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Satyagraha
Lisa Harney and Bryce Montgomery
The saints of India take on governmental incompetence and judicial corruption to protect the holiest river in the world from environmental devastation. The consequences of their Satyagraha (fast-unto-death) results in the inexplicable death of one saint, who they believe was murdered.
The Secret Fatwa
Delnaz Abadi
Late July 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran suddenly locked down its prisons, where thousands of political prisoners were serving their sentences. Five months later, their desperate families were summoned to prison. They were given a bag and told that their prisoner had been executed -- no explanation, no last will, no body , no burial location. To this day, no Islamic Republic official has assumed responsibility or explained why and talking about the 1988 prison massacre is a taboo in Iran. The Secret Fatwa, with the help of brave survivors and family members who have come forward to tell their stories, reveals the truth about this crime against humanity, unique in the known history of state crimes.
Secrets of Life and Death
Michelle Peticolas
Secrets of Life and Death takes a fresh look at death as teacher and transformer. It asks what meaning death has for the way we live. In a three-part collection of personal accounts, ordinary and not-so-ordinary people share potent lessons about living and dying.
Sensational Life
Bryan Horch
Sami Habib’s creative vision has become blurry. Ever since his soulmate Daniel died tragically twenty years before, the eccentric artist has filled his whimsical island home with broken things and quirky, needy people, burying his dream of launching a “Center for Sensational Living.” When Sami learns that his village has been chosen to host the Island Arts Festival in just a few weeks, he is inspired to make his vision of the art center finally a reality. But can he make the deadline? After Sami’s friends have lost faith in him, and his disgruntled yuppie neighbors report him to the officious local code enforcer, an intriguing young man rides his bike into Sami’s world and offers to help. Facing the imminent threat of losing his house and a paralyzing fear of loneliness, Sami attempts to unload both the physical and emotional clutter that prevents him from letting go, moving on and living his own sensational life.
Seventh-Gay Adventists
Stephen Eyer, Daneen Akers
Faith, identity and sexuality collide as three gay and lesbian Seventh-day Adventists are caught between the church they know and love and their desire to be fully accepted for who they are. One young man spent five years in "ex-gay" therapy trying to become straight, but now he's falling in love with another man and wondering if that can be okay. Another was a Brazilian pastor who was fired for being gay. Can he find his calling again? And a lesbian mom from the midwest wants her daughters to grow up with her faith and beliefs, even though she knows her church might not accept their family.

This feature-length documentary follows their raw and moving journeys as they wrestle with deep questions of identity and belonging. Is there a way to reconcile their faith and identity? Can they find a spiritual home? And what does it mean to belong when you find yourself on the margins?
Shaken
Michael Epstein
Shaken is a cross-platform media project exploring how disasters shape cities and community groups. The project combines smartphone and gps technologies to give audiences a site-specific experience of how the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906 shaped modern-day San Francisco. Shaken will approach disaster sociology through the experience of three historic characters whose post-disaster work with immigrant populations, worker’s rights, and the city’s financial base created structures deeply sewn into the San Francisco of today. 
Shanghai Deco
Denise Richards
A look at the art and lifestyle in 1930s Shanghai. This city of refugees became the birthplace of a short-lived but unique form of Art Deco that hybridized Chinese traditional forms with that of the prevailing style of art in Europe and America. After the Communist takeover in 1949, the style was outlawed as being too Western. Now, young Shanghainese are discovering their history and readopting Art Deco as both an art form and a lifestyle.
Shelter
Lee Schneider, Richard Neill
Shelter is a feature length documentary about a courageous community of architects and designers who are using socially responsible design to provide shelter to the homeless and to survivors of natural disasters. Whether facing the enormous challenges rebuilding post-earthquake Haiti or searching for creative solutions to housing for Americans most in need, architects and designers are working together to address shelter issues worldwide.
Signpost
Rivkah Beth Medow, Kyle Metzner
What did the San Francisco waterfront look like 150 years ago? What will it look like in another 100 years? Signpost is an interactive public art project centered on visualizing past and future landscapes from particular vantage points for cities around the world. The underlying goal is to contextualize climate change by showing the extraordinary changes these areas have undergone and to project best case / worst case change into the future. There are two ways to experience Signpost: either by looking through stationary viewing binoculars or by mobile phone as an app.
Soul of a Nation
Elizabeth O'Connell
Artists have historically been a force for social change and criticism in Iran. But the Iranian revolution dramatically impacted their freedom of expression. Soul of a Nation looks at Iranian artists and their struggles and triumphs in the contrasting environments of censorship (Iran) and expressive freedom (United States).
Spark
Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter
Spark goes behind the curtain with the Burning Man organization and its tight participant community, revealing a year of unprecedented challenges leading up to the 2012 event. The Burning Man-inspired dream of creating a new way of living based on ideals of artistic freedom and "radical inclusion" vividly collides with the reality of surviving in the "default world." Will Burning Man change the world, or will the world change Burning Man?
The Sprocket Ensemble
Nik Phelps
What performance art companies like New York's Wooster Group did to create a forum for unusual stage talents like Spalding Gray, The Sprocket Ensemble project attempts to do for the rich new talents of independent filmmakers and animators. A collaborative performing arts endeavor between composer/performers of live music and directors of short film and animation, The Sprocket Ensemble liberates the excitement of live concert performance to create a new milieu for the appreciation of diverse new forms and talents in the cultural development of American film. The Sprocket Ensemble collaborative series of screenings set to original live musical performance is entitled Ideas in Animation.
Stable Life
Sara MacPherson
Dionicia M. spends her days tending horses at the northern California racetrack where she works and lives. Meanwhile, her teenage son José Luis is turning heads as a hotshot jockey in Southern California. Dionicia is in search of a better life for herself and her family, and she and José Luis have gambled their futures on the hardscrabble sport of horse racing. Will they succeed or will immigration raids and racetrack closures keep them from achieving the stable life of their dreams?
Strand: A Natural History of Cinema
Christian Bruno
What does it mean to go to the movies? Through an examination of the repertory and revival era in San Francisco, the feature-length STRAND: A Natural History of Cinema explores this question while uncovering the hidden history of one of the richest moments in filmgoing. Structured like a visual excavation of the once-opulent movie palaces that stand silently around the City, STRAND explores the layers of history that exist below the surface. Its lyrical style incorporates contemporary 16mm film with archival photos and footage along while a number of interviews tell the story---people like celebrated film editor Walter Murch and iconic essayist Rebecca Solnit. With so many people going to the movies, and probably as many screens as ever, why did all these theatres close? Part analysis, part oral history and part urban travelogue, STRAND: A Natural History of Cinema celebrates the urban experience and the “collective dream”-moviegoing.
Summer ’82 - When Zappa Went to Sicily
Salvo Cuccia, Will Parrinello
Summer ’82 - When Zappa Went to Sicily is filmmaker Salvo Cuccia’s coming of age story. It’s the tale of a boy who will soon lose his father and of a country that must grow beyond the unbridled violence that has been its curse. Part impressionistic fable, part autobiography - the sixty-minute documentary Summer ’82 blends together evocative cinematography, archival material, and stop motion animation with interviews of people who lived through these tumultuous times.
Swamp Cabbage
Hayley Downs, Julie Kahn
Swamp Cabbage is a dark and sweaty documentary about Hayley Downs, a half-Cracker stuck in Brooklyn who discovers that the eccentric Florida childhood she fled is actually the key to surviving love and loss in an increasingly fragile world. An unlikely collision of rural Florida and urban Brooklyn cultures, Hayley’s tragicomic journey through sunshine-state mythology, pop zeitgeist, toxic relationships, Cracker foodways, and disappearing habitat ultimately changes how we view conservation, community, and the food chain.
DEVELOPER'S NOTE: http://sffs.org/content.aspx?catid=938,1004&pageid=472&filter=s