SFFS SCREEN
Alamar
July 30–August 5, 2010
July 30–August 5, 2010
SFFS SCREEN
Making Plans for Lena
August 6–12, 2010
August 6–12, 2010
SFFS SCREEN
Vengeance
August 13–19, 2010
August 13–19, 2010
SFFS SCREEN
Army of Crime
August 20–26, 2010
August 20–26, 2010
SFFS SCREEN
The Two Escobars
August 27–September 2, 2010
August 27–September 2, 2010
SFFS SCREEN
Dogtooth
September 3–9, 2010
September 3–9, 2010
Releases
San Francisco Film Society and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Announce Finalists for Initial $35,000 SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant
Winner to Be Announced May 6 at the Film Society’s Golden Gate Awards
4/7/2009
San Francisco, CA – San Francisco Film Society and The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced today the 12 finalists and 4 honorable mentions for the initial $35,000 SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant, to be given to a narrative feature film with a social justice theme being made in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the next five years SFFS and KRF will disburse a series of annual grants totaling $3 million. Finalists, honorable mentions and projects follow.
FINALISTS
Jeffrey Brown: In the Life
Screenwriting/script development
Lola, 14, lives in Oakland. When her mother’s boyfriend molests her, she runs away. Lola meets Duke, who seduces her and gets her addicted to crack. Soon, Duke forces her to turn tricks. Finally, rather than die from the dangers of life on the streets, Lola finds MISSSEY (Motivating, Inspiring, Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth), a safe haven where she meets other girls in recovery. This story depicts the brutal reality of how teens are sexually exploited in America.
Tom Brown: Pushing Dead
Preproduction
Dan is a struggling writer living paycheck to paycheck, working the door at a San Francisco dive bar. Although he’s been HIV positive for 15 years, his problems aren’t physical—his psyche is more of an issue than his T-cells. When the great State of California suspends Dan’s medical coverage and his $3,000-a-month AIDS drugs are cut off, life gets more complicated.
Catherine Craig: Suspended Belief
Preproduction
A young mother of two tries to escape the clutches of domestic violence and find a safe place for herself and her children to grow and become themselves. The story draws parallels between the monsters in her real life, an abuser and a society that does not understand, and the film monsters of her work life, at a stop-motion animation company.
Mark Decena: Speak to Me
Screenwriting/script development
Jim, a former Hunter’s Point Navy grunt, always wondered about the toxic dump he left behind. Thirty-five years later, his daughter Natalie sees the consequences in her speech therapy students. Javonte can barely utter a word, until Natalie introduces him to the literary arts organization Youth Speaks. Tragically, just as Jim glimpses his redemption through Natalie’s work, she is killed in a drive-by shooting. In his grief, Jim realizes he must help Javonte prepare for a spoken word recital, perhaps to have Javonte speak the words he needs to hear.
Nanci Gaglio: Venus Rising
Screenwriting/script development
San Francisco, 1950s: A wife and mother new to the city finds herself fascinated by, then attracted to, the underground lesbian society’s few secret bars. She risks all when she has an intense sexual relationship and secret love affair with her domestic. Presented in a pulpish risqué fashion, the film explores the desperate, lonely, highly sexual and illegal lesbian underground that surrounds the main character who struggles to fully express herself in love.
Richard Levien: La Migra
Screenwriting/script development
Eleven-year-old Alondra comes home from school to find her mamá Guadalupe has been taken by the immigration police. Alondra hates her prejudiced teacher Mr. Broad, but is forced to turn to him for help. Guadalupe is moved from prison to prison as the two race to find her before she is deported. Every day across the U.S. families are separated, often for life, by the deportation process. La Migra makes this story personal.
Jennie Livingston: Who’s the Top?
Screenwriting/script development
Alixe and Gwen are a couple. Alixe wants to have kinky sex. Gwen doesn’t. When Alixe travels to San Francisco, she runs into an old friend, Mars, who offers to introduce Alixe to her own libido in ways Gwen can’t. What’s more important, fulfillment or fidelity? Does fighting for marriage rights mean losing the gaiety in gay? In Who’s the Top? there are no right answers, just musical numbers.
Amanda Micheli: Tomboy
Screenwriting/script development
Ruby idolizes her father Frank, a retired NFL linebacker, and dreams of playing football herself. As a little girl, Ruby’s boyish ways are cute and almost socially acceptable; Frank teaches Ruby to throw and catch as if she were his son. As she transitions into womanhood, however, Ruby faces an identity crisis. Tomboy is a full-contact coming-of-age story about sexual identity, female courage and self-determination set in the world of college women’s rugby.
Mabel Valdiviezo: Soledad’s Awakening
Preproduction
San Francisco–based photographer Soledad González is shocked when she learns that her father’s body has been found in a mass grave in Chile. Soledad returns to her homeland to clarify her father’s identity, but as she investigates his disappearance, she unveils a sinister plot among high-ranking military men. A surprising revelation leads Soledad to the discovery of her father’s killer, whom she is challenged to forgive.
Natalija Vekic: Solace
Screenwriting/script development
Once a prolific author, Zlata lives an isolated existence in America. She refuses to confront the horror of the war she fled in Sarajevo, a trauma that stole her family and literary voice. Zlata overcomes her reluctance to join an oral history project about the war when a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with the General, a war criminal thought to be dead. Zlata faces the hardest decision of her life when she realizes the General may be closer than she imagined.
Caveh Zahedi: Coyote
Screenwriting/script development
Coyote is the story of Margo St. James’ transformational journey from prostitute to sex-worker rights activist. The film chronicles the events leading from her arrest for prostitution in 1962 to her founding of the world’s first sex worker rights organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), in 1973. St. James’s story is also the story of sex-positive feminism and the sexual revolution that made San Francisco the socially and politically progressive city that it is today.
Jeff Zimbalist: The Scribe of Urabá,
Preproduction
Based on real events, The Scribe of Urabá chronicles the rise of the Nobel Prize–nominated Peace Community Movement in Latin America through the personal story of a 14-year-old Colombian girl whose father is murdered for being a union leader at a rural Colombian Coca-Cola bottling plant. The girl’s life collides with that of an African American woman PR executive at Coca-Cola’s U.S. headquarters, assigned to ameliorate controversy around the violent union bust.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Dina Ciraulo: Opal
Postproduction
Opal is a narrative feature about self-taught naturalist and cult icon Opal Whiteley. Raised in a logging camp at the turn of the last century, Opal catapults to fame with the publication of her diary, then finds herself infamous as readers suspect a hoax. While the scandal has yet to be resolved, the film rides the tension between truth and fiction and presents a character who embodies the possibilities of both.
Eric Escobar: An Army of One
Screenwriting/script development
Two months after coming home from Iraq, Meg gets the order to return to duty. Still haunted by the nightmare of combat, and with her family and life unraveling, she finds out that the toughest soldier is the one who says no to war.
Jed Riffe: Convention
Postproduction
Convention explores the fine lines between courage and compromise, evasion and clarity, risk and refuge. Melanie Johnson believes passionately in using the democratic process to create change and is working for presidential candidate Ron Henderson, an African American liberal leader. Over the course of the Democratic national convention, Melanie finds herself thrust into the cold, calculating world where the future of the country and the soul of the nation are at stake.
Anurag Wadehra: Left at Exit
Screenwriting/script development
Left at Exit tells the story of Ravi, an educated Indian immigrant who is chasing the American dream. When his uninsured mother falls sick during a visit from India, his life takes a left turn. His savings dry up, and when he loses his job in the downturn, he comes face to face with a tottering healthcare system, the threat of deportation and financial ruin.
The SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants support films that through plot, character, theme or setting significantly explore human and civil rights, antidiscrimination, gender and sexual identity and other urgent social justice issues of our time. The grants, which run 2009–13, will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year. Total amount disbursed over these five years will be $3 million.
The letter of inquiry period for the fall 2009 grant for screenwriting, script development, preproduction and postproduction, opens July 20; the deadline is August 20.
The SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants support work by local filmmakers as well as attract projects of the highest quality to the Bay Area, providing tangible encouragement and support to meaningful projects and benefiting the local economy. In addition to a cash grant, recipients will receive various benefits through the Film Society’s comprehensive and dynamic filmmaker services programs (sffs.org/filmmaker-services.aspx).
The Kenneth Rainin Foundation is a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing the quality of life by promoting equitable access to a baseline of literacy, enabling inspiration through the magic of the arts and providing opportunity for a healthy lifestyle for those with chronic disease. The Foundation focuses its efforts on the San Francisco Bay Area and specific medical issues and utilizes its networks, resources and commitment to socially responsible business practices to support innovation, collaboration and connection.
San Francisco Film Society is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to celebrating film and the moving image in all its glorious forms. SFFS year-round programs and events are concentrated in four core areas: Celebrating Internationalism; Inspiring Bay Area Youth; Showcasing Bay Area Film Culture; and Exploring New Digital Media. The Film Society shows the best of world cinema year-round on its SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; presents the longest-running film festival in the Americas, the SF International (April 23–May 7, 2009); publishes a daily online magazine, SF360.org, featuring broad-ranging news and features on Bay Area film and media; annually reaches more than 8,000 students ages 6–18 with its acclaimed media literacy programs; and provides crucial support to the Bay Area filmmaking community through SFFS filmmaker services including FilmHouse Residencies, Fiscal Sponsorship, the Herbert Family Filmmaking Grants, SFFS Film Arts Forums and professional-level filmmaker classes.
For more information: http://sffs.org/filmmaker-services/grants-and-prizes/
###
FINALISTS
Jeffrey Brown: In the Life
Screenwriting/script development
Lola, 14, lives in Oakland. When her mother’s boyfriend molests her, she runs away. Lola meets Duke, who seduces her and gets her addicted to crack. Soon, Duke forces her to turn tricks. Finally, rather than die from the dangers of life on the streets, Lola finds MISSSEY (Motivating, Inspiring, Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth), a safe haven where she meets other girls in recovery. This story depicts the brutal reality of how teens are sexually exploited in America.
Tom Brown: Pushing Dead
Preproduction
Dan is a struggling writer living paycheck to paycheck, working the door at a San Francisco dive bar. Although he’s been HIV positive for 15 years, his problems aren’t physical—his psyche is more of an issue than his T-cells. When the great State of California suspends Dan’s medical coverage and his $3,000-a-month AIDS drugs are cut off, life gets more complicated.
Catherine Craig: Suspended Belief
Preproduction
A young mother of two tries to escape the clutches of domestic violence and find a safe place for herself and her children to grow and become themselves. The story draws parallels between the monsters in her real life, an abuser and a society that does not understand, and the film monsters of her work life, at a stop-motion animation company.
Mark Decena: Speak to Me
Screenwriting/script development
Jim, a former Hunter’s Point Navy grunt, always wondered about the toxic dump he left behind. Thirty-five years later, his daughter Natalie sees the consequences in her speech therapy students. Javonte can barely utter a word, until Natalie introduces him to the literary arts organization Youth Speaks. Tragically, just as Jim glimpses his redemption through Natalie’s work, she is killed in a drive-by shooting. In his grief, Jim realizes he must help Javonte prepare for a spoken word recital, perhaps to have Javonte speak the words he needs to hear.
Nanci Gaglio: Venus Rising
Screenwriting/script development
San Francisco, 1950s: A wife and mother new to the city finds herself fascinated by, then attracted to, the underground lesbian society’s few secret bars. She risks all when she has an intense sexual relationship and secret love affair with her domestic. Presented in a pulpish risqué fashion, the film explores the desperate, lonely, highly sexual and illegal lesbian underground that surrounds the main character who struggles to fully express herself in love.
Richard Levien: La Migra
Screenwriting/script development
Eleven-year-old Alondra comes home from school to find her mamá Guadalupe has been taken by the immigration police. Alondra hates her prejudiced teacher Mr. Broad, but is forced to turn to him for help. Guadalupe is moved from prison to prison as the two race to find her before she is deported. Every day across the U.S. families are separated, often for life, by the deportation process. La Migra makes this story personal.
Jennie Livingston: Who’s the Top?
Screenwriting/script development
Alixe and Gwen are a couple. Alixe wants to have kinky sex. Gwen doesn’t. When Alixe travels to San Francisco, she runs into an old friend, Mars, who offers to introduce Alixe to her own libido in ways Gwen can’t. What’s more important, fulfillment or fidelity? Does fighting for marriage rights mean losing the gaiety in gay? In Who’s the Top? there are no right answers, just musical numbers.
Amanda Micheli: Tomboy
Screenwriting/script development
Ruby idolizes her father Frank, a retired NFL linebacker, and dreams of playing football herself. As a little girl, Ruby’s boyish ways are cute and almost socially acceptable; Frank teaches Ruby to throw and catch as if she were his son. As she transitions into womanhood, however, Ruby faces an identity crisis. Tomboy is a full-contact coming-of-age story about sexual identity, female courage and self-determination set in the world of college women’s rugby.
Mabel Valdiviezo: Soledad’s Awakening
Preproduction
San Francisco–based photographer Soledad González is shocked when she learns that her father’s body has been found in a mass grave in Chile. Soledad returns to her homeland to clarify her father’s identity, but as she investigates his disappearance, she unveils a sinister plot among high-ranking military men. A surprising revelation leads Soledad to the discovery of her father’s killer, whom she is challenged to forgive.
Natalija Vekic: Solace
Screenwriting/script development
Once a prolific author, Zlata lives an isolated existence in America. She refuses to confront the horror of the war she fled in Sarajevo, a trauma that stole her family and literary voice. Zlata overcomes her reluctance to join an oral history project about the war when a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with the General, a war criminal thought to be dead. Zlata faces the hardest decision of her life when she realizes the General may be closer than she imagined.
Caveh Zahedi: Coyote
Screenwriting/script development
Coyote is the story of Margo St. James’ transformational journey from prostitute to sex-worker rights activist. The film chronicles the events leading from her arrest for prostitution in 1962 to her founding of the world’s first sex worker rights organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), in 1973. St. James’s story is also the story of sex-positive feminism and the sexual revolution that made San Francisco the socially and politically progressive city that it is today.
Jeff Zimbalist: The Scribe of Urabá,
Preproduction
Based on real events, The Scribe of Urabá chronicles the rise of the Nobel Prize–nominated Peace Community Movement in Latin America through the personal story of a 14-year-old Colombian girl whose father is murdered for being a union leader at a rural Colombian Coca-Cola bottling plant. The girl’s life collides with that of an African American woman PR executive at Coca-Cola’s U.S. headquarters, assigned to ameliorate controversy around the violent union bust.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Dina Ciraulo: Opal
Postproduction
Opal is a narrative feature about self-taught naturalist and cult icon Opal Whiteley. Raised in a logging camp at the turn of the last century, Opal catapults to fame with the publication of her diary, then finds herself infamous as readers suspect a hoax. While the scandal has yet to be resolved, the film rides the tension between truth and fiction and presents a character who embodies the possibilities of both.
Eric Escobar: An Army of One
Screenwriting/script development
Two months after coming home from Iraq, Meg gets the order to return to duty. Still haunted by the nightmare of combat, and with her family and life unraveling, she finds out that the toughest soldier is the one who says no to war.
Jed Riffe: Convention
Postproduction
Convention explores the fine lines between courage and compromise, evasion and clarity, risk and refuge. Melanie Johnson believes passionately in using the democratic process to create change and is working for presidential candidate Ron Henderson, an African American liberal leader. Over the course of the Democratic national convention, Melanie finds herself thrust into the cold, calculating world where the future of the country and the soul of the nation are at stake.
Anurag Wadehra: Left at Exit
Screenwriting/script development
Left at Exit tells the story of Ravi, an educated Indian immigrant who is chasing the American dream. When his uninsured mother falls sick during a visit from India, his life takes a left turn. His savings dry up, and when he loses his job in the downturn, he comes face to face with a tottering healthcare system, the threat of deportation and financial ruin.
The SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants support films that through plot, character, theme or setting significantly explore human and civil rights, antidiscrimination, gender and sexual identity and other urgent social justice issues of our time. The grants, which run 2009–13, will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year. Total amount disbursed over these five years will be $3 million.
The letter of inquiry period for the fall 2009 grant for screenwriting, script development, preproduction and postproduction, opens July 20; the deadline is August 20.
The SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grants support work by local filmmakers as well as attract projects of the highest quality to the Bay Area, providing tangible encouragement and support to meaningful projects and benefiting the local economy. In addition to a cash grant, recipients will receive various benefits through the Film Society’s comprehensive and dynamic filmmaker services programs (sffs.org/filmmaker-services.aspx).
The Kenneth Rainin Foundation is a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing the quality of life by promoting equitable access to a baseline of literacy, enabling inspiration through the magic of the arts and providing opportunity for a healthy lifestyle for those with chronic disease. The Foundation focuses its efforts on the San Francisco Bay Area and specific medical issues and utilizes its networks, resources and commitment to socially responsible business practices to support innovation, collaboration and connection.
San Francisco Film Society is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to celebrating film and the moving image in all its glorious forms. SFFS year-round programs and events are concentrated in four core areas: Celebrating Internationalism; Inspiring Bay Area Youth; Showcasing Bay Area Film Culture; and Exploring New Digital Media. The Film Society shows the best of world cinema year-round on its SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; presents the longest-running film festival in the Americas, the SF International (April 23–May 7, 2009); publishes a daily online magazine, SF360.org, featuring broad-ranging news and features on Bay Area film and media; annually reaches more than 8,000 students ages 6–18 with its acclaimed media literacy programs; and provides crucial support to the Bay Area filmmaking community through SFFS filmmaker services including FilmHouse Residencies, Fiscal Sponsorship, the Herbert Family Filmmaking Grants, SFFS Film Arts Forums and professional-level filmmaker classes.
For more information: http://sffs.org/filmmaker-services/grants-and-prizes/
###
