San Francisco, April 18-------The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival (23 April – 7 May) will open with local director Peter Bratt’s LA MISSION, a powerful story about the ties of family and responsibility set in the city’s Mexican-American community. The film, which stars Benjamin Bratt, Erika Alexander and Jeremy Ray Valdez, had its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was made, in part, with monies from the Scene in San Francisco financial rebate program that the local film commission has put in place to support homegrown media projects.

Peter Bratt, who presented his debut feature FOLLOW ME HOME at the Festival in 1996, has collaborated with his brother Benjamin Bratt who stars in the film as a reformed ex-con and recovering alcoholic who has turned his life around and now devotes himself to his lifelong friends, his passion for building classic cruisers and, most of all, his rock solid relationship with his honor student son, Jess (played by Jeremy Ray Valdez). When a sudden revelation and a sputtering of violence threatens to shatter the peaceful surface, a struggle emerges between the traditional values of the tight community and the new neighborhood that is besieged with cycles of violence and conflict.

The film’s premiere will be fittingly followed by an Opening Night Party set at the iconic Bruno’s restaurant, a mainstay of the Mission neighborhood, and the ruins of El Capitan Theatre, a landmark theater that was one of the area’s best known attractions. The Festival will be featured in the April Web Spotlight beginning 15 April. For more information on the Festival, visit: www.sffs.org.

Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Online Dailies Editor