The San Francisco Film Society today announces the comprehensive package of Youth Education programs scheduled for the 2009–10 school year with a focus on human rights, multiple disciplines of science and the breadth and richness of world culture.

Under the leadership of recently appointed Director of Education Joanne Parsont and longtime Youth Education Manager Keith Zwölfer, the San Francisco Film Society’s Youth Education Program aims to develop media literacy, broaden insights into other cultures, enhance foreign language aptitude, develop critical thinking skills and inspire a lifelong appreciation of cinema. Through film screenings, media presentations, filmmaker visits to schools, interactive discussions, study guides and professional development for teachers, SFFS strives to cultivate students’ imaginations, facilitate their awareness as filmgoers and empower them as true global citizens.

“We look forward to providing Bay Area students and teachers with our most extensive and diverse selection of programs to date, and several exciting new opportunities for interaction and engagement that give the program even greater depth and substance,” said Parsont. “In addition to our content-rich film series for the 2009–10 school year, we are very excited about several new programs we're piloting this fall, including classes for both youth and K–12 teachers in media literacy and the integration of media in the classroom. And there’s much more to come in the months ahead.”

The compelling new series Human Rights & the Use of Power includes a range of films that expose and explore the often unjust and inequitable use of power by governments and authority figures and the many global economic, political and social consequences that follow. Students will have the opportunity to engage in discussions with filmmakers, scholars and victims of human rights abuses in order to gain a more complete understanding of these important issues. The series launches with a double-feature program of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars and Archaeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi, Wednesday, October 7, 9:00 am–3:00 pm, at the M. H. de Young Museum. Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars tell the real-life story of survival and hope of a reggae-inflected band born in the camps of West Africa that came together in Guinea after civil war forced them from their native Sierra Leone. In Archaeology of Memory Bay Area Chilean exile musician Quique Cruz goes from the Bay Area to Chile and back as he creates a multimedia art piece to heal his wounds inflicted by the state-sponsored torture of the Pinochet regime. Several of the filmmakers and film subjects will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, live musical performance and tour of the museum galleries for all participating students.

From biology to physics, nutrition to the environment, the inspiring films in the series Exploring the Sciences, will provide teachers with creative resources for getting students excited about science. The series gets started with Whiz Kids, Thursday, November 5, 10:00 am, at the Exploratorium. At a time when American teens lag far behind other countries in math and science, this coming-of-age documentary tells the story of three very different yet equally passionate 17-year-old scientists who vie to compete in the nation’s oldest, most prestigious science competition. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Tom Shephard and tour of the Exploratorium exhibits for all students.

The San Francisco Film Society is renowned for the wide international scope of its programming, and it is part of SFFS’s mission to spread that global appreciation and awareness to the next generation. The enriching World Cultures series exposes students to the lives and experiences of their peers in other parts of the world and helps them develop a keen understanding of the true global landscape. In partnership with the Consulate General of France in San Francisco, the annual French Films & Schools program kicks off the World Cultures series by exposing high school–level French students to the language and culture of France. This year’s offerings, to be screened at Landmark’s Clay Theatre, include Stella, Sylvie Verheyde’s wonderfully observed portrait of a restless teenager, Tuesday, November 3 at 10:00 am and 12:30 pm and François Truffaut’s classic The 400 Blows, Wednesday, November 4 at 10:00 am.

Returning for a second year, the popular series The Art & Science of Lucasfilm features four different multimedia presentations at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas by the legendary film entertainment company that demonstrate the intersection of art and science in the entertainment industry. For Inside the Adventure: How LucasArts Games Are Made, Thursday October 1, 12:00 pm, art director Matt Omernick and software engineer Eric Johnston provided a close-up look at what LucasArts puts into each game project. With an inside view of the art and the technology, they demonstrated how early drafts and concepts become a final product. Miles Perkins, director of marketing and communications for Industrial Light & Magic, takes students on a journey through the past, present and future of the pioneering visual effects company in The Moments Behind the Magic: ILM Past, Present & Future, Thursday, December 10, 12:00 pm. Sound designer Will Files and production manager Jonathan Greber provide an in-depth look at the art and craft of sound in cinema in the program Skywalker: Creating Sound for Film, Thursday, February 4, 12:00 pm. The presentation will include interactive demonstrations of sound creation, as well as clips from recent projects and film classics. And to wrap up the series Dave Filoni, supervising director of the animated series Clone Wars, demonstrates the various stages of creating an episode, including scriptwriting, concept design, layout, asset creation, animation, lighting, effects, voice recording, editing and sound in Lucasfilm Animation, Thursday, May 13, 12:00 pm.

Though Hollywood has long been dominated by men, the pool of talented and successful women filmmakers producing documentaries, shorts, foreign films and independent features continues to grow. Women in Film, a series of films made by and about women, will include visits by accomplished women filmmakers to local all-girl schools.

From recent classics like The Golden Compass to young adult novels like How to Eat Fried Worms, (each a focus for a previous Literary Adaptation program) books are a rich resource for screen adaptations. The Literary Adaptation series will present these films in an educational context and foster discussion of the theme, structure and characters of the original source material while comparing it to its cinematic counterpart. Several new film releases will be shown throughout the school year.

SFFS has also added two new classes designed specifically for K–12 teachers and students to its curriculum of classes and workshops. Mixing Media into the Classroom (September 26), a professional development workshop for K–12 teachers, explored a range of practical, interactive and interdisciplinary ways of integrating media into creative classroom practice. Teachers were shown how to engage students and develop their media literacy skills while using the widely accessible multimedia tools that already saturate their lives. And in his class What’s in a Movie?, Saturday, November 14, 10:00 am–1:00 pm, filmmaker Richard Levien will teach students how to be critical viewers and how to judge films for festival programs. Focusing on his award-winning short film Immersion, Levien and his crew will take students on a backstage tour of the filmmaking process, demonstrating and investigating how films are constructed, who creates them and how audiences are affected by them.

For the 2008–09 school calendar over 60 schools and institutions and over 6,600 students were engaged and inspired by Youth Education programs including the multimedia presentations of the Art & Science of Lucasfilm screening series; screenings and panel discussions of films such as American Violet, Children of the Amazon, My Kid Could Paint That, New Muslim Cool, Soldiers of Conscience, Trouble the Water and Waltz with Bashir; visits and demonstrations by filmmakers such as legendary animator Gene Deitch; and the Nellie Wong Schools at the Festival Student Essay Contest, which awarded $1,850 in cash prizes for essays describing the impact of film on the lives of students.

The Film Society’s commitment to educational outreach and film literacy goes back nearly two decades to the birth of the Schools at the Festival program, founded in 1991 by retired teacher Robert Donn. One of the first and largest programs of its kind, Schools at the Festival created a connection between the San Francisco International Film Festival and the local educational community, providing K–12 students the opportunity to participate in the Festival. In 2004, the organization launched the year-round Youth Education Program and to date has served more than 50,000 Bay Area school children and 2,500 teachers from more than 350 educational institutions.

Peter Esmonde, parent of a student at Cathedral School for Boys applauded the value of the program saying, "Bay Area kids benefit so much from having their eyes, ears and minds opened to new artistic and technical opportunities by SFFS’s programs."

The SFFS education department also includes a comprehensive Filmmaker Education Program offering a full slate of classes and workshops addressing both the business and artistic aspects of filmmaking and designed to foster creativity, inspire cinema appreciation and further the careers of independent filmmakers. This spring, the SFFS Colleges and Universities Program was initiated, and outreach is currently underway developing links to the region’s higher education community in order to create bridges for students between academia and the film industry.

As these programs coalesce with the Youth Education Program, the SFFS education department will be piloting several new initiatives over the next few years. Planned offerings include more online classes, curricula and webinars; artists in residence; filmmakers-in-schools programs; professional development for K–12 teachers; an educational media lending library; media literacy classes for youth; youth exchange programs; and internships for students of all ages.

Ultimately, the department will be working towards a year-round schedule of classes serving a broad range of ages and skill levels. The curriculum will serve youth (ages 8–18), college students, adults (continuing education), teachers (professional development) and filmmaking professionals (skills enhancement) in numerous subject areas, including: screenwriting, documentary, criticism, digital and new media, media literacy, film appreciation and production.

For a comprehensive description of SFFS youth education visit sffs.org/youth-education.

San Francisco Film Society is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to celebrating film and the moving image in all its glorious forms. SFFS year-round programs and events are concentrated in four core areas: Celebrating Internationalism, Inspiring Bay Area Youth, Showcasing Bay Area Film Culture and Exploring New Digital Media. The Film Society shows the best of world cinema year-round on its SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; presents the longest-running film festival in the Americas, the SF International (April 22–May 6, 2010); publishes a daily online magazine, SF360.org, featuring broad-ranging news and features on Bay Area film and media; annually reaches more than 8,000 students ages 6–18 with its acclaimed media literacy programs; and provides crucial support to the Bay Area filmmaking community through SFFS Filmmaker Services including FilmHouse Residencies, Fiscal Sponsorship, the SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants, the Herbert Family Filmmaking Grants, the Hearst Screening Grant, the Djerassi/SFFS Screenwriting Fellowship, SFFS Film Arts Forums and professional-level filmmaker classes.

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