Lynch's 'Empire' Strikes San Francisco IndieFest

The popular -- yet still very "indie" -- San Francisco IndieFest kicks off its 9th annual festival with David Lynch's Inland Empire. It will be the first time Lynch's new film has screened in the Bay Area. The festival begins Thursday, February 8 at the Roxie Cinema, the Victoria Theatre, The Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the California Theatre in Berkeley, and runs through February 18. At first glance, the new festival offers a puzzling lineup, with no "name" directors (other than Lynch) and few stars. But a deeper look reveals some potential treasures.

I saw Kumakiri Kazuyoshi's Green Mind, Metal Bats, a bizarre kind of baseball black comedy about two washed-up players. One -- who was beaned in the head by a stray pitch -- has spent the years practicing his swing while working in a convenience store. He meets a sexy, drunk girl who suddenly moves in with him. The other, a pitcher with a bum elbow, has become a contemptuous bicycle cop. The film ends in the expected showdown between pitcher and hitter, but until then it wanders through all kinds of fascinating, deadpan territory.

I also saw a bit of Joe Swanberg's LOL, a shot-on-video look at twentysomethings and their vague attempts to make their lives mean something. It has the same uncomfortable emptiness of Andrew Bujalski's films, but not their odd, connective poetry. Also on the bill, we have a new film with Paul Giamatti, The Hawk Is Dying, which returns him to the kind of rich roles that won him so much respect -- before he started working with Ron Howard and M. Night Shyamalan. Rolf de Heer, who directed the Roger Ebert favorite Dance Me to My Song (1998), returns with Ten Canoes, a story set in the Arafura Swamp many years ago.

Gus Van Sant stamped his seal of approval on Nick Peterson's Yellow, a musical about a disillusioned librarian and the clerk that catches her eye. Perhaps the best title in the festival is Mike Scullion's Gobshite, a comedy crime thriller from Ireland. There are more than 100 titles in all, including shorts, documentaries, cartoons and even classics like Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour (1950) and Shan Hua's Inframan (1975). Andrew Currie's Fido, about an idyllic 1950s world co-populated by zombies, closes the festival on February 18. Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly and Dylan Baker co-star.

I've had the distinct pleasure of covering the festival since its inception, and many of these potentially obscure titles have stayed in the memory: Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep, Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, Takashi Miike's Gozu, Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Maria Giese's Hunger, John Crowley's Intermission, Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, James Crowley's The Journeyman, Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy and Jonas Åkerlund's Spun. So you never know what's going to turn up next.