Exhibition | Fiscal Sponsorship | Resources


PAST EXHIBITIONS

Highlighted film titles link to SFIFF pages that contain film synopses, credits, print sources, running times and countries of origin.

Ballast
A man, a woman and a child battle each other and themselves in the aftermath of a tragic death.
SFFS Exhibition: 2008 SFIFF
Attendance: 620
Website: ballastfilm.com/
 
Beyond the Call
Ed, Jim and Walt are not your average weekend warriors. Ordinary, inconspicuous Americans with wives, careers and hobbies, these three friends realize their deepest passion in life through self-financed humanitarian missions to war zones around the globe.
SFFS Exhibition: 2006 SFIFF
Attendance: 595
Website: www.beyondthecallthemovie.com/
 
Boxers and Ballerinas
Shot in three countries over a two year period, Boxers and Ballerinas explores the US-Cuba conflict thru the eyes of four youths--a boxer and a ballerina in Havana and Santiago de Cuba and a boxer and a ballerina exiled in Miami.
SFFS Exhibition: 2005 SFIFF
Attendance: 1010
Youth Ed Attendance: 561
 
The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan
The 1,600-year-old Buddhas carved into the pale cliffs adjoining Afghanistan’s picturesque Bamiyan valley were the world’s tallest stone statues until the Taliban destroyed them in 2001.
SFFS Exhibition: 2004 SFIFF
Attendance: 509
Website: www.theboywhoplaysonthebuddhasofbamiyan.com/

The Boys of Baraka
Mavis Jackson tells her Black male Baltimore high school audience that they have three options by the time they reach age 18: “An orange jumpsuit and bracelets, a black suit in a brown box or a black cap and gown.”
SFFS Exhibition: 2005 SFIFF
Attendance: 1012
Youth Ed Attendance: 871
Website: www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/boysofbaraka/

California Company Town
Filmed over a five-year period from 2003 to 2008, Lee Anne Schmitt’s visually ravishing document of the devastation and desolation of California’s abandoned industrial towns is a wholly unique meditation on natural and man-made environs, at once languid and heartbreaking.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 481

Chaturanga (Four Chapters)
A young Bengali intellectual’s rebellion against conservative society takes him from atheism to mystical asceticism and relationships with two women in this story of love as both a game and a war of ideas, based on Tagore’s classic 1916 novella.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 636
Website: http://www.chaturangathefilm.in/

La Corona
In Bogotá, Colombia, four incarcerated women vie for a coveted beauty pageant crown.
SFFS Exhibition: 2008 SFIFF
Attendance:  557
Youth Ed Attendance: 283
 
The Dignity of the Nobodies
This is activist cinema at its best: passionate, informative and uncompromising.
SFFS Exhibition: 2006 SFIFF
Attendance: 693
Website: www.pinosolanas.com/la_dignidad_info.htm

Empress Hotel
Light and Saraf, an acclaimed local filmmaking duo, spent years documenting the eccentric and colorful residents of a Tenderloin residential hotel for the recently homeless. This moving feature paints a multifaceted portrait of a neighborhood and its residents.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 663
Website: http://www.lightsaraffilms.com/empresshotel.html/

L’ Enfant
Bruno and Sonia, a young couple living off her benefit and the thefts committed by his gang, have a new source of money: their newborn son.
SFFS Exhibition: 2006 Youth Ed
Attendance: 366
Website: www.sonyclassics.com/thechild/
 
The English Surgeon
What is it like to have God-like surgical powers yet to struggle with your own humanity? This question has plagued London neurosurgeon Henry Marsh his entire medical career.
SFFS Exhibition: 2008 SFIFF
Attendance: 284
Website: www.theenglishsurgeon.com/

Enough!
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 Youth Ed
Attendance:108

Favela Rising
One night in a favela, an impoverished barrio on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, an infamous druglord shot and killed four policemen, launching what the favela residents refer to as “The Massacre.”
SFFS Exhibition: 2006 SFIFF
Attendance: 392
Youth Ed Attendance: 171
Website: www.favelarising.com/
 
Flow: For Love of Water
Water is the very essence of life, sustaining every being on the planet. 'Flow' confronts the disturbing reality that our crucial resource is dwindling and greed just may be the cause.
SFFS Exhibition: 2008 SFIFF
Attendance: 746
Youth Ed Attendance: 22
Website: www.flowthefilm.com/

Ghosts of Cité Soleil
In 2004, 200 years after Haiti became the first independent black republic and 13 years after Jean-Bertrand Aristide became the country’s first democratically elected president, Haiti once again found itself in turmoil.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 SFIFF
Attendance: 706
Website: www.ghostsofcitesoleil.com/

Good Life
This affectionate patchwork of stories is about ordinary people—a social worker, a hairdresser, a bank loan officer, a classical musician—struggling to follow their dreams in the Chilean metropolis. Their lives are presented with such penetrating empathy that the film rises to the level of human comedy.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 689
Website:  http://www.latidofilms.com/proyectos.nuevostitulos.ficha.do?idProyecto=66&opcion_izquierda=5&opcion_superior=3/

Hip Hop Project
The compelling story of Kazi, a former homeless teenager who inspired a group of New York City teens to transform their stories into powerful works of art, using hip hop as vehicle for self-development and discovery.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 Youth Ed
Attendance: 125
Website: www.hiphopproject.com/

Kisses
Children have it tough in this bitter, bright and winning film from Ireland. Young teens Dylan and his neighbor Kylie live for the day they can make a break from their abusive families and bleak suburban housing estate.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 491
Website:  http://www.kisses.ie/

Omar and Pete
After three decades in and out of prison, Omar hopes to break the cycle by participating in the Maryland Reentry Program. “I’m trying to save my life,” he declares.
SFFS Exhibition: 2005 SFIFF
Attendance: 402
Youth Ed Attendance: 14
Website: www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/omarandpete/

The Other America
“I do come from somewhere,” declares homeless teenager Ari, “Right here, as a matter of fact.” “Here” is the diverse urban landscape of West Philadelphia, where Ari lives virtually unsupervised with his never-seen mother.
SFFS Exhibition: 2004 SFIFF
Attendance: 445
Website: theotheramericamovie.com/
 
Recycle
In this vivid documentary, filmmaker Mahmoud al Massad digs into the politics, piety and poverty of his native city in Jordan through the life of husband, father and former mujahadeen-turned-cardboard collector Abu Ammar.
SFFS Exhibition: 2008 SFIFF
Attendance: 449
Co-presenter: Arab Film Festival

River People
In an elegiac portrait blurring fiction and reality, an extended family of fisherfolk continues its generations-old pattern of life in Shanxi as modernization seeps in and the young look beyond the river to the outside world.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 301

A Social Genocide
The government must resign! Kick them out! In December 2001, Argentina was in a state of siege—thousands of people filled the streets banging on pots and pans, protesting decades of corrupt leadership that resulted in devastating economic ruin.
SFFS Exhibition: 2005 SFIFF
Attendance: 506

Sounds of Sand
Harrowing in its implications yet deeply humane in its testimony to the endurance of hope under impossible circumstances, Marion Hänsel’s beautifully observed family saga takes place beneath the unforgiving sun of East Africa, where the increasing scarcity of free-flowing water is devastating entire communities and causing civil unrest.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 SFIFF
Attendance: 538
Youth Ed Attendance: 403

These Girls
The streets of Cairo, Egypt are no place for a young girl. Dangerous and unstable, they provide little reprieve from the dirty underbelly of urban life, where kidnappings are as frequent as police abuse.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 SFIFF
Attendance: 440
 
Up the Yangtze
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang displays a lyrical eye for landscape and detail that doesn’t shy from hard truths. His haunting film leaves us mourning what is lost and wondering what is gained as the imminent completion of the massive Three Gorges Dam, one of the biggest and most controversial engineering projects in human history...
SFFS Exhibition: 2008 SFIFF
Attendance: 651
Youth Ed Attendance: 86
Website: www.pbs.org/pov/pov2008/uptheyangtze/

Versailles
Guillaume Depardieu, in one of his last performances, brings heart-piercing intensity to the role of a brooding social outcast living in a hut in the woods near Versailles whose life is upended when a young homeless woman decides to leave her five-year-old son in his care.
SFFS Exhibition: 2009 SFIFF
Attendance: 543
Website:  http://www.filmsdulosange.fr/uk_a_laffiche_versailles.php

The Violin
His right arm maimed, the elderly, grizzled peasant Don Plutarco ties the bow of his violin to his damaged appendage in order to play.The Violin explores the basic humanity that moves ordinary people to fight oppression, regardless of the consequences.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 SFIFF
Attendance:  646
Co-presenter: The Mexican Museum
Website: www.elviolinthemovie.com/

A Walk to Beautiful
The journey Ayehu and many young women make on foot and by bus from their remote villages in Ethiopia to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital to have corrective surgery.The film follows five women from the despair of their conditions to hope and confidence as they undergo treatment and take control of their lives.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 SFIFF
Attendance: 594
Website: www.walktobeautiful.com/
Co-presenter: United Nations Association Film Festival
 
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Spike Lee’s epic documentary on the impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a transcendent prayer for salvation.
SFFS Exhibition: 2007 SFIFF
Attendance: 1353
Youth Ed Attendance: 234
Website: www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/
 
Workingman's Death
Michael Glawogger (Megacities, SFIFF 1999) wonders if, in the digital age, heavy manual labor is disappearing, or maybe just becoming invisible.
SFFS Exhibition: 2006 SFIFF
Attendance: 577
Youth Ed Attendance:
Website: workingmansdeath.com/about_en.html


FISCAL SPONSORSHIP

HIghlighted film titles link to sffs.org "Current Projects" pages, alphabetically listing SFFS fiscally sponsored films, containing synopses and website links where available. Below each title is the filmmaker's name.


Kunjo
Terrie Samundra

The Memory Book, A Mother's Words
Chesley Chen
 
The Most Distance Places
Michael Seely

Tents: Where Does Hope Live
Francesca Roveda
 
Without A Net
Kelly J. Richardson


RESOURCES

The following list of resources offers interested audience members more information and ways to become involved in Economic Justice.

Direct Access to Housing Project San Francisco

Princess Projects

Cinterandes Hospital Project

The Homeless Coalition San Francisco

Tents of Hope

AIDWorkers

Kiva

Global Giving

Common River (Ethiopia)

Keep a Child Alive

Housing Opportunity for Everyone

Habitat for Humanity

Active Voice

Viengping Children's Home

UNICEF