May 4, 2014
Festival
The 57th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 24-May 8) today announced its juries and the prizes to be presented at the Festival’s Golden Gate Awards, Wednesday May 7, 9:00 pm at Rouge | Nick’s Crispy Tacos. Winners will be announced for the New Directors Prize and the Golden Gate Awards, and a total of nearly $40,000 in prizes will be distributed.
NEW DIRECTORS PRIZE
The New Directors Prize is a $10,000 cash prize awarded to the director of a debut feature with a unique artistic sensibility or vision.
NEW DIRECTORS JURY
Scott Macaulay is a New York-based film producer and the Editor-in-Chief of Filmmaker Magazine. As a producer, with his partner, Robin O’Hara, and his production company, Forensic Films, Macaulay has produced or executive produced many award-winning features including Raising Victor Vargas, Harmony Korine’s Gummo and julien donkey-boy; Saving Face; and Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning What Happened Was. Macaulay and O’Hara are the recipients of an Independent Spirit Award for their producing work in independent film. In 2005 Macaulay created for IFP (Independent Filmmaker Project) the IFP Narrative Labs, a filmmaker mentorship program specifically focused on postproduction, festival strategy and distribution.
Fandor cofounder Jonathan Marlow is an accomplished cinematographer, curator and composer as well as a director with over a dozen films of assorted durations to his credit. In the two decades prior to his role as Chief Content Officer at Fandor, Marlow was affiliated with numerous film exhibition institutions, film festivals and technology-centric film distribution companies such as Amazon, VUDU and others. Concurrently, Marlow frequently writes about cinema for Keyframe and a number of other publications. He is known to host screenings throughout the world showcasing remarkable works that are generally unavailable elsewhere.
Ella Taylor teaches at the University of Southern California School of Cinema and writes movie reviews and features for npr.org as well as The Wrap, Elle Magazine, the New York Times‘ Arts and Leisure section and other publications.
GOLDEN GATE AWARDS
The Golden Gate Awards competition has introduced Bay Area audiences to filmmakers who have transformed the medium with their award-winning documentary features and animated, narrative, experimental and documentary shorts. Bay Area media professionals screen submissions and then make recommendations to SFFS programmers who finalize the selections. Four juries view the official selections at the Festival and bestow Golden Gate Awards on films in seven categories.
GGA DOCUMENTARY FEATURE JURY
Rob Epstein is director, writer, and producer of both nonfiction and scripted narrative film. He won two Academy Awards for the films The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. His film Paragraph 175 received the FIPRESCI Award at the Berlinale Film Festival as well as the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for direction. Epstein is also the recipient of four national Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards, multiple GLAAD Media Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pioneer Award from the International Documentary Association.
Nathan Heller is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a film and TV critic for Vogue. Previously, he was a columnist at Slate, where he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in essays and criticism. Throughout his career, Heller has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and New York. He grew up in San Francisco and is currently based in New York.
Lesli Klainberg is the Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Prior to that, she was Managing Director of the Film Society and Producer of the organization’s New York Film Festival and annual Chaplin Award Gala. She was the Executive Director of New York’s LGBT Film Festival NewFest, a consulting producer for the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and a producer of IFP’s Independent Film Week Forum. An award-winning documentary producer and director, among Klainberg’s credits are line producing A Place at the Table, Beware of Mr. Baker and Mission Blue, and producing Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, the series Indie Sex, Miss America, In the Company of Women and Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema.
GGA SHORT FILM JURY
Jonathan Kiefer is a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle who writes about movies for publications including SF Weekly, Esquire and the Village Voice. Kiefer has also made multiple short films which have been shown at festivals in Europe and the United States.
Vendela Vida is the author of four books and a founding coeditor of The Believer magazine. She cowrote the script for Away We Go, which was directed by Sam Mendes. Currently, she is working on a screenplay adaptation of her award-winning novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name which will be directed by Eva Weber. The project was the recipient of a SFFS / KRF Filmmaking Grant in 2013.
Diana Williams is the founder of Roller Coaster Entertainment and has produced critically acclaimed narrative films including Our Song, and documentaries such as Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible and the Emmy-winning Sylvia Drew Live and Another First Step. She developed the cross-platform storyworld The Gatecrashers, the interactive/educational app The Digits, consulted on the documentaries Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis and Room 237, and collaborated on animated motion comics for Tron: Legacy, The Muppet Show, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Repo Men and Torchwood: Web of Lies. A past Spirit Awards nominee, Williams currently works at Lucasfilm.
GGA YOUTH WORKS JURY
Davis Avila is a junior at Head-Royce School who creates digital media collages consisting of intertwining music, audio, photo and video pieces. After taking several film production and intermedia literacy courses, he is now an active member of his high school film department. Avila was part of a team that put together a documentary about the Hayward gay prom. He is looking to pursue interaction design or other media arts in the future.
Sophie Edelhart is a junior at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco where she is a member of the drama department and has studied both playwriting and screenwriting. She is a frequent visitor to the Castro Theatre and an avid movie lover. Amongst her favorite directors are François Truffaut, the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. She hopes to continue her involvement with film and theater in college.
Julia Pollak is a junior at Lick-Wilmerding High School. She discovered her passion for filmmaking after making videos using her family’s vacation photos, and ever since she has been exploring filmmaking and photography. Pollak has participated in local and national film contests, including the Anti-Bullying Film Contest where she won third place, and the Dartmouth College Math-O-Vision challenge, in which her film was a finalist.
GGA FAMILY FILMS JURY
Donna Lee has been a SFUSD elementary school teacher for the past 20 years. She is often called the “Fieldtrip Queen” and enjoys introducing her students to the visual and performing arts. Lee feels that the best educational experiences often come from outside of the classroom. She and her students are regular attendees at the Schools at the Festival program at SFIFF.
Nicki Richesin is a freelance writer and editor based in Marin. She frequently contributes to Sunset, DuJour, 7×7, Daily Candy, The Children’s Book Review, The Horn Book and The Huffington Post. Richesin is the San Francisco Editor ofRundown and formerly of DuJour. She is also the author and editor of four anthologies: The May Queen, Because I Love Her, What I Would Tell Her and Crush.
Jeena Wolfe is an artist who has enjoyed living in the Bay Area for 20 years. She leads a discussion group for teens using short films, clips and documentaries to discuss current events and controversial topics to build understanding, empathy and a sense of worldwide interconnection. SFFS has been a major part of their curriculum, emphasizing the power of film in education.
For a full list of films in competition, see the Golden Gate Awards Competition Official Selection list.
For general information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews or screeners, contact your Festival publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
57th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 57th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Castro Theatre and New People Cinema in San Francisco and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Held each spring for 15 days, the International is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in one of the country’s most beautiful cities, featuring 200 films and live events, 14 juried awards and nearly $40,000 in cash prizes, upwards of 100 participating filmmaker guests and diverse and engaged audiences with more than 65,000 in attendance.