Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your name?
Elizabeth Duran.
What is your job at SFF?
Volunteer, Board Support, Executive Director’s Office
What do you do the rest of the year?
I work in the Development Department of the California Film Institute. We present the Mill Valley Film Festival and year-round programming at the Rafael Film Center, a beautifully restored art-deco movie house located in downtown San Rafael. I’m pretty proud of the work we do there; the programming for both is really solid.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your name?
Jesse Dubus.
What is your job at the Sundance Film Festival?
Theater Operations Runner.
What do you do the rest of the year?
I work in the Programming Department at SFFS and at the Berkeley Home
Office of the Telluride Film Festival, among some other things.
Why did you decide to start working at SFF?
Last year I had a break in my schedule in January for the first time,
and I decided to see what the fuss was all about.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your job at SFF?
I manage the outside of the venue at the Racquet Club Theatre, the festival’s second largest screening venue. Whether you’re filmmaker, programmer, talent, passholder/ticketholder, press member, staff member, or any of the other hundred types of people that come through, I make sure that everything runs smoothly before you get to the front door.
What do you do the rest of the year?
I’m a fine art photographer, creative consultant, FAA-certified safety professional, educator, travel addict/writer/photographer, film festival junkie, and proud Cal alumnus.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your name?
Michael Lyons.
What is your job at Sundance Film Festival?
Volunteer with the Works Crew.
What do you do the rest of the year?
I have a business in San Francisco teaching CPR & First Aid.
Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What’s your name?
Jon Ho.
What is your job at Sundance Film Festival?
Egyptian Theatre.Associate Crowd Liaison (ticket counter and filling out ticket info) for 4 years. Worked on radio with Mother and a floater for 1 year
What do you do the rest of the year?
Work in a hospital in Palo Alto part time. I work under a prop master as a set dresser for Independent or feature films, commercials and industrials. I also work as a producer, location manager, unit production manager for shorts, documentaries or Independent features around the Bay Area.
Why did you decide to start working at SFF?
Luck… Here is the story, I was going to school in San Francisco. A classmate was going to volunteer at Sundance and offered me a place to stay at her uncle’s place if I volunteered. Then all of the sudden, she decided not to go, and then I got a call from Sundance a month before the festival because of my radio experience from volunteering at other film festivals in the Bay Area. I learned that if you have a specific skill Sundance is looking for that it helps you land a position.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your job at Sundance Film Festival?
Steve: Crowd Liasion at the Egyptian and Terri: Theater Team at the Holiday.
What do you do the rest of the year?
Steve, Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of California San Francisco, Terri, Dental Hygienist.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your name?
Jennie-Marie Adler.
What is your job at SFF?
Volunteer Coordinator. Specifically for all Press office, Film office, industry, Feature film, Development, Executive, Accounting, corporate relations, and ticketing volunteers.
What do you do the rest of the year?
I work at other film festivals in the Bay Area.
Why did you decide to start working at Sundance Film Festival?
In college I read Down & Dirty Pictures and started dreaming about one day working at Sundance.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your name?
Ilya Tovbis.
What is your job at Sundance Film Festival?
I work in the Film Office as the Shorts Associate (a volunteer position). I help check in shorts filmmakers, get them credentialed and oriented to Park City. We also help them navigate and enjoy their premiere Sundance screening.
What do you do the rest of the year?
I am a seasonal film festival employee at a couple of Bay Area Festivals and a freelance writer.
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Photo by Hilary Hart/SFFS.
Words from Sundance staffers
What is your name?
Ashley Soares.
What is your job at Sundance Film Festival?
Film Office Coordinator, Midnight and NEXT
What do you do the rest of the year?
I suppose you could call me a Festival Carny. Since early 2009 I have been jumping from festival to festival working in departments such as Publicity, Marketing, Film Office or Guest Services. I’m hoping this trend will continue, it’s a whole lot of fun!
[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]
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Cry freedom: "Howl" elicits adoration at the Library in Park City. (Photo courtesy SFF)
The greatest finds of my generation
Susan Gerhard: The harsh glare of the spotlight that brought Howl mixed reviews from critics on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival had melted into a warm glow by Saturday, when the Bay Area-made nonfiction feature played to an adoring audience at Park City’s Library venue. Programmer David Courier’s slip of the tongue as he celebrated "two of the most venerated documentary filmmakers of our time," Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Oscar winners for Common Threads and The Times of Harvey Milk), by praising how the two were "making their first fourway—I mean FORAY—into dramatic films" offered an appropriately irreverent frame for a film about Allen Ginsberg’s development as a poet and the fate of his epic "Howl" in a 1957 San Francisco courtroom.
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An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla
All right then. The new issue of OTAKU USA magazine (March/April) is just on the verge of release, so here's the cover. Look for it on sale / going out to subscribers shortly. Meanwhile, we've begun work on what will...
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02.03.2010
Bayflicks.net
What’s Screening: February 5 – 11
IndieFest runs through this week and the next at the Roxie. B+ The Music Man, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 5:30. One of my childhood favorites doesn’t quite look like a masterpiece anymore. But it’s still big, dazzling, funny, and filled with catchy tunes. Robert Preston carries the pic
02.05.2010What’s Screening: January 29 – February 4
In festival news, Noir City closes on Sunday, and IndieFest opens Thursday. A+ Brazil, Castro, Wednesday. One of the best black comedies ever filmed, and the best dystopian fantasy on celluloid. In a bizarre, repressive, anally bureaucratic, and thoroughly dysfunctional society, one government
01.29.2010Kurosawa Diary, Part 11: Record of a Living Being (I Live in Fear)
Akira Kurosawa’s 15th film doesn’t enjoy the continued popularity of the works that bookcase it, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood. Nor is it as widely available. I saw it for the first time only a few years ago at the Castro. My second viewing happened on DVD Sunday night, as part of my current
01.26.2010
Senses of Cinema
Numerous contributors from across the globe offer their selections and thoughts on their movie-going experiences in 2009. Readers should find it a fascinating overview of cinema from a multitude of countries and cultures.
Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria edited by Pierre Barrot translated by Lynn Taylor
This is an essential book on one of the most explosive film movements in recent memory, rivalling the prodigious output of Iranian films in the 1990s; the Nigerian feature film industry, which, working almost entirely in video (both digital and analogue) has racked up an astounding 9,000 full-length
Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch edited by Joram ten Brink
Joram ten Brink’s interest in French Ethnographer-Cinéaste Jean Rouch’s (1918-2004) work “resurfaced” after the latter’s death in Africa. In October 2004, he organised the highly successful conference Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch at London’s Institut Français. The confere
Hell On Frisco Bay
Adam Hartzell on Three Canadian Indies
Film festival season has started again here in Frisco. Last week I spent the majority of my evenings at Noir City, taking in a personal-best fifteen of the twenty-four films programmed. I've been letting a wrap-up piece slowly broil, but in the meantime I highly recommend the coverage of the festi
02.04.2010On Thursday, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts each began a new season of screenings. The PFA showed Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday. As I noted last month, the screening kicked off both a complete Tati retro at the PFA, and a month-long circumnavigati
01.16.20102010. How futuristic! And indeed, technology continues to shift the way many of us experience entertainment and art, seemingly making an entire catalog of the world's cinematic history available to us at our convenience. But in pockets of cinema culture like the Bay Area, the desire to see restor
01.13.2010
Bright Lights After Dark
Bright Lights #67 is now online
February 2010 From the Editor "Progress is our most important product!" By Gary Morris Articles A German Tragedy, Turned Absurd: Fassbinder's Satan's Brew By Andrew Grossman "Allowing his acidity unfettered reign, Fassbinder concocts one of the most blistering excoriations of despotism ever committe
02.03.2010Who are Parents? Parents are the ones who are ALWAYS there
I've written a lot about the decline of the "Father" in genre film-from tough WW2 vet to tough but loving 70s hedonist to needy, emasculated single dad of the 21st century, but nothing could have prepared me for the delightful KNOWING (2009) wherein Nicolas Cage plays perhaps the most unbearably cli
01.29.2010Some Cameroning, Part 2 – Cameron as Auteur
Can a filmmaker spend most of his or her artistic life recycling other people’s ideas and still be a true auteur? Sure. Why not? Any idea, theme, style, or attitude if repeated frequently or obsessively enough can constitute an artistic signature – something that immediately identifies a particu
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