Juan Solanas talks about 'Upside Down'

One morning, director Juan Solanas woke up and had a vision. "I saw two mountains, one upside down on top of the other," he recalls. "This guy looked up at a girl on the upper mountain, and she was looking down. I was not searching for an idea of a movie. It just happened."

Seven years after that image popped into his head, Solanas has brought the concept to life in "Upside Down." The futuristic sci-fi romance casts Jim Sturgess as a poor "lower world" inventor who yearns to unite with Kirsten Dunst's rich girl. She lives in the "upper world" planet that occupies the top half of the picture frame. Solanas says, "Of course you cannot have an actor walking around on the ceiling upside down, so we built two half-sets right next to each other, one for 'up,' the other for 'down.' "

Prepping the film with production designer Alex McDowell ("Minority Report"), Solanas shot "Upside Down" on a Montreal soundstage using an ingenious camera rig that captured gravity-defying performances without forcing actors to emote in a computer-generated vacuum.

He says, "On one half of the set, our cameraman framed the shot and pushed the dolly like you would normally. We'd send that data to a motion control robot that made the complementary movement at the same time on the other side of the set, so we had two cameras doing one shot together. Then we cut it together in real time and framed it to create the final image."

Solanas, who fled his native Argentina in 1977 because of a military coup, sees "Upside Down's" split-frame concept as a metaphor for a divided world. "I left my country when I was 10 years old because they were going to kill us. I know people who died and were tortured, so for me, ever since I was a little boy, reality is something serious. I live in France, in exile. The people that I love in Latin America are upside down from me, so this double-gravity setup allowed me to take a very simple love story and talk, in a twisted way, about reality."

Roiled by political scandal and a high-stakes building boom, China remains the very picture of complexity. Underscoring the country's contradictions is "High Tech, Low Life."

Director Stephen Maing's documentary, screening Sunday and Tuesd! ay as par! t of CAAMFest, follows activist bloggers Zhou "Zola" Shuguang and Tiger Temple in their efforts to report on the country's downtrodden despite government censorship.

As Shuguang, 27, says in the film, "I used to be a nobody, until I discovered the Internet."

George Csicsery never set out to become the go-to guy for math movies, but after his "N Is a Number" about noted brainiac Paul Erds opened in 1993, the Oakland filmmaker suddenly became inundated with ideas for similarly themed documentaries. "People began to bombard me with ideas and requests," he says. "In making 'N Is a Number,' I felt Paul Erds was an interesting person, but I never would have imagined going into this whole other world."

Csicsery celebrates that world Monday and Wednesday at the Roxie Theater with Math Films Mathathon. Entries include Monday's Bay Area premiere of "Taking the Long View: The Life of Shiing-Shen Chern," which profiles the late co-founder of Berkeley's Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

The filmmaker does not have a background in mathematics. "I try to not put anything into a film unless I can understand it," he says. "Mathematicians have to exercise great patience with me. I might have 20 or 30 people on camera telling me the details of the same problem or proof. Then I look for ways to translate that onto film. If I can get it, you can get it." {sbox}