The current crew of FilmHouse residents include producers,writers and directors working on a wide range of projects across genres and platforms. Check out their projects and bios below.

FilmHouse Residents, Fall 2010 - Spring 2011
Priya Desai, production, feature documentary
MATCH+: A Story of Love in the Time of HIV tells the human story of HIV/AIDS through a new lens: the growing movement for HIV-positive marriage matchmaking in India. With the effectiveness and relative availability of antiretroviral drug therapy, HIV-positive people are living longer. But in a culture steeped in tradition and obsessed with marriage, how do you find lifelong companionship when you are HIV-positive? Dr. Suniti Solomon and her staff of matchmakers at the YRG CARE clinic in Chennai, India are at the film’s core. Through them we learn about society’s expectations on the one hand – if you are of marriageable age, you should be married -- and the stigma HIV-positive people face on the other. We hear from bachelors, widows, couples all looking for the same thing: support, companionship and love, despite their illness and despite the community they so desperately want to fit into. MATCH+ is a modern love story.

Priya’s work spans print, web and tv/film, including work for outlets such as Life and Boston Globe Sunday magazines, PBS and independent theatrical productions. She is Emmy-nominated for her work on PBS’s children’s series Postcards from Buster, for which she has written, directed and produced. Her credits also include work on the DuPont award-winning health disparities series Unnatural Causes (PBS) as well as the documentary Forgotten Ellis Island (PBS) about immigration and public health at the turn of the 20th century, and Enlighten Up! (theatrical) about yoga in America. Priya’s passion for how cultures and communities evolve stems from her experiences as the daughter of Indian immigrants living in northern California and traveling regularly to India to visit family. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter.

Hayley Downs and Julie Kahn, postproduction, feature documentary
Swamp Cabbage is a dark and sweaty documentary about Hayley Downs, a half-“Cracker”—in Florida, a term of pride referring to the descendants of early pioneers known for their ability to survive in the treacherous wilderness—stuck in Brooklyn who discovers that the bizarre backwoods-meets-suburbia childhood she left behind is actually the key to her own survival. Find out more information at swampcabbagemovie.com

Hayley Downs is a documentary filmmaker, producer and fundraising/outreach consultant. She produced Hidden Battles, a documentary about the psychological effects of killing on soldiers by Victoria Mills. She Associate Produced Naturally Obsessed, a documentary about laboratory research by Dick and Carole Rifkind. She also served as Broadcast Editor on Naturally Obsessed. Her installations and experimental films: Move, Coleslaw Wrestling and Boar Hog, exploring multi-generational Florida folk culture, have shown at underground film festivals including NY, Chicago and SF, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami and Art Basel. Her angst-filled teen journal was included in Mortified: Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic, published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment.

Julie Kahn is a filmmaker, producer and visual artist whose award-winning work includes the hybrid documentary Swamp Cabbage: Cracker Culture in a Fast Food Nation and the short films Taxidermy High and Möbius. She has also exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally, including Art Basel, Havana Biennal, and Art in Embassies. Her Dixie Dingo Film Festival was named top art event by The Miami Herald, and she was named Best Miami Photographer by CityLink. She has worked as an A&R executive at Columbia Records, content development director at Sony Pictures, producer for Annie Leibovitz, and investment banker at Morgan Stanley. She graduated from Harvard with a BA and MBA. Kahn is currently an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and lives on a houseboat in Sausalito with her two brown dogs, Logan and Hadley.

Lisa Fruchtman, postproduction, feature documentary
Sweet Dreams follows the 62 members of Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda’s first and only women’s drumming troupe, who have come from both sides of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to find a haven in which they feel both safe and empowered. Now, with the help of two young American entrepreneurs, they are moving toward improving their economic future by opening Inzozi Niza (sweet dreams)—Rwanda’s first-ever local ice cream shop—embarking on a remarkable experiment in economic and emotional recovery.

Producer/Director, Lisa Fruchtman is an Academy Award–winning editor who has worked in both feature film and television. Among her many film projects are Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, Children of a Lesser God, The Godfather Part III, The Doctor, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Dance with Me, and The Woodsman. For television, she has edited such HBO films as Truman, Witness Protection, Point of Origin and Normal. Her awards and honors include an Oscar for The Right Stuff, Academy Award and BAFTA Nominations for Best Editing for both Godfather Part III and Apocalypse Now, an Emmy Nomination and a Cable ACE Award for Truman. Children of a Lesser God, on which she was sole editor, was nominated for Best Picture.

Jim Granato, outreach/distribution, feature documentary
D tour is a feature-length documentary about indie rock drummer Pat Spurgeon who struggles with kidney disease while fulfilling his dreams as a musician. As his band starts to take off, he takes his dialysis with him on the road and starts the difficult quest to find a potential living donor. A rock-and-roll film about life, death and bodily functions, D tour addresses issues regarding the U.S. health care system, lack of affordable insurance and the importance of organ donation. http://dtourmovie.com/

Jim Granato is a self-taught filmmaker based in San Francisco since 1996. His most recent short documentary film, Vivid Dreams (2008), has played film festivals worldwide. As a cinematographer and sound recordist Jim Granato has been involved with several independent feature film productions such as past festival favorites Stuck (2003), Mango Kiss (2004), and Revolution Summer (2007). In addition, he's worked on award-winning documentary features including Taggart Siegel's The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005), Michael Jacobs' Audience of One (2007) and Dori Berinstein's Some Assembly Required (2008).  D Tour (2009), his first feature film as director and producer, has won several awards including the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Feature Documentary from the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Jury Prize for Best Documentary from the Bend Film Festival. D Tour premiered nationwide on the PBS Emmy award-winning program Independent Lens in November 2009.

Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell, preproduction, feature documentary
Good Robot is a documentary film that aims to capture a new era in the relationship of humans and machines. Good Robot will explore the social impact the field of modern robotics in medicine, in the military and in the commercial market around the world. As machines become integrated in our lives, the film asks the questions about the places they will take, the morality of their use and whether there is a line we can cross. www.colonymovie.com/

Ross McDonnell graduated his MA in Film Production in 2003. He has received grants and awards from Simon Cumbers Foundation, The Jerome Foundation and the Irish Arts Council and twice nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award. His work has been published in The New York Times, Art in America, and The Irish Times among others. He received a Documentary Production Grant for Colony in 2009.

Carter Gunn is a filmmaker based in San Francisco. Since graduating from The School of Visual Arts in 2005, he has worked as an assistant editor on several films, including PETA (07) and Quest for Honor (09). Colony (09) is his feature-length directorial debut. He received a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation in 2009.  Colony received its World Premiere at TIFF in 2009 and its European Premiere at IDFA in Amsterdam where it won the First Appearance Award.

Scott Kirschenbaum, postproduction, feature documentary
You’re Looking at Me Like I Live Here and I Don’t is the invigorating first-person account of Lee Gorewitz’s life inside the Traditions Alzheimer’s & Other Dementia Care Unit at the Reutlinger Community for Jewish Living in Danville, California. A total immersion into the fragmented day-to-day experience of the disease, the film reveals Gorewitz’s penetrating ruminations and charismatic vitality, challenging our preconceptions of illness and aging. yourelookingatme.com

Scott Kirschenbaum was recently commissioned to make The Town Chernobyl Built, a short documentary for the Chernobyl Children's Project. He previously completed the documentary Jumor: A Journey through Jewish Humor, which screened at the New Orleans Jewish Film Festival. His short films include Elementary Cool, Uphill, and Good Times Goodbye. Kirschenbaum has long been an activist for the aged. He wrote profiles of the elderly for the Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, taught improv to and performed stand-up comedy for nursing home residents across the country, and served as a personal assistant to a Jewish screenwriter suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Kirschenbaum graduated from Yale University.

Miles Montalbano, preproduction, feature narrative
A Human Certainty is a contemporary neorealist fable in which a young working-poor couple foresee a bleak future for themselves in the midst of a worsening economic crisis and make a lovers’ suicide pact. They check into a cheap hotel with one month’s rent and a vow to spend their last days full of carefree passion and romance. Their love is finally allowed to grow and blossom, but when the month inevitably ends, they must face the irrevocable finality of their decision. www.grayeminencefilms.com.

California-born Miles Matthew Montalbano segued into filmmaking by producing and directing no-budget music videos for the Sub Pop label. Montalbano continued making short films, music videos, and documentary work, including producing and directing the feature-length Jonathan Richman concert film Take Me to the Plaza, which was released by Neil Young’s Vapor Records label. His narrative feature debut as writer/director, Revolution Summer, premiered at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival and was named “One of the Ten Best Films of the Year” and “One of the Best Independent Films of the Decade” by the San Francisco Chronicle.