FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
FILM SOCIETY CINEMA
April 2011
April 2011 Filmmaker News & Notes
Sheila Ganz received a $10,000 donation toward completion of her documentary Moms Living Clean. Five women in an innovative residential treatment program in San Rafael, California battle addiction, domestic violence, prostitution and incarceration to transform their lives into Moms Living Clean. Ganz also wrote an article about self-distribution for Cine Source.
Pam Walton's Raging Grannies: The Action League was a finalist in San Jose's CreatTiVe Awards. Raging Grannies is airing on Free Speech TV and will screen this spring at The Eau Claire Progressive Film Festival in Wisconsin and at the Hope and Freedom Festival in Long Beach. Her film Gay Youth was the featured film at the LGBT Resource Center at the University of CA at Riverside, Walton's alma mater.
Love Hate Love, an SFFS fiscally–sponsored feature-length documentary directed by Emmy award–winning directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy, is having its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26. Weaving together the stories of three families who lost loved ones on the most notorious terrorist attacks of the last decade, the film will be shown in the Special Events section. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with executive producer Sean Penn and directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy along with family members featured in the film.
Presumed Guilty, the gripping documentary about the Mexican judicial system, by Roberto Hernández, Layda Negrete and Geoffrey Smith finally premiered in Mexico in mid-February. After an impressive run on Mexican screens, the film got temporarily suspended from the screenings. The filmmakers are currently trying to restore the screenings.
After receiving the Audience Award at the Sacramento Film & Music Festival last January M. T. Silvia’s Atomic Mom took home the Jury Award for best feature-length documentary at the Thin Line Film Fest, an international documentary film festival held in Denton, Texas. Atomic Mom introduces two women, both mothers, who have very different experiences of the atom bomb: The director’s mother, Pauline Silvia, a Navy biologist, and Hiroshima survivor Emiko Okada.
Director Tiffany Shlain won the Women in Film/National Geographic All Roads Film Grant for Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death and Technology. The film, discussion and Internet project explores the surprising links between biology, technology, and culture, illuminating the complex relationships between our actions and the world.
David Weissman's We Were Here, the first documentary, which takes a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco, had a week-long run at the end of February at San Francisco’s Historic Landmark, the Castro Theater.
Useful information for bike riders and environmental activists can be found in Laura Lukitsch’s new webisode for her project Mind the Gap. The Bay Area filmmaker released tips for urban bike commuting and recreation, car free alternatives highlighting various alternatives to the urban car, and transportation policies and legislation.
Soumyaa Kapil's My Garbage, My Neighborhood screened at the first San Francisco Green Film Festival on March 5. Kapil’s documentary attempts to understand the complicated relationship between those who have homes and those who don't and the effect of that relationship on the recycling program in San Francisco’s famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
Premieres in Italy! Red Poet by Matthew Furey, which paints a soulful picture of political poet Jack Hirschman, screened at the Roma Independent Film Festival and in Bologna.
Congratulations to SFFS fiscally sponsored filmmakers who were awarded grants for their documentaries by the California Council for the Humanities: Tamara Perkins was awarded post-production funds for The Trust, Arwen Curry was awarded post-production funds for The World of Ursula K. Le Guin and Singeli Agnew was awarded development funds for Hunting Stories.
Florencia Manóvil of Mynah Films reports that she is in preproduction for the pilot episode of Dyke Central, which will shoot over Memorial Day weekend.
Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel’s Speaking in Tongues was featured at a congressional briefing on language as a 21st century skill at the Capitol, cohosted by ACTFL and P21. Later in the spring, the National Education Association is bringing together representatives of key organizations at their DC headquarters to create a strategic campaign using Speaking in Tongues to create more opportunities for students to become bilingual. Schneider and Jarmel are also fundraising for their film Got Balz?, a short doc that follows their teenage son as he collects baseball gear for Cuban kids and gives thanks to the island that sheltered his grandfather during World War II. The benefit screening that they held on February 27 will help them finance their upcoming filming trip to Cuba.
Dina Ciraulo, writer/director of Opal, reports that she and her team recently returned from the Bijou Art Cinemas in Eugene, Oregon, where after quick sell-outs of initial screenings the theater invited them for a week-long return engagement April 11–16. Opal screens in San Francisco at the Roxie on Friday, April 8 at 7:00 pm as part of the San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival and that same night at the Palm Beach Women’s International Film Festival.
SFFS member Douglas Mueller, the producer of short film Prairie Love, reports that the film screened at the Sundance Film Festical in January in the NEXT category.
SFFS-sponsored filmmaker Mark Allan Kaplan’s article Toward an Integral Cinema: The Application of Integral Theory to Cinematic Media Theory and Practice was recently published in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. The article is a result of the first phase of Kaplan’s SFFS-sponsored Integral Cinema Project and explores a pioneering approach to aid filmmakers in creating more powerful and effective cinematic realities that could potentially induce transformative states of consciousness, and stimulate shifts in stages of human development and the evolution of consciousness.
The short film Library of Dust, codirected by Robert James and Ondi Timoner, screened at South by Southwest in March. The film will also screen at the San Francisco International Film Festival as part of the Cupid with Fangs program.
FilmHouse Resident and fiscally sponsored Scott Kirschenbaum was recently in Haiti to launch the Haiti Soapbox Project.
Sheila Ganz received a $10,000 donation toward completion of her documentary Moms Living Clean. Five women in an innovative residential treatment program in San Rafael, California battle addiction, domestic violence, prostitution and incarceration to transform their lives into Moms Living Clean. Ganz also wrote an article about self-distribution for Cine Source.
Pam Walton's Raging Grannies: The Action League was a finalist in San Jose's CreatTiVe Awards. Raging Grannies is airing on Free Speech TV and will screen this spring at The Eau Claire Progressive Film Festival in Wisconsin and at the Hope and Freedom Festival in Long Beach. Her film Gay Youth was the featured film at the LGBT Resource Center at the University of CA at Riverside, Walton's alma mater.
Love Hate Love, an SFFS fiscally–sponsored feature-length documentary directed by Emmy award–winning directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy, is having its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26. Weaving together the stories of three families who lost loved ones on the most notorious terrorist attacks of the last decade, the film will be shown in the Special Events section. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with executive producer Sean Penn and directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy along with family members featured in the film.
Presumed Guilty, the gripping documentary about the Mexican judicial system, by Roberto Hernández, Layda Negrete and Geoffrey Smith finally premiered in Mexico in mid-February. After an impressive run on Mexican screens, the film got temporarily suspended from the screenings. The filmmakers are currently trying to restore the screenings.
After receiving the Audience Award at the Sacramento Film & Music Festival last January M. T. Silvia’s Atomic Mom took home the Jury Award for best feature-length documentary at the Thin Line Film Fest, an international documentary film festival held in Denton, Texas. Atomic Mom introduces two women, both mothers, who have very different experiences of the atom bomb: The director’s mother, Pauline Silvia, a Navy biologist, and Hiroshima survivor Emiko Okada.
Director Tiffany Shlain won the Women in Film/National Geographic All Roads Film Grant for Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death and Technology. The film, discussion and Internet project explores the surprising links between biology, technology, and culture, illuminating the complex relationships between our actions and the world.
David Weissman's We Were Here, the first documentary, which takes a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco, had a week-long run at the end of February at San Francisco’s Historic Landmark, the Castro Theater.
Useful information for bike riders and environmental activists can be found in Laura Lukitsch’s new webisode for her project Mind the Gap. The Bay Area filmmaker released tips for urban bike commuting and recreation, car free alternatives highlighting various alternatives to the urban car, and transportation policies and legislation.
Soumyaa Kapil's My Garbage, My Neighborhood screened at the first San Francisco Green Film Festival on March 5. Kapil’s documentary attempts to understand the complicated relationship between those who have homes and those who don't and the effect of that relationship on the recycling program in San Francisco’s famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
Premieres in Italy! Red Poet by Matthew Furey, which paints a soulful picture of political poet Jack Hirschman, screened at the Roma Independent Film Festival and in Bologna.
Congratulations to SFFS fiscally sponsored filmmakers who were awarded grants for their documentaries by the California Council for the Humanities: Tamara Perkins was awarded post-production funds for The Trust, Arwen Curry was awarded post-production funds for The World of Ursula K. Le Guin and Singeli Agnew was awarded development funds for Hunting Stories.
Florencia Manóvil of Mynah Films reports that she is in preproduction for the pilot episode of Dyke Central, which will shoot over Memorial Day weekend.
Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel’s Speaking in Tongues was featured at a congressional briefing on language as a 21st century skill at the Capitol, cohosted by ACTFL and P21. Later in the spring, the National Education Association is bringing together representatives of key organizations at their DC headquarters to create a strategic campaign using Speaking in Tongues to create more opportunities for students to become bilingual. Schneider and Jarmel are also fundraising for their film Got Balz?, a short doc that follows their teenage son as he collects baseball gear for Cuban kids and gives thanks to the island that sheltered his grandfather during World War II. The benefit screening that they held on February 27 will help them finance their upcoming filming trip to Cuba.
Dina Ciraulo, writer/director of Opal, reports that she and her team recently returned from the Bijou Art Cinemas in Eugene, Oregon, where after quick sell-outs of initial screenings the theater invited them for a week-long return engagement April 11–16. Opal screens in San Francisco at the Roxie on Friday, April 8 at 7:00 pm as part of the San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival and that same night at the Palm Beach Women’s International Film Festival.
SFFS member Douglas Mueller, the producer of short film Prairie Love, reports that the film screened at the Sundance Film Festical in January in the NEXT category.
SFFS-sponsored filmmaker Mark Allan Kaplan’s article Toward an Integral Cinema: The Application of Integral Theory to Cinematic Media Theory and Practice was recently published in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. The article is a result of the first phase of Kaplan’s SFFS-sponsored Integral Cinema Project and explores a pioneering approach to aid filmmakers in creating more powerful and effective cinematic realities that could potentially induce transformative states of consciousness, and stimulate shifts in stages of human development and the evolution of consciousness.
The short film Library of Dust, codirected by Robert James and Ondi Timoner, screened at South by Southwest in March. The film will also screen at the San Francisco International Film Festival as part of the Cupid with Fangs program.
FilmHouse Resident and fiscally sponsored Scott Kirschenbaum was recently in Haiti to launch the Haiti Soapbox Project.