Member News & Notes

Revolution Summer, the feature film debut from writer/director Miles Matthew Montalbano is being released on DVD in April, distributed by Vanguard Cinema. The film premiered at SFIFF50 and was deemed “One of the Ten Best Films of the Year” by Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. Montalbano also is the recipient of a six-month FilmHouse residency to begin preproduction of his second feature, The Recondite Heart, a dark coming-of-age story of small town punk rock and star-crossed love at the onset of Reagan’s America.

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn Valadez’s Going on 13, a documentary about four girls during four very tumultuous years, won Best Documentary at the 2008 LA Femme Film Festival and the Best Documentary 2008 Cine Golden Eagle Award.

Mine, a documentary from director Geralyn Pezanoski about animals left behind during Katrina and the struggles of hurricane victims to reunite with their beloved pets, will premiere this year at South by Southwest.

Bay Area filmmaker Elizabeth Farnsworth, codirector of The Judge and the General, was nominated for the Director’s Guild of America 2008 Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in the documentary category. The film premiered last May at SFIFF51.

Sheila Ganz’s documentary Unlocking the Heart of Adoption screened at the First National Exhibition of Cinema and Biological Identity in Buenos Aires and will be touring Argentina during 2009. The film bridges the gap between birth and adoptive families through diverse stories of adoptees, birthparents and adoptive parents.

Maureen Gosling and Maxine Downs’ ten-minute short film Bamako Chic: Women Cloth Dyers of Mali was invited to the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Chris Ohlson recently produced the feature film The Overbrook Brothers. It will world premiere in competition at this year’s South by Southwest. Its tagline: “When Jason brings his girlfriend home for Christmas…bad things happen.”

Barbara Klutinis has won multiple awards for her 18-minute documentary Severing the Soul, which uses found footage to interweave an account of Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy procedure in 1941 with an overview of the psychosurgery movement of the 1930s–60s in the U.S. Klutinis won Best Film Written and Directed by a Woman at the Gate City Women’s Film Festival and received the Maya Deren Award for Best Experimental Film from the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck, Germany.

Durand Garcia, director of Blood Run, was recently asked to direct a short, ultra low budget contemporary gangster noir feature about a young Black man who has been groomed for leadership by a high-level gangster. Garcia is looking for a producer and a unit production manager.

Tamara Perkins’ documentary film proposal for The Trust, which will explore a program designed to help men incarcerated in state prisons prepare to reenter society, was excerpted as an example of excellence in the third edition of Morrie Warshawski’s book Shaking the Money Tree. Also included are excerpts from Arwen Lee Curry’s proposal for The Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin and Jonathan Joiner and Robert Martin’s Behind the Velvet Curtain. All three are SFFS fiscally sponsored projects.

Michael Jacobs’ feature documentary Audience of One has been picked up by IndiePix and opens in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater March 21 on its way to a ten-city theatrical release. Jacobs also recently completed a ten-part documentary Web series for Sony Pictures Television entitled American Dreamers, which can be seen on Sony’s Crackle.com. Jacobs’ current project is a series of video installations for a hotel in New York, for which he is collaborating with Barry Jenkins, Justin Barber and James Laxton.

Mary Kerr’s documentary The Beach, about the Beat Era art scene in San Francisco’s North Beach, is currently showing in the screening room at San Jose Museum of Art as part of the exhibition The Culture of Spontaneity. Her documentary about Southern California artists and poets in the late ’50s, Venice West and the L.A. Scene, recently was screened at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in conjunction with the exhibition Time and Place: Los Angeles, 1957–1968.

Dawn Logsdon’s film Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans aired on PBS throughout February in commemoration of Black History Month. The film won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Documentary Feature at SFIFF51.

Mark Grieco’s SFFS fiscally sponsored documentary Marmato, which reveals the lives of peasant miners in the historic gold-mining town of Marmato, Colombia as a Canadian multinational mining company plans a total takeover, has received a grant from Cinereach.