Culture

You never know what to expect from the Oakland Underground Film Festival. From Kung fu and female wrestlers to hip-hop and community gardens, this film festival has got it all. The event is being held this week, from Thursday to Saturday, in East Oakland.

The third annual annual Eat Real Festival’s organizers hope the event is so much fun you’ll forget it’s reshaping your assumptions about food. The free event in Jack London Square this weekend, which is billed as half street festival, half block party, will feature local music and film screenings alongside food workshops, demonstrations, contests and scores of vendors.

Home movies are easy to define. According to Pamela Jean Vadakan, a former film collection assistant at the Pacific Film Archive, home movies are “personal moving images shot by an amateur (non-professional) of familiar subjects and familiar places.”

Giant dove puppets made from bed sheets were lofted high by youth brandishing them as signs of peace at this Sunday’s Roots & Shoots International Day of Peace event at the Oakland Zoo. The doves, held together by wooden poles and duct tape, their large eyes outlined with acrylic paint, looked down over the meadow as hundreds of attendees turned the ninth annual celebration into a day-long festival engaging youth in educational arts and crafts activities, like making piñatas for the primates at the zoo.

A man dressed in jeans and a t-shirt kneels on the ground, his hands held at an awkward angle by the chains that bind him to a drag king who is standing behind him wearing a sharp suit. Like a marionette, he is forced to bring his trembling hands to his face and smoke. The scene unfolds next to a 4-foot cardboard replica of a cigarette, as Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” blares from the speakers.

At the end of her tenure as an artist in residence at the San Francisco Dump, Sharon Siskin discovered a pile of old, Arabic language textbooks used to teach Muslim children the fundamental lessons of life, such as to love their parents, attend school and share.

On a normal day in Oakland, most passing drivers probably wouldn’t pause to think about the pairs of stone pillars marking the entrances of four streets in the Fairview Park neighborhood. The worn, 100-year-old pillars have long been a visual anchor in the area. But yesterday it was hard to miss them: two of the monuments were decked in huge, lime green bows.