Tenderloin Museum screens director Rob Nilsson’s epic cycle of 9 Tenderloin feature films in its entirety.
Full Series Tickets Here | Individual Film Descriptions & Tickets below
9 interconnected feature films, spun from the world of the Tenderloin and featuring TL denizens inhabiting their characters and improvising the scripts, are framed by the poetic vision and prolific practice of iconoclast director Rob Nilsson. His ambitious 9 @ Night cycle achieves a deep exploration of the human condition and stands as a rich chronicle of the Tenderloin–the physical place, its people, their existential struggles, sorrows and joys.
Independently produced, the series is an epic feat of cinema in terms of both craft & concept. 9 @ Night is the fruit of Nilsson’s nearly 2-decade collaboration with the Tenderloin yGroup, an acting workshop embedded in the neighborhood and operating with Nilsson’s creative method of “Direct Action,” which he describes as “a cinema of the moment which lives off the land to discover the relationship between what we think we want and what is actually there.” The films and the process that created them (as well as their life after completion) are a tremendous synthesis of art-making, community, and the culture of the Tenderloin both real and imagined.
The Tenderloin Museum is proud to present the 9 @ Night series in its entirety, screened salon-style with Nilsson (and guests) in-person, offering a rare opportunity to see the complete film cycle in “the land” where it was forged. For lovers of San Francisco on-screen, gritty filmic realism, character driven dramas, consider 9 @ Night an essential opus in the canon of Tenderloin-alia!
This rare, complete presentation of 9 @ Night is part of a broader retrospective of Nilsson’s work happening around the Bay Area. Nilsson has been collaborating with fellow filmmaker Zhan Petrov to digitally restore his films—nearly 50 features over a 5 decade career!—and to organize the artist’s full oeuvre via a new and interactive website: RobNilssonArtForms.com. Visit the site for info on other nearby opportunities to view Nilsson’s films with the artist in person!
About Rob Nilsson:
Rob Nilsson is the first American film director to win both the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (NORTHERN LIGHTS, 1979) and the Grand Prize at the Sundance Film Festival (HEAT AND SUNLIGHT (1988). His work as a filmmaker, poet, painter, essayist, and film critic explores “the way things seem to be” in the joys and sorrows of everyday people. Born and raised in familial, social and political systems they struggle to find their way as unique individuals. This dilemma creates the paradoxes and contradictions Nilsson sees at the root of the artist’s mission.
Praise for 9 @ Night:
“If pressed, many cinephiles would admit a magnetic attraction to truly magnum opuses: whether crafted by Tarr, Rohmer, Rivette or Syberberg, the mere existence of such titanic features or multi-film cycles suggests an important artistic event. There’s nothing quite like the exhilaration of discovering a huge project that in cinematic terms reaches for the extra-wide narrative/cinematic embrace of The Brothers Karamazov, Proust, even Infinite Jest. But does anyone work with that kind of scope in contemporary American cinema? Meet Rob Nilsson, who with very little self-promotional zeal has spend the last dozen- plus years creating a fascinating collection of exquisitely shot digital features under the umbrella of 9 @ Night… a sprawling black and white tapestry of separate but overlapping feature narratives that encompass a broad character scroll of homeless, hustling and bourgeois types in San Francisco and environs.” – Dennis Harvey, Film Comment, Sept./Oct. Issue, 2008
+ Read Ray Carney’s superlative essay surveying 9 @ Night for the Harvard Film Archive.
UPCOMING 9 @ NIGHT PROGRAMS:
PAST 9 @ NIGHT PROGRAMS:
