Member News & Notes

Dawn D. Valadez and Kristy Guevara-Flanagan received a $10,000 grant from the Robeson Fund for Independent Media and $20,000 from the Fledgling Fund for their SFFS fiscally sponsored documentary Going on 13.

Denise Zmekhol’s film Children of the Amazon screened May 21 as part of the Berkeley Filmmakers Screening Series at the Zaentz Media Center. The SFFS fiscally sponsored project, which received the Best Picture award at the 2009 Jules Verne Film Festival in Paris, tells the story of what happened to life in the Amazon forest when a road was built straight through its heart.

Jay Rosenblatt’s Beginning Filmmaking, chronicling his young daughter Ella’s year-long endeavors with her first camcorder, premieres May 28 on HBO.

Scott Kirsner’s new book, Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age unlocks the secrets of using the Web as a channel for building up a fan base and creating a business model to support creative work. It’s available in paperback, PDF and in an Amazon Kindle edition.

In March, the Ventura Film Festival presented a five-film retrospective screening of the work of noted San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker William Farley. Known for their sly humor, social critique and freewheeling use of technique, Farley’s films have played at over a hundred festivals around the world.

At South by Southwest in March, Geralyn Pezanoski won the documentary feature audience award for Mine: Taken by Katrina, which considers the fate of pets rescued and adopted by families around the country following Hurricane Katrina. Jennifer Steinman won the audience award in the Emerging Visions category for Motherland, in which six grieving mothers journey to Africa.

Lynn Hershman Leeson has been selected among the recipients of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009. In awarding the grant, the Foundation recognized Hershman as “perhaps the most influential woman working in new media today.” Hershman will be applying the grant to work on her film Women Art Revolution, the (Formerly) Secret History, which focuses on the development of the feminist art movement in the U.S.

Elizabeth Appell’s Easy Made Hard explores the heartbreaking event when an inner city kid meets his fate at the hand of his father. The script has placed in several competitions including American Gem, Finalist; Writer’s Network, Semi-Finalist; and KAOS, Second Rounder. Production begins early July. Delphine Suter will direct.

Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg’s documentary Soldiers of Conscience is one of four films representing the U.S. at INPUT, the International Public Television organization, this May in Warsaw, Poland. INPUT is “an annual weeklong television showcase where the rules of broadcasting are challenged and redefined.” Soldiers of Conscience was broadcast in 2008 on the PBS series POV and has received five best documentary awards at film fests around the world.

PBS has commissioned Stephen Talbot and his San Francisco based company the Talbot Players to produce a pilot for a new series, Sound Tracks, that explores music around the world. The pilot, already in production, is due this summer.

Pam Walton’s Raging Grannies: The Action League premiered at Cinequest 2009 to a sold-out theater and was screened again at the San Jose Teamsters’ Hall in an event sponsored by the Peace and Justice Center. Walton’s documentary on a Bay Area coalition of elderly activists will screen at Frameline in June.

Two films produced by Michelle Peticolas as part of the documentary series Secrets of Life and Death screened recently at the Bare Bones Film Festival in Muskogee, Oklahoma and at the Davis Film Festival.