Caveh Zahedi’s much loved and much reviled independent feature I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore played to sold-out houses at the Film Festival a while back. Tonight we present the inimitable director-actor Caveh in person with both his features, Vegas and the earlier A Little Stiff (co-directed with Greg Watkins; recently sold to the Sundance Channel). An experimental narrative in which Caveh re-enacts his infatuation with an art school student (the student and her boyfriend “play” themselves), Stiff uses romantic obsession as a metaphor for the process of narrative. In the controversial Vegas, winner of Rotterdam’s Critics’ Prize, Caveh uses a road trip to Las Vegas with his father and half-brother to prove the existence of God and convinces (or doesn’t?) his father to try Ecstasy. A meditation on the possibility of divine intervention becomes a portrait of a highly idiosyncratic cross-generational encounter. (Programmed by Irina Leimbacher)
7pm: A Little Stiff 9pm: I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore
Sunday, May 25, 1997
Stiff & Vegas: A Caveh Zahedi Double Feature
San Francisco Art Institute