San Francisco, CA – The San Francisco Film Society will present its second annual Investigative Documentary Week featuring the free SFFS Focus: Investigative Documentary program Slippery Slopes: A Forum About Crude and the Investigative Functions of Film, 2:00 pm Saturday, September 26 at Landmark’s Lumiere Theatre in conjunction with a screening of Crude (SFIFF 2009), directed by Joe Berlinger. Tickets to the screening must be purchased separately.

SFFS Investigative Documentary Week is copresenting Crude, which opens for a one week run at the Lumiere and Shattuck (Berkeley) theaters on Friday, September 25. Berlinger will be on hand for audience Q & A following the 7:00 & 9:45 pm screenings Friday and Saturday at the Lumiere and the 2:10 and 4:40 pm screenings Sunday at the Shattuck.

Crude, a lively and gripping documentary, chronicles the shifting course of a lawsuit brought by 30,000 Ecuadoreans against Chevron over its responsibility for the country’s contaminated waters and streams. Alternately inspiring, funny, disturbing and infuriating, Crude offers a thoughtful and complex look at the issues surrounding human rights and corporate behavior in Latin America.

Following the 12:00 noon Saturday screening of the film at the Lumiere, the forum will address the functions, roles and processes of documentary film as a form of investigative journalism. Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large at the San Francisco Chronicle, will moderate a discussion with Crude director Joe Berlinger, Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mitch Anderson, corporate accountability campaigner at Amazon Watch.

Joe Berlinger is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist and photographer whose films include the celebrated documentaries Brother’s Keeper (SFIFF 1992), Paradise Lost (SFIFF 1996) and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (SFIFF 2004). Berlinger’s first independent film Outrageous Taxi Stories (1989) was a cult favorite on the festival circuit. In 1992, Berlinger and frequent collaborator Bruce Sinofsky received international acclaim for their Sundance-winning feature Brother’s Keeper, named 1992’s Best Documentary by the Directors Guild of America, the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, and listed one of the year’s ten best by over 50 major critics.

An award-winning journalist with nearly 40 years of experience, Robert Rosenthal has worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle. As a reporter, his awards include the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World Reporting.

Mitch Anderson is Amazon Watch's corporate accountability campaigner, responsible for organizing US-based grassroots, shareholder and media strategies across all of Amazon Watch's campaigns. He is also the lead campaigner in the Clean Up Ecuador campaign, which seeks to hold Chevron accountable for massive environmental contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Prior to joining Amazon Watch, Anderson spearheaded several international fundraising campaigns to support indigenous autonomy.

As editor-at-large, Phil Bronstein is responsible for broad strategic decisions at the San Francisco Chronicle and for the Hearst Corporation. Bronstein represents the Chronicle in community affairs and is the principal public face of the paper. As a reporter, Bronstein has specialized in investigative projects and was a foreign correspondent for eight years. He has won awards for his coverage of the Philippines from the Overseas Press Club, Associated Press, the World Affairs Council and Media Alliance.

The Film Society also celebrates and supports the world’s finest investigative documentaries by annually bestowing the $25,000 Golden Gate Award for Best Investigative Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF53, April 22–May 6, 2010).

For more information, sffs.org.

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 22–May 6, 2010); 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 SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants, the Herbert Family Filmmaking Grants, the Hearst Screening Grant, the Djerassi/SFFS Screenwriting Fellowship, SFFS Film Arts Forums and professional-level filmmaker classes.

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