babak Jalali is the most seasoned of the bunch. He offers a touching take on the immigrant experience in the well-received Fremont, “a warm portrait of a young Afghan woman haunted by her past, who decides to start a new life in California." Anaita Wali Zada — who stars in the lead role, Donya — impresses in this monochromatic movie as she graces the screen for the first time. As a fragile depiction of day-to-day life in the commuter culture so prevalent in the Bay Area, Fremont examines the immigrant experience in America with a style somewhat related to Ben Sharrock’s portrayal of refugees in Scotland in the 2020 film Limbo.
As a continuation of a documentary short co-directed with Taylor Russell, Earth Mama stands out as the feature debut for former Olympian and up-and-coming director Savanah Leaf. With the support of A24, Film4, and Park Pictures, Leaf “[locates] the subversion and beauty within a welfare-system drama about a single mother fighting for her life and children." Also shot on film, Earth Mama portrays the Bay Area with a poetic delicacy as Gia — played by Oakland music artist Tia Nomore — navigates the intersections of drug addiction, parenthood, and adoption.
Defining Bay Area Cinema
This lineup of emotionally heavy films is more than just singular portraits of individuals from marginalized communities. Together they exemplify the mural that is the Bay Area, where the differences of its residents lend to the rich culture and deep appreciation for uniqueness. As a film industry that operates in direct opposition to Hollywood and the gravitational pull of Los Angeles, the Bay Area relies on its long history of social justice and civil rights — a history that dates back to the founding of the Black Panther Party and the student strike movement at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley — to attract filmmakers looking to tell stories perpendicular to the mainstream. The similarities these three movies share speaks to the slow-boiling cinema movement unique to the Bay Area.
Bay Area Cinema can be defined by its documentary-like depiction of underrepresented communities, as seen in Fairyland (LGBTQ+), Fremont (immigrants), and Earth Mama (black women). It employs neorealism techniques such as shooting on-location and casting “real people” (such as Tia Nomore in Earth Mama and Anaita Wali Zada in Fremont) instead of studio regulars. By focusing on real stories, these films create a meta-text where the emotional impact of the film is less dependent on traditional three-act structures and more reliant on the life experiences of the filmmakers. While Hollywood filmmaking has its commerciality and New York film boasts its intellectualism, Bay Area Cinema contains an intense emotional core with intentions of reconciling with the past, healing traumas, and rewriting narratives to include oneself. Other films which align with this definition of Bay Area Cinema include Fruitvale Station (2013), Blindspotting (2018), Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), and Medicine for Melancholy (2008).
As the week of festival activities comes to a close, Fairyland, Fremont, and Earth Mama will all hopefully receive a theatrical release and/or online distribution within the next calendar year. Like previous Bay Area films from the last decade, this trio of Sundance standouts will certainly jumpstart a career or two as the next decade rolls around.
