Film
Last Witness
Story Structure: Some secrets refuse to stay buried, and some wounds never fully heal. In 2010, Luuk Meijer, a researcher at the Anne Frank House, discovers Max Heppner’s memoir, I Live in a Chickenhouse. The book implicates Luuk’s father in a wartime murder. Meanwhile, 11-year-old Theo van Daalen unearths an artifact of past violence that sets him on an obsessive journey to uncover the region’s hidden past. As their independent searches intertwine, flashbacks reveal the same world in 1942, where the Dutch Resistance sought to protect Jewish refugees, including two boys, Felix Goldman and Max Heppner, and their families. When [...]
Querida Fátima
After losing her 12-year-old daughter Fátima to a horrible attack and fleeing her home in a small town in Mexico, Lorena leads her family on a quest for justice against a corrupt system preying on thousands of women and girls each year, taking her fight all the way to the country’s Supreme Court.
98 Days: Last Stand at City Hall
98 Days is a hybrid documentary tracing activist-filmmaker RJ Dawson’s journey from the 2020 Grand Park occupation, where Black Unity organizers and unhoused residents clashed with police and internal divisions to his current work with the Center of Independent Living Storytellers Initiative, a disability justice media project. The film contrasts the sacrifices of street protests with today’s accessible resistance tactics, asking how movements can wield narrative power without replicating trauma. At its heart, it’s a story about who controls the camera and whether marginalized communities can televise their revolution without being consumed by it.
Pleasure Seekers
Pleasure Seekers is a vérité feature length documentary following the intertwined lives of three women in Brooklyn, New York. Mayra, a first-generation immigrant from Ecuador, and mother reflects on her life once rooted in survival over pleasure, now reclaims her relationship to sex and aging. Her daughter Sam, a filmmaker in her twenties uninterested in marriage or children, returns home with a camera and a growing desire to understand her mother—and herself. Alongside her is Emily, her childhood best friend and practically a second daughter to Mayra, who is adamant about finding love. Finding intersectional and intergenerational perspectives on the [...]
Pipe Dreams: Saving the Castro Theatre Organ
Pipe Dreams follows the battle over the future of the Castro Theatre, and its prized Wurlitzer pipe organ, at a time of unprecedented change in San Francisco.
The Shape of Light
In the world's epicenter of technological innovation, San Francisco cinema goers struggle to preserve their neighborhood movie theaters and keep the theatrical experience alive in times of a global pandemic, shifting social behaviors, and an ascendant streaming industry. Will they be able to safeguard cinemas as we know them? The Shape of Light chronicles multiple storylines in different neighborhoods of the Bay Area striving to preserve local movie theaters while facing an unprecedented global pandemic, a struggling economy, and a societal increase of individual isolation through the use of personal electronic devices. Over several years, we witnessed the solidarity, inventiveness, [...]
Queerly Beloved
“Queerly Beloved” is a feature ensemble about a group of queer and trans friends whose bonds are tested when they come together for a weekend wedding in the Redwoods. This multi-protagonist film depicts the beauty and hilarity of Bay Area queer community as friends, lovers, exes, and relatives navigate their intertwined relationships, threading and re-threading the fabric of chosen family.
Rebel Woman
Rebel Woman is a personal documentary short that traces a first-generation Afghan American woman's journey to understand her mother's quiet acts of defiance and the legacy of resilience passed down through generations. The film weaves together memories of pre-war Afghanistan and the immigrant experience in America, exploring the tensions between cultural expectations and personal freedom. In our current moment, when women's rights are threatened globally and immigrant voices are being silenced, Rebel Women offers an intimate reminder of strength, identity, reconnecting with a dying culture, and the powerful bond between mother and daughter.
West O. Dreaming
In 1933, Charlotte Beradt began collecting dreams of people in her Berlin neighborhood, and eventually published The Third Reich of Dreams. The film West O. Dreaming is a core sample of dreams during our time in history. The film portrays a series of dreams, each in creative collaboration with its dreamer. The project rises to the challenge of the near impossibility of representing dreams—a task which touches on language, meaning and the nature of consciousness.
Todo Lo Sólido (All That is Solid)
Todo Lo Sólido (All That Is Solid) tells the story of an island sinking into the Caribbean Sea. As a nameless drifter searches for explanations about the island's destiny, reality and fantasy merge to reflect on the construction of a nation and the burden of progress.
