Ahoy, mateys. Here’s what you’re doing this weekend:
Oakland Underground Film Festival
Now in its third year, the Oakland Underground Film Festival features three days of indie films, food, live music, and after-parties. The fest kicked off at the Grand Lake Theater last night but moves to NIMBY (8410 Amelia St., Oakland) on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 23-24, where moviegoers can devour food-truck fare and watch movies, documentaries, and shorts. Must-sees: Komaneko, a sickeningly cute Japanese short, and the international hip-hop documentary The Furious Force of Rhymes. $10-$15 per feature film. 510-295 3259 or OakUFF.org— Cassie Harwood
The first Eat Real Festival, in 2009, sweated under the glare of an Oakland wave, and while there were fearsome lines and food shortages over its three days, it was a success. Some 70,000 people showed up, in no small part to check out the Bay Area’s young street-food scene, then on its first legs. This year’s fest is later than in previous years — September 23-25, in Jack London Square — but promises to be no less sweaty. Again, organizers — who inaugurated an LA version of Eat Real earlier this summer — are tweaking the format. They’ve invited fewer food trucks this year (sixty, compared to ninety in 2010), apparently to limit the mass of queued-up food seekers from choking the central promenade. Also new this year: a Craft Food Market, made up of nearly three dozen food artisans hawking a range of things, from coffee and jams to pasta and pickles. And — are you excited yet? — get ready for Eat Real’s Jam Bar, which sounds like some sort of hip-hop poetry slam from the Nineties performed behind a counter, but I bet is going to be, well — a jam bar. Eat Real standbys are back again this year, though, including the butchery competition, various food demos, a multi-tap beer garden, music, and a literary festival. It’s always been a bit hard to nail down Eat Real’s exact rationale (apart from a being a sprawling, end-of-summer outdoor festival in Oakland, a food-focused bookend to Art & Soul). Neither purely a street-food festival nor a pickle-forward maker fair, Eat Real describes itself as “part state fair, street-food festival, and block party created to celebrate and showcase good food,” according to a press release. Maybe that’s rationale enough. Free, various times. See EatRealFest.com for details and full schedule. — John Birdsall