WORLD PREMIERE JUST ANNOUNCED TODAY

Touching Home to Have Its World Premiere in 51st San Francisco International Film Festival's Cinema by the Bay Spotlight
Ed Harris and Robert Forster Star in Debut Feature from Bay Area Filmmakers Logan and Noah Miller
Vanity Fair is the Platinum Sponsor of SFIFF51
March 10, 2008
San Francisco, CA – Touching Home, the debut feature film produced, written, directed, and acted in by self-taught identical-twin filmmakers Logan and Noah Miller will have its world premiere at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival (April 24–May 8, 2008), on Saturday, April 26 at 5:00 pm at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. The film is one of only four chosen to top line the Festival’s showcase Spotlight: Cinema by the Bay. Touching Home will screen a second time on Tuesday, April 29 at 12:30 pm at the Kabuki.
Touching Home is a powerful and moving homage to small-town life and the forgotten working class in America. Ed Harris heads a strong cast featuring fellow Academy Award nominees Brad Dourif and Robert Forster, with Lee Meriwether, Evan Jones, Ishiah Benben and Bay Area locals Logan and Noah Miller. Harris, Forster and other members of the cast are expected to attend the premiere, schedule permitting.
Shot largely in the Miller Brothers’ backyard of rural West Marin, California—both literally and figuratively, as this quietly powerful film is intensely autobiographical—this family drama showcases Ed Harris’s extraordinary acting talents as the twins’ homeless father with excellent supporting work by Robert Forster as the sympathetic small town sheriff. When the twenty-something brothers find their dreams of making the cut in Major League Baseball dashed they are forced to return home to Northern California to regroup, rethink their lives, and reconcile their love for their father with their anger and despair over his chronic shameful behavior. At the same time they must wrestle with their own encroaching fears of failure and with unfamiliar fraternal conflicts as they work alongside their father and ne’er-do-well buddies in the town quarry. The film is deeply felt—it is clearly a personal catharsis, a story that the filmmakers had to tell—and, with its sweet rhythms and rural settings, it is as much a hymn to the bygone innocence of small town America as it is an elegy for a lost soul who was never able to be father enough to his two beautiful sons.
As well as being a superb film, Touching Home is an inspirational testament to the resilience and determination of its young filmmakers. In early 2006, a month after the Miller Brothers were awarded a Panavision New Filmmaker Grant, they set out to persuade four-time Oscar nominee Harris that he was the only actor to play their father. They managed to buttonhole Harris coming off the Castro Theatre stage following a tribute at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival. Impressed by their energy and enthusiasm, and the quality of the footage they showed him on a laptop, he agreed to take a look at the script. Shortly thereafter Harris told them that, unfortunately, he was already fully booked for a year. However, their enthusiasm and sincerity won him over once more and he agreed to give them two weeks that December to shoot. They sealed the deal with a handshake, and the extraordinary results will be unveiled at the 51st International for all to see.
“Unbeknownst to us at the time, the International played a crucial role in the genesis of Touching Home,” said Graham Leggat, executive director of the SF Film Society. “We are thus enormously pleased to be able to present the film’s world premiere this year, and to have Ed, Logan and Noah onstage with us as this inspiring project makes its way into the world.”
Though the SFIFF51 screenings is its world premiere, the film already has fans in the industry. Says award-winning editor Walter Murch, “With its crisp photography, concise editing and excellent use of sound, I found Touching Home to be a thoughtful and emotional exploration of the forgotten corners of the American Dream.” The International’s Spotlight: Cinema by the Bay celebrates films produced in the creative heart of the West. In addition to Touching Home, the 2008 Cinema by the Bay Spotlight includes Dikayl Rimmasch’s Cachao: Uno Más, a stirring documentary about the Cuban music legend, with plenty of concert footage; Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy, two young African Americans spend a day touring San Francisco and getting to know each other following a one night stand; and Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up on Mu, a collage narrative that interweaves archival documentary ‘found’ fiction and newly-shot live-action material towards a complex chronology of sub-cultural forces in post-war California.
For tickets and information go to www.sffs.org or call 925.866.9559.
Touching Home is sponsored by the San Francisco Film Commission and Borel Private Banking & Trust Company.



© 2008 San Francisco Film Society
Site Design by Counterform