Good morning!

The San Francisco Women’s Film Festival is tomorrow, which is a nice way to end Women’s History Month.

9th Annual San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival presents Global Panorama Shorts Program

And here are the women filmmakers, making it all happen. Congratulations to all of them!

Awards Reception

SFIWFF 2014 will be hosting a reception celebrating the achievements of SF Bay Area Women in Film, Television and the Media. So come mix and mingle with filmmakers, film industry guests and filmgoers at this Closing Day celebration! Enjoy complimentary Wine from BAREFOOT WINE & BUBBLY and culinary bites while supplies last.

Date: Saturday, March 29, 2014
Time: 1:00-2:00 PM (doors open 12:30 PM)
Location: Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Admission: $20 – Reception and Global Panorama Shorts Program. Reception starts at 1:00 PM.  Following the reception the Closing Day celebration continues with the Global Panorama Shorts Program at 2:00 PM.
Purchase tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/594333

Honorees include:

Brenda Chapman – Brenda has a unique and broad experience as a storyteller from American film industry – as director, story supervisor, and scriptwriter. She was the first woman to direct a feature film for one of the big studios, Dreamworks’ THE PRINCE OF EGYPT and was head of story on Disney’s LION KING. Brenda received an Academy Award and a BAFTA for Best Feature Animated Film, as well as a Golden Globe Award for BRAVE, a Disney/Pixar film which she wrote and directed. She is now consulting on a project for LucasFilm and developing a project for DreamWorks Animation. She’s shown here with her daughter, Emma, the inspiration for BRAVE, the night of the Oscar ceremonies.

Jan Wahl - Emmy winning producer, entertainment reporter and film critic, Jan Wahl wears many hats. San Francisco turns to Wahl for the scoop on Hollywood, celebrities and film lore and history. Vancouver Magazine called her “San Francisco’s sharp-witted solo answer to Ebert and Roeper.” Recognized as a woman of many hats, film critic Jan Wahl joined KRON 4 in October 1990. Sporting a different chapeau each week, she critiques recent movie releases, reviews new videos, conducts celebrity interviews, and offers interesting background on show business.

Tiffany Shlain - Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain, is a filmmaker, public speaker, writer, founder of The Webby Awards, and co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Tiffany’s films have won over 50 awards and distinctions including Audience and Grand Jury Prizes, and a 2012 Disruptive Innovation Award from The Tribeca Film Festival. Her films have been shown at museums, theaters, conferences, festivals, and by the US State Department to represent America at embassies around the world.

Sally Jo Fifer - Sally Jo Fifer (President, CEO) oversees the funding, production, and public television launch of more than 75 independently films each year. During her tenure, ITVS programs have garnered 16 Emmy Awards, ten duPont-Columbia Awards, 22 Peabody Awards, one Golden Globe Award, and 16 Academy Award nominations, among other industry accolades. Since taking the helm, Sally has piloted ITVS through major programmatic expansion, launching the primetime Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens.

Cheryl Dunye - Cheryl Dunye has received numerous national and international honors for her work in the media arts. Her fourth feature film THE OWLS, was celebrated at national and international film festivals in 2010. Her third feature film, Miramax’s, MY BABY’S DADDY, was a box office success and played at theaters nationwide. Dunye’s second feature, the acclaimed HBO Films, STRANGER INSIDE, garnered Dunye an Independent Spirit award nomination for best director in 2002. Dunye wrote, directed and starred in her first film which was the first African American lesbian feature film, THE WATERMELON WOMAN.

Holly Million - Holly Million is a filmmaker, nonprofit leader, teacher, speaker, writer, and blogger whose personal passion is empowering people to change their world for the better. Holly has over 20 years’ experience in nonprofit management and fundraising for organizations and films. In addition to securing funding for A STORY OF HEALING, which won a 1997 Academy Award, Holly has raised money for documentary and dramatic films that have aired on PBS, HBO, and other broadcast outlets.

Tamara Perkins - Tamara Perkins is a change maker focused on documentaries that inspire dialogue, empower and provide voice for vulnerable communities. She founded Apple of Discord Productions to produce films such as Niroga, profiling a program she founded which reaches incarcerated youth through Yoga and mindfulness, and documentary Life After Life, the 7 year saga of life after decades of incarceration. In 2009 the National Council on Crime and Delinquency presented Tamara with their Media for a Just Society Award.

Esther Pearl - Esther Pearl is the founder and Executive Director of Camp Reel Stories. She has spent 15 years working in Production Management in the Entertainment Industry. The majority of her career was spent at Pixar Animation Studios where her feature film credits include Academy Award winning films The Incredibles and Wall-e, as well as Monsters, Inc.  Her other credits include; Titanic, Starship Troopers, Armageddon and What Dreams May Come.

Dorothy Fadiman - Dorothy Fadiman has been producing award-winning documentary media with an emphasis on human rights and social justice since 1976. Honors include an Oscar nomination, an Emmy and the CPB Gold Medal.  Dorothy has produced more than 25 films. Throughout her film career, she has sustained an ongoing commitment to women’s rights. Films in this area include WOMAN by WOMAN: New Hope for the Villages of India, FROM RISK to ACTION: Women and HIV/AIDS In Ethiopia. and a trilogy of films on reproductive rights CHOICE: Then and Now: From the Back-Alleys to the Supreme Court and Beyond.

Debbie Brubaker – Debbie Brubaker is a seasoned producer living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her most recent project was co-producing the feature The Diary of a Teenage Girl based upon the graphic novel and directed by Mari Heller. Prior to that, she has been busy with Tim Burton’s latest movie, Big Eyes and the indie movie Quitters. Debbie has worked on a number of features, documentaries and television, some titles include Woody Allen’s latest release, Blue Jasmine, NBC’s Park & Rec, Jennifer Seibel Newsom’s documentary feature Miss Representation, the TV show Alcatraz, Peter Bratt’s popular movie, La Mission, Finn Taylor’s The Darwin Awards and Cherish, and Joshua Grannel’s All About Evil.

Shirin Papillon - After many years of producing film, television and online video content, Shirin Papillon launched OneMoreLesbian.com (OML), a video curation site that aggregates lesbian films, TV series, web series and more from around the world.  The site has helped launch and promote many films and web series and has served as a platform for lesbian visibility.  Shirin is an active and vocal advocate of LGBT rights and equality and through the site has partnered with GLAAD, HRCm The Trevor Project and others.

Guetty Felin-Cohen - Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, reared in America and came of age cinematically in Paris France, Guetty Felin is an award winning  Haitian-American filmmaker with a very eclectic and rich background in the film and television industry.   Her career took root while in graduate school in Paris in 1991 with her work as associate producer for the series “Ecrire Contre L’oubli” (Write Against Forgetting) to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Amnesty International.  Since then, she has worked on over 70 hours of documentary and narrative films and has worn many hats:  distributor, marketing/outreach director, screenplay reader, voice-over narrator, curator and teacher.

Tracey Quezada – When developing a story whether that is a documentary film, or a promotional video, at the forefront is good storytelling. Tracey Quezada gets to the heart of the story and does so by helping people to share their story, inspired by their voice. She is an experienced director, producer, researcher and story consultant. Tracey is currently producing a documentary film entitled, You and Me and the Fruit Trees, that focuses on stories of healing and the movement to end child sexual abuse.

Alexa Fraser-Herron – Alexa heads Scary Cow, a prolific film collective in the San Francisco Bay Area. While working to create a nurturing and productive community for the next wave of indie filmmakers, Alexa writes and directs films, lectures on various aspects of creative development and film production, and manages live performance productions for Peaches Christ.

Karen Larsen – Karen Larsen is a film publicist in San Francisco. In 1987 she founded Larsen Associates,  a public relations firm specializing in publicizing independent feature and documentary films, film festivals, and special events in the Bay Area. She handles the publicity for many film festivals in the Bay Area: CAAMFest (International Asian American Film Festival), San Francisco International Jewish Film Festival, The San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, SF Indie Fest, The California Film Festival, SF DocFest, Green Festival and The San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival. In November of 2011, Larsen received the Essential SF Award from the San Francisco Film Society. In 1995, Karen Larsen contributed a chapter on publicity to Morrie Warshawski’s book, The Next Step: Distributing Independent Films and Videos (Foundation for Independent Video & Film, Inc., 1995).

Soumyaa K. Behrens - Behrens is the President of Bay Area Women in Film and Media. Behrens is an award winning director, producer and curator of film and contemporary visual art.  Behrens is the Social Justice Coordinator for the Metro Academy in the College of Liberal & Creative Arts and a lecturer at San Francisco State University. She is currently in post-production on a new documentary that chronicles the forced demise of the oldest community recycling center in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco that was emboldened by city wide gentrification efforts to reduce homeless visibility in the city.

 Loran Parial - Loran Parial serves as the Vice-President of Bay Area Women in Film and Media and has been on the board for five years in various capacities, from member at large to Secretary to Marketing and now in her current position.  She is a media professional in the Bay Area and has worked locally at universities, gaming companies and media content distribution companies.  She has a decade’s worth of experience in the film and media industry.

Ryan Lynch – Lynch has spent the last eight years at Pixar Animation Studios in the story department working on films such as Ratatouille and Brave. She started her own production company, MissMottMedia in 2011 and has made several short live-action award winning films.  She produced her first live action feature film, White Rabbit (2014) with director Bill Kinder, which is currently on the festival circuit. She is also about to launch a web series, SanFranLand, which she wrote and directed. She has an M.F.A. in Film Directing from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and serves on the Board of Directors for Bay Area Women in Film and Media.

Katherine Rife – Katherine Rife  is a community justice advocate and documentary filmmaker. She is particularly interested in how documentary film can be used as a medium to expose inequities and spark dialogue about social change. She is the Secretary and Co-Chair of Communications for the Board of Bay Area Women in Film & Media. She is also the Program Coordinator & Communications Specialist for the Healthy Richmond initiative, an initiative supported by Bay Area LISC.

Sarah Gilson - Sarah Gilson is a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and has two decades of experience in the fields of narrative film, documentary, television and new media. Sarah got her start in the entertainment industry working as an intern in the MTV News Specials department in New York, and with films including American History X, The Mighty and Legalese in Los Angeles. During her career, Sarah has worked at several entertainment companies, including Pressman Film, Lucasfilm, and Creative Artists Agency, and in crew positions on films including the recent Redemption Trail, a narrative feature, Crime After Crime, a documentary feature, and Heterogenius Classrooms: Universal Math and Science for All, an educational documentary. Sarah serves as the Membership Chair for Bay Area Women in Film and Media.

 Laura Costantino – Laura Costantino has worked at the intersection between film, video, and technology for the past 7 years. She has been a film curator for Telluride Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, San Francisco Indie Fest, San Francisco Doc Fest, and the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. She has also worked as content marketing and social media strategist for Yahoo, where she oversaw social media and content strategy for the video vertical Yahoo Screen, and for documentary production company PatchWorks Films, where she managed distribution and community outreach for the award-winning documentary “Speaking in Tongues.” Laura serves as the Co-Chair of Communications for Bay Area Women in Film and Media.

SFIWFF 2014 will be honoring the following festival filmmakers:

 Rolla Selbak, Mary Guzmán, Amber Yada, Kate Elston, Chandra Reyes, Cynthia Lubow, Ashley Rodholm, Meg Smaker, Arpita Kumar, and Carrie Carnevale. 

 ****

Readers: Support your sisters – attend! I wish I could be there with you, but I have a previous engagement supporting 30 teenage girls in a first ever, Teen Empowerment Scholarship Pageant! I’m so excited to be a part of this – I’ll share more with you later.

Happy Saturday!

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