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.

January 2010 Member News & Notes

Sundance Film Festival news: Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein’s eagerly anticipated drama Howl was selected to screen in competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Sam Green’s Utopia in Four Movements will be screened in the New Frontier section. Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores—Bay Area filmmakers who go under the name the Butcher Brothers—will show their latest, The Violent Kind, about the travails of a group of boisterous young bikers. Dayna Goldfine has been selected to be on the Sundance documentary jury. Producer Chris Ohlson recently served as a coproducer on Lovers of Hate; the film will world premiere in competition.

Esteemed local critic David Thomson has been tapped to program a 40-film retrospective at the Berlinale in February marking the Festival’s 60th anniversary.

The Bay Area documentary film community is unusually though deservedly well represented with three titles on the shortlist of 15 for the Academy Award nominations for Best Feature Documentary—Andy Abraham Wilson’s Under Our Skin, Rick Goldsmith and Judith Ehrlich’s The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers and Bill Guttentag’s Soundtrack for a Revolution.

Screenwriter Caitlin McCarthy took home the Best Period Piece award at the Action on Film International Film Festival for her screenplay Vera. The script is based on the life of Vera Laska who, as a teenager, defied statistics and lasted three years as a Czech resistance fighter, survived Auschwitz and escaped the Nazis during a death march.

In July, writer/director DJ Bad Vegan (aka Brant Smith) completed principal photography in the Bay Area on his “smart sci-fi” feature, In-World War. Second unit work was completed via low-cost “backpack-budget filmmaking” in September in France and Ireland.

Maureen Gosling’s film Blossoms of Fire screened in two indigenous film festivals in November: Native Spirit Film Festival in London (with Gosling in attendance) and Talking Circle: Big Island Indigenous Film Festival.

S. Leo Chiang’s documentary, A Village Called Versailles won the Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award from the Philly Asian American Film Festival in October. The ITVS- and CAAM-funded film will air on PBS’ Independent Lens in May.

Repatriation of the Pawnee Scouts, a short film directed by George Burdeau and produced by Jed Riffe, was awarded second place in Answering the Call: Veteran’s Day Short Film Contest, a competition put on by the National Museum of the American Indian. The four-minute short film can be seen on the museum’s Web site.

Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco’s female bullfighter documentary Ella Es el Matador received the Best Documentary Award at the Women in Direction International Film Festival in Spain.

Have You Heard from Johannesburg?, Connie Field’s seven-part history of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, is scheduled to open in New York in April at Film Forum.

In December, Thinking Grande!, a documentary by Kevin Bender, had its Bay Area premiere at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. The film focuses on a Mexican immigrant who spent 20 years building a colossal, hand-made “Mexican Disneyland” in the heart of California.