Experience

Reed Redeems Promise of ‘Prodigal Sons’

If Kimberly Reed took a not particularly unique path into filmmaking, she certainly took an interesting road out of it. A native of Helena, Montana, she came to U.C. Berkeley in the late ’80s, discovered film and went on to earn a master’s degree at S.F. State while working in the seminars department at Film Arts Foundation. After transitioning from male to female, the challenge of adjusting to a new identity impelled her to trade her location (San Francisco for New York) and career (digital editing for magazine publishing). Call it necessity, call it a detour, but it’s in the rear-view mirror now. She makes a triumphant return to both filmmaking and the Bay Area with her first-person documentary Prodigal Sons, a raw and altogether remarkable debut that opens this month around the country.

topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, documentary film, film arts foundation, frameline, independent film, sf international lgbt film festival

Experience

SFFS's first annual Cinema by the Bay festival spotlights local talent

A film festival that’s long overdue arrives tonight with San Francisco Film Society’s first annual Cinema by the Bay. A wide-ranging showcase of local filmmaking, as well as a forum for the region’s influence as subject and setting in the work of filmmakers beyond the Bay, it runs through Sunday, October 25, and encompasses the straight-ahead to the avant-garde to the tantalizingly difficult to categorize (I’m thinking Etienne!) in a four-day program of features, shorts, docs and multimedia live performance from established and emerging artists.

topics: actors, audiences, avant-garde, bay area, curators, digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, dramatic films, exhibitions, experimental film, film arts foundation, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco film society

Report

SFIFF52: Golden Gate Awards uncorked, SFFS/KRF grant winner announced

The San Francisco International Film Festival handed out approximately $100,000 in cash prizes to filmmakers at its Golden Gate Awards ceremony last night at the Temple Nightclub-Prana Restaurant. It also announced the winner of the $35,000 San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grant, the first in a cycle of grants that will infuse $3 million dollars into narrative feature filmmaking in the Bay Area in the next five years.

topics: awards, bay area, diy, documentary, drama, festivals, film arts foundation, funding, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival

Platform

SFIFF52: Yun Suh finds revolution in a Jerusalem watering hole

Sneaking through a hole in the border fence between Israel and Palestine may seem like a high-risk way to have a nightlife, but for Boody, a young man living in Palestine, it’s the only way to get to Shushan, Jerusalem’s lone gay bar. City of Borders, the debut film by Bay Area filmmaker Yun Suh, follows several characters who have found a second home at the bar. The film testifies to the intolerance that members of the LGBTQ community face in addition to all of the other walls, physical and social, separating people in the region. City of Borders screens in the Documentary Competition at the "San Francisco International Film Festival": (Sun., April 26, 2 p.m., PFA, Thurs., April 30, 9:30, Mon., May 4, 9:15 and Wed., May 6, 12:15, Sundance Kabuki). Yun Suh answered my questions over e-mail during her time off of her day job, as an assignment editor for KRON.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is part of a series of Q&As with local Bay Area filmmakers whose work is screening the SFIFF52.]

topics: center for asian american media, diy, documentary, film arts foundation, funding, gay lesbian cinema, political film, san francisco international film festival, youth

Insider

Social justice filmmaking grants announced

A series of annual grants totaling $3 million for narrative feature films being made in the San Francisco Bay Area will be distributed over the next five years by the San Francisco Film Society and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Film Society announced today.

The grants run from 2009-13, and will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year. In 2009 there will be two $35,000 grants, and the amounts awarded will increase dramatically in the following years, to $1,050,000 by 2013.

Filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who funded his first San Francisco-made feature, Medicine for Melancholy for what he terms "the cost of a car," said, "This is definitely going to be a boon to us indie filmmakers."

topics: actors, bay area, directors, features, film arts foundation, independent film, san francisco film society

Platform

New at Frameline: K.C. Price

For a large chunk of Frameline’s 32 years of existence, Michael Lumpkin captained the preeminent San Francisco queer media arts organization. When he departed to forge new trails at the conclusion of this year’s S.F. International LGBT Film Festival, the board picked K.C. Price to take over as executive director. Price was the managing director of the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, the building that houses Frameline and several other local film organizations, and his resume includes stints as the development director at Frameline and the STOP AIDS Project. Price’s fundraising experience should be an asset amid a spiraling recession that’s expected to roil nonprofit arts groups in the coming year. We met the new guy in the Frameline offices last week to find out what was on his plate.

topics: castro theatre, directors, documentary, experimental film, features, festivals, film arts foundation, frameline, gay lesbian cinema, queer cinema

Insider

Film Arts education program evolves with SFFS partnership

"Film Arts was started by a handful of people around a flatbed editor," says Michael A. Behrens, Filmmaker Education Manager for Film Arts Foundation, which now presents its filmmaker education classes, workshops and seminars in partnership with the San Francisco Film Society, publisher of SF360.org. "And then they made that highly expensive piece of equipment available to a larger number of people."

"Now," he says, "you can buy a $500 camera and you’re on the street making a movie." Times have changed—which is why Behrens frequently uses the word "evolution" when it comes to his vision of the filmmaker education program.

Behrens, energized by the Film Society’s recent adoption of a suite of filmmaker services previously offered by Film Arts, is finalizing a hearty schedule of classes aimed at filmmakers, to debut in mid-October.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, film arts foundation, filmmakers, san francisco film society