Film
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.
Beyond the Gap
Beyond the Gap is a documentary that explores the educational achievement gap existing between young African-American males and other American students. Grandville Taylor, Deshon Smith and Raysean Jones, graduates of Washington High School in the San Francisco Unified School District, share their empowering stories of success to inspire other young African-American men and students of color to successfully overcome the achievement gap. This film will also provide possible solutions for educators, administrators, community members and families to eliminate the gap in educational opportunity.
End of Isolation
In the summer of 2022, 9 people embarked on a 2-month national tour to perform The BOX, a critically acclaimed play about prison resistance. In following this journey, the documentary also dives deep into the lives of visionary thought leaders and communities on the frontlines of reimagining justice across our country. If we think beyond prisons, what are we building in their place?
Black Is Blue
BLACK IS BLUE is set in dystopian Oakland, where an ex-techie trans woman uses pirated AI technology to control a young trans lover, but their love and revenge plot against a DNA-harvesting corporation unravels, leading to a tragic end for all. Against the dystopian backdrop of another Bay Area tech boom gone bust, this is an erotic tale of a black trans couple brought together by technology. Their tragic love story is witnessed by a bot who stands by — eager to learn and protect— until it is transformed by them. Epic in presentation, taut and tense in character and [...]
