Festival 2017
About
The 22nd annual festival presented 18 programs with films from eight countries—Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, and the USSR. This year’s SFSFF Award was presented to the EYE Filmmuseum in the Netherlands for its commitment to the preservation and presentation of silent cinema.
The Program
SFSFF 2017 was bookended by true silent film legends—Harold Lloyd, hilarious in The Freshman on opening night and Douglas Fairbank, swashbuckler extraordinaire in The Three Musketeers on closing night! In between there was Polish melodrama, Italian futurism, Japanese modernism, and American fantasy!
The Musicians
A diverse group of international musicians accompanied 2017’s programs including Alloy Orchestra, Berklee Silent Film Orchestra, Frank Bockius, Guenter Buchwald, Stephen Horne, Sascha Jacobsen, Matti Bye Ensemble, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Donald Sosin, and, in his SFSFF debut, Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky!
New SFSFF Restorations
SFSFF’s preservation department proudly presented three new restorations at the 2017 festival. We returned Cecil B. DeMille’s recently rediscovered Silence to the big screen in collaboration with Cinémathèque Française, while The Three Musketeers was restored in collaboration with MoMA and the Film Preservation Society. We also restored a fragment of Now We’re in the Air with Národní filmový archiv.
