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Winter/Spring 2009 Class Schedule
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Our classes are taught by talented, inspirational working professionals actively involved in the Bay Area film and media community, who are selected for their professional expertise and ability to convey the specific challenges of the changing contemporary media landscape. Instructors for the Winter/Spring 2009 term are:
Michael A. Behrens
Michael is the Film Society’s filmmaker education manager. He sits on the board of the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco and co-founded Laccolith films, a documentary training program for International NGOs and activists. He has produced, acted and directed in the U.S., Europe and Asia for the last 15 years. Michael has taught acting and directing at the National Theater School of Finland, SUNY Potsdam, Illinois State and others. He has taught lighting, camera and documentary production at BAVC, Film Arts Foundation and Sun Yat-Sen University. He has worked at several theaters, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Chicago Dramatists, Tampere Theatre of Finland, Seinajoki City Theatre and San Diego Rep. He has worked for Paramount, Fox, Disney and others, appearing on TV. Recently, he consulted on the documentary A Permanent Mark and is now producing My Garbage My Neighborhood. His latest work as DP on the film Climate Change screened at the Rome International and Santa Fe Film Festivals in 2008.
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David L. Brown
David L. Brown is a two-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who has produced, written and directed more than 80 productions and ten broadcast documentaries. His recent works include The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story (two Emmys, including best documentary), Seniors for Peace, Surfing for Life, Bound by the Wind and Digital Divide.
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Carey Burens
Carey Burens has over 10 years of postproduction experience, starting his career at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic. Working with the Editorial Department there he learned the benefits of organization within a large workflow pipeline that included editing, film scanning, naming conventions, computer graphics and deliverables. After leaving ILM he landed at Spy Post Digital in San Francisco working in telecine/film transfer and color correction. Now a full time colorist, he has color graded with many formats, including film, SD and HD video and RED camera footage on feature length films, shorts, music videos and commercial spots.
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Anna-Mae Chin
Marketing Manager at the San Francisco Film Society since 2007, on SFFS marketing staff since 2005, previously worked in Development and Membership at the Center for Asian American Media and the Asian Art Museum and has worked in non-profit arts for 8 years. Having gone through the festival experience as a filmmaker in 2002 she understands the marketing process from the side of the filmmaker as well as the film exhibitor.
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Michael Dougan
A U.S.C. graduate and George Cukor scholarship winner, Michael Feit Dougan's screenwriting credits began with Public Access, which earned the Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture at Sundance. His current feature-length thriller 647 is in pre-production and slated for 2009. A freelance story consultant, Michael has presented story design at Dreamworks Animation. As an academic, Michael earned both the 2003 Presidential and ASB Teacher of the Year Award at Cogswell College and was featured in the San Jose Mercury News. Michael currently lectures at the University of San Francisco. Michael co-wrote Developing Digital Short Films with Sherri Sheridan in 2004. As part of his Masters Class in Screenwriting Michael works alongside Charles Pogue (The Fly re-make, Dragonheart and Psycho III) and as a founding member of The Kentucky Film Lab, ran the Advanced Screenwriter’s Lab at the Idea Festival with Jack Epps Jr. (Top Gun, Dick Tracy, Anaconda).
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Jack Curtis Dubowsky
Jack Curtis Dubowsky has scored four feature films including Rock Haven, That Man Peter Berlin and Under One Roof, as well as projects for television and advertising. He has also worked in the music department at Pixar Animation Studios. He has a MM in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has received grants from Meet the Composer, Zellerbach Family Fund and Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Dubowsky teaches at NYU in the Design, Digital Arts and Film department of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He writes about film, music and popular culture for Film International and other publications.
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Mike Epple
Mike Epple is a San Francisco–based director of photography and camera operator. He shoots both film and video for television and for corporate and narrative films throughout the U.S. He has shot for the Discovery Channel, PBS and HD Net, as well as clients Visa, Yahoo and Cisco. He is experienced with state-of-the art camera systems and is well versed on the latest digital formats and techniques.
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Karen Everett
Karen Everett is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor based in San Francisco. She has directed and edited five films, including the PBS biography I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs. Her trilogy of films on lesbian relationships has been seen in more than 150 film festivals worldwide.
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Hilary Hart
Director of Publicity at the San Francisco Film Society since 1998, and a veteran of the SFFS publicity staff since 1993, Hart previously worked as publicity coordinator at San Francisco International LGBT Festival and director of publicity at Cinequest, San Jose Film Festival. She has attended Sundance and Telluride for over 15 years. Hart learned the basics of grassroots publicity while working at a Bay Area repertory movie theater and later Landmark Theatres for 19 years, before segueing to the film festival world.
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David Walter Lech
David Walter Lech is a Bay Area based filmmaker and photographer. In 2008 he attended the Sundance Film Festival for his work on the feature film The Wind and The Water (Burwa Dii Ebo), which premiered in the World Dramatic Cinema Competition. He was also a Sundance panelist, hosted by festival director Geoffrey Gillmore. He travelled to Panama to shoot The Wind and the Water, made collectively with the indigenous Kuna people of the San Blas Islands. While working as Director of Photography, he also worked as Workshop Coordinator, teaching filmmaking to a group of Kuna youth. His experience working in a collaborative, community based model was a great asset to Kunjo, which he recently travelled to Punjab, India to shoot. He has lensed many other films in a wide variety of formats including the 35mm feature film Mitsein.
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Richard Levien
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. Recently he edited and did motion graphics for the short film On the Assassination of the President which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2008. He also edited the cult internet hit Store Wars, which was seen by 5.5 million people in the first 6 weeks of its release. Levien recently completed his first film as a director. Immersion premieres at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2009. Levien was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He enjoys a good cup of tea and follows the (mostly ill) fate of the New Zealand cricket team. He is one of the few New Zealanders who played no part whatsoever in the making of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
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Chris Martin
Chris studied photography and film at Brooks Institute of Photography and began learning telecine and coloring at Varitel in San Francisco, where he worked on music videos and commercials. In 2005, Chris joined Spy Post as lead colorist, where he has worked on the commercials (Comcast, Budweiser, Microsoft, Scion, Adidas), music videos (Carrie Underwood, LeAnn Rymes, Zioni), narrative (Black August, Village Barbershop, Quality of Life and Everything Strange and Beautiful) and documentary films (The Weather Underground and multiple projects for the PBS series American Experience).
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Holly Million
Holly Million is a consultant, author and filmmaker with nearly two decades worth of experience in fundraising. In addition to securing funding for A Story of Healing, which won a 1997 Academy Award, Million has raised money for numerous documentary and dramatic films that have aired on PBS, HBO and other broadcast outlets. She is the author of Fear-Free Fundraising: How to Ask People for Money, available on Amazon.com. Visit Million’s fundraising blog at fearfreefilmfundraising.blogspot.com.
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Dan Olmsted
Dan Olmsted is a Berkeley-based sound mixer and designer with extensive and varied credits in the field. An alumnus of SFSU’s film production program, Olmsted honed much of his craft at Berkeley’s Saul Zaentz Film Center, where he served as a rerecording mixer for many years. He also performs music in a variety of local bands. Recent credits include Strange Culture (Lynn
Hershman Leeson), White Light, Black Rain (Steven Okazaki) and HBO’s Soldiers of Conscience (Gary Weimberg).
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Miguel Pendás
Today the creative director of the San Francisco Film Society, Pendás graduated from the cinema program at San Francisco State University in 1987 and completed an AFI-Academy Director’s Internship after graduation. His film Refugees, a California Council for the Humanities-funded documentary about Central American refugees in the United States, has been shown on PBS. Pendás has appeared on local television taking viewers to his favorite San Francisco film locations and he recently lectured at the San Francisco Museum & Historical Society on the film noir era in San Francisco.
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Shaka Jamal Redmond
Shaka Jamal Redmond, a grassroots artist from Oakland, is a graduate of Tuskegee University in Alabama and is currently working on his MFA in Cinema at SFSU. Redmond’s goal to engage both his love for the arts and for community development led him to work with Digital Underground Storytelling for the Youth (DUSTY) in West Oakland, where he taught digital storytelling and created his first music video on his experience in South Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He is co-owner of Black Apes Project, a multimedia collaboration, and the owner of OLU 8: Film. Redmond is a talented producer, writer and performing artist for the hip hop funk band Hairdoo. His work has premiered at the Pan African Film Festival and the San Francisco Black Film Festival.
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Lisa Rosenberg
Lisa Rosenberg is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran story consultant whose credits include independent features, television, home entertainment and Internet narrative and documentary productions. Currently, she is seeking production opportunities for her dramatic feature based on Edie Meidav’s award-winning novel Crawl Space, researching a new screenplay based in Russia and the Middle East and beginning a romantic comedy.
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Jay Rosenblatt
Jay Rosenblatt is an internationally recognized artist who has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980 and has completed 25 films. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim, USA Artists and a Rockefeller Fellowship. His films have received over 100 awards and have screened throughout the world. A selection of his films had theatrical runs at the Film Forum in New York and at theaters around the country. Eight of his films have been at the Sundance Film Festival and several of his films have shown on HBO/Cinemax, the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel. Jay is originally from New York and has lived in San Francisco for many years. He has been a film and video production instructor since 1989 at various film schools in the Bay Area, including Stanford University, S.F. State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology and, in a former life, worked as a therapist.
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Tiffany Shlain
Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and an award-winning filmmaker. Her films include The Tribe and Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness, and have been selected at over 100 festivals—including Sundance and Tribeca—and received over 22 awards. Tiffany founded The Webby Awards in 1996 and was creative director and CEO for nearly a decade. She is currently in production directing a feature length documentary, Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence. Tiffany is a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. She lectures worldwide on the Internet and her filmmaking. She has just been invited to give one of the keynotes at the Berlin International Film Festival in Feb 2009. She is the director of The Moxie Institute, an organization that creates film, books and theater experiences around social issues using emerging technologies.
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Michele Turnure-Salleo
Michele Turnure-Salleo heads the Film Society’s fiscal sponsorship and regrant program. Turnure-Salleo has produced and directed projects for film and television for more than 15 years in Sydney, Berlin, Vancouver, Banff and Marseille. She was associate producer of Regret to Inform, an Oscar-nominated documentary about the effect of the Vietnam War on war widows. She is currently producing the feature documentary Free China Junk.
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Sean Uyehara
Sean Uyehara is a programmer at the Film Society, where he inaugurated KinoTek, a programming thread dedicated to exhibiting cross-platform technologies and emergent media. Uyehara is also the establishing programmer of the San Francisco International Animation Festival and lead programmer of film and music, live events and multimedia performance at the San Francisco
International Film Festival and SF360 Film+Club.
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Jason Wolos
Jason Wolos is a writer, director and videographer. His short films have been screened worldwide and include Waiter Duty, which is also used as a training video in restaurants and The High and the Mighty, shown as part of IFP’s program Independents in Flight. His freelance camerawork has been shown on PBS, 60 Minutes and in festivals such as Sundance and Los Angeles. His feature Trattoria is planned for production in 2009.
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