San Francisco Film Society Announces Winners of Herbert Family Filmmaking Grants

$25,000 in Grants Awarded to Seven Bay Area Filmmakers to Support Development, Production and Postproduction

February 9, 2009

San Francisco, CA – The San Francisco Film Society announced today the winners of the inaugural Herbert Family Filmmaking Grants. Part of the Film Society’s grants and residencies programs, designed to foster the creativity and further the careers of independent filmmakers, these grants provide critical support to local narrative and documentary film projects in various stages of production. The grants, ranging from $2,500 to $5,000 each, are made possible through the generosity of the Herbert Family of San Francisco. Winners and projects follow.

Christian Bruno: $5,000, Strand: A Natural History of Cinema
Postproduction, documentary feature
Strand: A Natural History of Cinema charts the rise and demise of San Francisco’s movie theater culture while examining the changing face of the urban landscape and the disappearance of public space.

Filmmaker Christian Bruno focuses primarily on nonfiction and experimental practices. Pie Fight 69 (made with Sam Green) celebrated the collision of independent film and creative activism by a band of hippie filmmakers. It went on to play worldwide from Tehran to Needles, California, winning awards at the Sundance, Black Maria and Chicago Underground film festivals. We Interrupt This Empire . . . ,  a collaborative feature documentary produced with members of Whispered Media and the Video Activist Network, documented the shutdown of San Francisco on the first day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 while interweaving critiques of the mainstream media and corporate war profiteering. More information at http://www.naturalhistoryofcinema.net.

Sam Green: $5,000, The Universal Language
Postproduction, documentary feature
The Universal Language looks at the state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the 21st century. The film weaves together several seemingly unrelated documentary stories, including a history of Esperanto, to raise questions about the withering of the utopian imagination and what this says about our society today.

Sam Green received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His award-winning documentaries include lot 63, grave c, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30 and Pie Fight ’69. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, broadcast nationally on PBS and included in the Whitney Biennial. Green currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute. More information at http://www.samgreen.to.

Jenni Olson: $5,000, The Royal Road
Development, experimental documentary feature
Mundane yet stunning 16mm urban and rural landscapes provide the backdrop as a butch lesbian hero (pining over indie actress Guinevere Turner) offers an entertaining voiceover about the history of California, via an exploration of El Camino Real, the original trail connecting the territory’s missions during under Spanish-Mexican rule. The Royal Road also offers a colloquial history of the Mexican-American War in a fashion akin to the groundbreaking 1986 film Sherman’s March.

Jenni Olson is one of the world's leading experts on LGBT film history. She has been curating, collecting, writing about and making LGBT film since 1985. Her debut feature film The Joy of Life played a pivotal role in renewing debate about the need for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. More information at http://www.butch.org.

Gemma Cubero: $2,500, Ella Es el Matador (She Is the Matador)
Postproduction, documentary feature
Ella Es el Matador is a character-driven documentary that illuminates the attraction of two female protagonists to bullfighting while highlighting the mystique and the contradictions of this ancestral tradition. The film follows the stories of Eva Florencia, a novice bullfighter from Italy and Maripaz Vega, the only active professional female matador in the world.

Gemma Cubero is a native of Spain. She worked as associate producer and researcher on the award-winning documentary Señorita Extraviada, Lourdes Portillo’s film about the murders of women in Juárez. She also produced the feature length documentaries What’s Under Your Hat? with Julio Medem and One Percent: Schizophrenia. In 2006 she founded Talcual Films. More information at http://www.talcualfilms.com.

Peter Nicks: $2,500, Hope and High Water
Development, documentary feature
Hope and High Water goes behind the scenes at Highland Hospital, a safety-net hospital in Oakland, California. With complete access to the hospital and its staff, the filmmakers follow CEO Wright Lassiter as he struggles to run a complex yet vital institution in the face of daunting systemic, economic and political challenges.

Peter Nicks is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian currently working as an independent filmmaker in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first feature documentary, The Wolf, explored the collision of race, class and addiction through the personal prism of his own addiction and incarceration in the late 1980s. Nicks has since produced and developed projects for ABC, PBS, MSNBC and HBO. More information at http://www.documentfilms.net/Home.html.

Rick Tejada-Flores: $2,500, The Road to Chulumani
Production, documentary feature
A historical road trip traces Rick Tejada-Flores’s family's legacy in Bolivia, from their early role as slaveholders and slave traders, though the period when his grandfather was president during a bloody war with Paraguay, to their involvement after World War II with Nazi war criminals. In The Road to Chulumani, he explores his family’s past, connecting with the descendants of former slaves and working with a village of former hacienda indentured workers to help the community solve its current problems.

Rick Tejada-Flores is a documentary filmmaker with 38 years of experience in the film and television industry. As an award-winning independent filmmaker, his works have appeared on PBS and cable networks and screened at the Smithsonian Institution. Among his credits are Si Se Puede!; Low ’n Slow, the Art of Lowriding; Jasper Johns, Ideas in Paint; The Fight in the Fields; César Chávez and the Farmworkers Struggle; The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It; Race Is the Place; and Orozco Man of Fire. More information at http://www.paradigmproductions.org.

Jack Walsh: $2,500, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer
Production, documentary feature
Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer brings to light the works of choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. During a time when the challenges faced by women in the art world were formidable, over the course of her five-decade career, Rainer revolutionized modern dance, created the genre of performance art and reintroduced narrative into avant-garde filmmaking.

Award-winning independent filmmaker Jack Walsh has produced and directed seven independent films that have shown at film festivals throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. Walsh also has an active career in public television. He is a former executive producer for KQED and currently is an independent public television producer. He is the recipient of two Emmy Awards and three Golden Gate Awards, among other honors and distinctions.

More information about the Film Society’s Filmmaker Services programs, including grants and residencies initiatives, is available at www.sffs.org/filmmaker_services.

The 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 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 23–May 7, 2009), publishes a daily online magazine, SF360.org, with broad-ranging news and features on Bay Area film and media; annually reaches more than 7,000 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, SFFS Film Arts Forums, SFFS Filmmakers Advisory Board and professional-level filmmaker classes.

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