The Circuit

The San Francisco Film Society has launched two initiatives focusing on investigative documentaries. 

Beginning in the fall, the SFFS will give a weeklong theatrical run to a doc, kicking off with Robb Moss and Peter Galison's "Secrecy," a look into the necessity of government secrets.

Org also announced a new $25,000 cash prize for its San Francisco Int'l Film Festival.  The juried award for Best Investigative Documentary will presented at the fest's awards ceremony on May 6, 2009.

"These initiatives help further consolidate the Film Society's place as a leader in the exhibition of meaningful nonfiction films and enable us to bring the finest work on crucial issues from all over the world to Bay Area audiences," said Executive Director Graham Leggat. "They're designed to raise the visibility of courageous and committed documentary filmmakers, and to provide tangible encouragement to filmmakers considering launching investigative nonfiction film projects."

Final deadline for San Fran fest submissions is December 5.  More info at www.sffs.org.

As part of a massive expansion, the San Francisco Film Society will become stewards of the Film Arts Foundation, a move which pushes the film society toward filmmaker services and doubles its membership.  The initiative saves many assets of the troubled FAF, the Bay Area's long-standing nonprofit dedicated to assisting filmmakers.

Whiling stopping short of calling it a "merger," SFFS exec director Graham Leggat said the org will take over such FAF services as education, career development, fiscal sponsorship, grantmaking and information resources.  "It makes us a real film society instead of just a producer of the San Francisco Film Festival," said Leggat. "We will now offer a full suite of filmmaker services.  The transition for current FAF members will be seamless."

Leggat also announced the creation of SFFS FilmHouse Residencies in partnership with the San Francisco Film Commission.  The program will offer production offices free of charge to Bay Area filmmakers.

“We are delighted to partner with the Film Society to make production space available to local independent filmmakers,” said San Fran Mayor Gavin Newsom. “FilmHouse has all the makings of a dynamic new hub for independent filmmaking in San Francisco.”

Other items in the SFFS remodeling:

• Herbert Filmmaker Grants totaling $25,000 for Bay Area filmmakers for project development.

• The creation of an advisory board of established local professionals.

• The SFFS Film Arts Forum will be the org's monthly screening and networking event.

• A full-service fiscal sponsorship department to aid filmmakers in obtaining grants.  SFFS will take over all existing FAF sponsorship agreements.

While the SFFS will not continue the FAF's production equipment rental arm, it will incorporate the foundation's educational info into a greatly expanded website that includes a digitized archive of Film Arts/Release Print back-issues, once the FAF's national magazine.

The move comes at a troubled time for nonprofit filmmaking orgs who are forced to adapt to a changing indie marketplace.  When New York's Association of Independent Film and Video recently shuttered for lack of cash, many in the industry faulted the grassroots org for failing to expand. 

"As opposed to the AVIF, the Film Society is better financed and has much greater reach," said Leggat. "There are more opportunities for different revenue streams. If the AIVF did was Renew Media accomplished, by situating itself under a bigger organization [Tribeca Film Institute], than the AIVF would still be around."

 

by Danielle Beverly
In its 51st year and the longest running festival in the Americas, The San Francisco International Film Festival is only getting better, particularly under the helm of fairly new, but ever-charming executive director Graham Leggat.  This year saw nearly 200 films, including several favorites about Place and Identity:


"Medicine for Melancholy"
Winner of an Audience Award, "Medicine for Melancholy" is a quiet, introspective narrative about love, race, and "indie" twenty-something life in San Francisco.  The film is loping and a bit sleepy - just like the hangover the two characters are nursing from their hookup the night before.  Director Barry Jenkins reveals the silent magic of getting to know a new lover - when Micah slips his hand into the small of Jo's back, the audience feels the tingles.  Biking through changing neighborhoods rarely seen, the city is entirely theirs, as if they are truly alone inside it.

And they might be, because Micah (Wyatt Cenac) tells Jo (Tracey Higgins) that gentrified San Francisco is only 7% black and dwindling.  He defines himself as a "black man", but knows the world sees him simply as "black".  Jo, however, views her blackness as just one element of herself, and this distinction is how they come to teach one another, and the audience.


"Children of the Sun"
Comprised exclusively of archival footage (an extraordinary feat), "Children of the Sun" is a documentary about daily life on a kibbutz.  Director Ran Tal was born on one founded by his grandparents, and it's his child's view now seen through the lens of adulthood that is both loving and jaundiced.  From infancy, children were raised en masse by caregivers, sleeping each night in dorms and showering communally.  It proved a grand but heartbreaking social experiment, where children never experienced solitude, and never truly knew their own parents.


"Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans"
(Winner, Best Bay Area Documentary Feature) details a forgotten 1800's civil rights movement in New Orleans, as well as the destruction of the same neighborhood by Hurricane Katrina.  The film employs standard PBS-style construction - historians, archival footage, recreations, narration, and first person book-ending by a writer who lives in the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood.  But as the narrative unfolds, it reveals an incredible era of freedom and empowerment during Reconstruction, that later died out. 

Thinking they'd completed their historical documentary, the filmmakers were about to go into their online edit when Katrina struck.  It was only then that they truly began the documentary they were destined to make - a film about how one neighborhood was twice "forgotten and refused by the American government".