Member News & Notes encapsulates the successes and accomplishments of the Film Society’s growing cadre of filmmaker members. Drawn from items submitted directly from members, Member News & Notes is a de facto chronicle of the San Francisco Bay Area filmmaking scene. If your filmmaking career shifted into overdrive, submit an update concerning your project. Appropriate topics include awards, grant announcements, screenings and broadcasts. Listings are presented in the order received, are subject to editing for content and style and may be bumped to a future issue due to space restraints. Send an email to membernews@sffs.org with “Member News & Notes” as the subject heading.

November 2009 Member News & Notes

The pilot for Stephen Talbot’s series Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders, a magazine-format show that explores the world through music, will screen Monday, January 25, 10:00 pm on PBS. The network will be soliciting viewer feedback online and streaming the program in advance of this broadcast date.

Sherezada Kent’s short zombie comedy Everything I Needed to Know About Zombies I Learned from the Movies screened at the Chicago Horror Film Festival in September. The film premiered at the FireStarter Film Festival in Milwaukee after being one of ten films chosen for the NYC Horror Film Festival’s online competition and had its hometown screening at SF IndieFest’s Another Hole in the Head Film Festival this summer.

Robert Arnold and Cynthia Mitchell’s short film All Animals won a Director’s Choice Award at the SF International Festival of Short Films, where it also garnered a Jury Special Recognition for Acting prize for the female lead, played by Sheena McFeely. The film also screened at the SFFS Cinema by the Bay festival in October.

Berkeley producer Roger Garcia’s latest feature HIMPAPWID (Manila Skies), directed by Palme d’Or–winning Filipino filmmaker Raymond Red, world-premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival and closed the Cinemanila Film Festival in Manila this October.

Will Parrinello’s documentary Mustang: Journey of Transformation will have its national PBS broadcast premiere on Wednesday, November 18. The film is being distributed on DVD by PBS Home Video and internationally on iTunes by Shorts International. The film, narrated by Richard Gere, tells the remarkable story of a Tibetan culture pulled back from the brink of extinction through the restoration of its most sacred sites.

Severing the Soul, an experimental documentary about Rosemary Kennedy’s psychosurgery by Bay Area filmmaker Barbara Klutinis, has won awards at the London Independent Film Festival, the It’s All True Documentary Festival in São Paulo, the Macon Film and Video Festival in Macon, Georgia and the Polar Film Festival in Sweden. 

Jim Granato’s film D-tour, which won this year’s Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Documentary Feature, also picked up awards for Best Documentary from the San Joaquin Film Festival in May and Best Music Documentary from the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival in June. In September, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted an evening that featured a screening of D-tour and a live performance by Rogue Wave to a sold-out audience. D-tour will make its national televised broadcast premiere November 10 on PBS’s Independent Lens.

Jason Wallach’s screenplay Burden of Treasure recently won Best Science Fiction Screenplay at the Action on Film Festival, and also was a winner at the Cinema City International Film Festival, and is in contention at other upcoming festivals and contests. Another of Wallach’s screenplays, A Tale of Water, was a finalist in the Family International Film Festival.

Pam Walton’s Raging Grannies: The Action League received a 2009 National Mature Media Merit Award and screened at the Louisville International Festival of Film and the Seattle LGBT Film Festival in October. KQED kicked off Home Improvement Month in October with a broadcast of Walton’s The Forever Home: Going Green.

Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s film Speaking in Tongues screened this fall at the Kansas City International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival, the U.N. Association Film Festival and the Northwest Film Forum.

Sheila Ganz screened 20 minutes from the rough cut of her feature documentary Moms Living Clean at the Out of the Ashes: A Project Peace Film Festival to benefit Oakland Elizabeth House in Berkeley.

Selections from Michelle Peticolas’s film Caring for Dying: the Art of Being Present will be shown at a presentation on media use in community education at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s conference on family caregiving this December in Florida.

River of Renewal, a documentary about wild salmon, water scarcity and dam removal in California’s second-largest river, will be broadcast on PBS stations nationwide in October and November. SFFS member Stephen Most is the film’s writer/producer and also author of the companion book River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin (2006).

Going on 13, an examination into the lives of three young women, has been picked up by PBS’s Digital Channel, PBS World, and will be shown digitally in more than 40 markets around the country. Additionally, the filmmakers, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn Valadez, have announced that they were chosen for ITVS’s pilot Project 360 program, a multiplatform exhibition and promotion initiative for which they have created a new behind-the-scenes video.

Helen Prince’s latest work, Taksu Bali: Two Gamelan Journeys, an SFFS fiscally sponsored project, featuring the ensemble Gamelan Sekar Jaya of California, received its premiere screening in San Francisco in a two-part presentation at  the screening room of the Carlisle senior housing community. GSJ performers played and danced, then held a Q&A on Balinese music and dance. The film depicts the filmmakers traveling with the GSJ to Bali, where music performance is a key component of daily devotional life.

Leslie Streit and Robin McCain of Cinematiks, LLC have just signed an agreement with Animatrix Studios to distribute their 2005 film God Wears My Underwear to mobile devices via Apple, Palm and other APP stores. The film, which appeared at several international festivals between 2005 and 2007, was named best short film at the Digital Narrative Arts Film Festival in Toronto.