The transition from film school to the working world can be tough. Will a degree and some great student projects lead to a career in filmmaking? Must a filmmaker move to LA or New York, or can a successful career be sustained here in the Bay Area? Panelists will share their experiences and stories of how they’ve sustained their careers over time and made the Bay Area their city of choice for filmmaking. SFFS Director of Education Joanne Parsont will moderate the discussion. Attendees will also have the opportunity to network with promising filmmakers from numerous Bay Area film schools and celebrate today’s emerging talents with the second annual SFFS Colleges & Universities showcase of a selection of the best student work being produced in the Bay Area. The evening will feature audience-award voting with prizes including SFFS classes and consulting services.

PANELISTS

Building on a foundation laid in the visual arts and experimental music, Frazer Bradshaw’s first semi-narrative short film, Every Day Here, screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and later at the New York Film Festival. Harnessing a deep connection with the visual aspects of the medium, Bradshaw has built a substantial résumé as director of photography for over 200 independent productions. His first narrative feature Everything Strange and New premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the Fipresci Prize at the 2009 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Kelly Duane de la Vega is an Emmy-nominated director and producer, 2009–2010 HBO/FIND Fellow and 2010 Sundance Documentary Fellow. Her documentaries have been broadcast on PBS, the Documentary Channel, Discovery Channel and have screened at numerous international film festivals. She also produced a television series for IFC on emerging and innovative artists. Better This World, which she codirected with Katie Galloway has received countless awards and honors.

Katie Galloway is an award-winning director and producer. Her most recent film Better This World (POV, 2011) won the Writer’s Guild of America’s Best Documentary Screenplay Award, the Gotham Award for best documentary, an International Documentary Association Creative Achievement Award and several top documentary awards on the festival circuit (including SFIFF 2011). It is being developed as a feature film. A 2010 Sundance Documentary Fellow and HBO/Film Independent documentary fellow, Galloway taught documentary production at Columbia Journalism School and now teaches media studies at U.C. Berkeley.
 
Adam Keker is a cinematographer and screenwriter based in San Francisco. His award-winning narrative short, On the Assassination of the President, premiered at Sundance and received the Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area short film in 2008. In 2011 he received a $35,000 SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant to develop his feature film, National Park.

Richard Levien has a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University. Now a freelance film editor, he enjoys the collaborative process of helping the director find an original vision. He edited and did motion graphics for Keker’s short On the Assassination of the President. He also edited the cult Internet hit Store Wars (2005), which was seen by 5.5 million people in the first 6 weeks of its release. His first film as a director, Immersion, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2009. Levien won a $35,000 SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant in 2009 to develop his feature La Migra.




Tickets $7 for SFFS members, $10 general. Box office opens March 9 online at sffs.org.