Apr 23, 2012
Festival
The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 19-May 3) today announced its juries and the awards to be presented at the Festival’s Golden Gate Awards, Wednesday, May 2, 8:00 pm at Rasselas Restaurant & Jazz Club. Winners will be announced for the New Directors Prize, FIPRESCI prize and Golden Gate Awards. A total of $70,000 in prizes will be awarded.
New Directors Prize
The New Directors Prize is a $15,000 cash prize awarded to the director of a debut feature with a unique artistic sensibility or vision.
New Directors Jury
Thirty-one-year-old Felipe Bragança directed three short films from 2003 to 2006. In 2005, he worked as assistant director and screenwriter of Suely in the Sky and began a partnership with director Karim Ainouz. Between 2008 and 2011, in partnership with Marina Meliande, he directed the independent feature trilogy Hearts on Fire, including a collaborative experimental work with the participation of 14 Brazilian filmmakers. He is currently developing the screenplay of Ainouz’s new effort, Sunlit Berlin, and three feature projects as a director.
Karyn Kusama wrote and directed her first feature, Girlfight, in 1999. The film won multiple awards, including the Director’s Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Prix de la Jeunesse at the Cannes Film Festival, and was released theatrically by Sony Screen Gems in 2000. Kusama directed the science fiction love story Aeon Flux (2005), starring Charlize Theron, Marton Csokas and Frances McDormand. Her third feature was the comedy-horror Jennifer’s Body (2009). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, screenwriter Phil Hay, and their son Michio.
Wesley Morris is a film critic at the Boston Globe. Previously, he wrote about film for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. His writing appears in Film Comment, Slate, Ebony and Grantland. He’s also a regular contributor on NPR. He lives in Boston and recently won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
FIPRESCI Prize
The FIPRESCI Prize is given to a first or second feature film by a director emerging on the international scene. SFIFF is one of three festivals in the United States to host a FIPRESCI jury and award a FIPRESCI prize. FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics, has been in existence for more than 65 years, with members in over 60 countries. The prize was established to promote film art and to encourage new and emerging cinema. The purpose of FIPRESCI is to support cinema as an art and as an outstanding and autonomous means of expression.
FIPRESCI Jury
Andrés Nazarala has written film criticism for over a decade. He contributes to the cinema magazine Mabuse and the newspaper La Segunda, where he is the second editor-in-chief of the Art & Culture section. He is also an independent filmmaker. Debut, his first film, was part of the Chilean competition at the SANFIC film festival in 2009. He has contributed experimental music to Chilean theater and an instrumental theme to Amos Poe’s film La Commedia di Amos Poe.
Film critic and writer Claire Valade has written for Séquences, Canada’s oldest film publication, for 15 years and been active on the Montréal film and cultural scene for 25 years. She has worked as a programmer, researcher and publication director for festivals and film centers, including the Festival of New Cinema (FNC), Just For Laughs and Excentris. She is also documentary programmer of the online video platform Vitheque.com. An independent screenwriter and filmmaker, her current projects include a feature screenplay, short film diaries and a book of personal stories.
Dennis West has taught at universities and cultural institutions in Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, the United States and Portugal. The author of Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, his film writing has appeared in periodicals such as Jump Cut, Latin American Research Review and Film Criticism. He has worked as a film exhibitor and translator, and is a contributing editor at Cineaste.
Golden Gate Awards
The Golden Gate Awards competition introduces Bay Area audiences to filmmakers who have transformed the medium with their documentary features and animated, narrative, experimental and documentary shorts. Four juries view the official selections at the Festival and bestow Golden Gate Awards on films in ten categories, awarding a total of $55,000. The categories are Documentary Feature ($20,000), Bay Area Documentary Feature ($15,000), Documentary Short ($5,000), Narrative Short ($5,000), Animated Short ($2,000), Bay Area Short, First Prize ($2,000), Bay Area Short, Second Prize ($1,500), New Visions Short ($1,500), Youth Work ($1,500) and Family Film ($1,500). All winners will be announced at the Golden Gate Awards ceremony.
Golden Gate Awards Documentary Feature Jury
Laura Gabbert‘s critically acclaimed documentaries deploy humor and drama to put a human face on such difficult issues as aging, the environment and AIDS. No Impact Man premiered at Sundance in 2009 and Sunset Story (2003) won awards from Tribeca, Los Angeles and Miami film festivals among others. Gabbert is currently directing a documentary about Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold and developing another about gender roles since the Women’s Movement. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.
Dennis Lim is a critic and programmer based in New York. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image, where he organizes film programs and oversees the online magazine Moving Image Source. His work has appeared in Artforum, Slate, Cinema Scope and the Village Voice. He has served on the New York Film Festival’s selection committee and was the programmer of the 2010 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
John Maringouin is a San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker. He makes tactile, situational films that focus on relationships between the visceral and the ephemeral. Professionally, he has crashed cars with Jackass, swum the Amazon with drunken Slovenes and sprinted back alleys at midnight with the Rolling Stones. His films have screened at festivals from Sundance to Moscow. In 2008, his documentary Running Stumbled was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. In 2009, his film Big River Man received the World Cinema Cinematography Award.
Golden Gate Awards Short Film Jury
Vicci Ho is an Asian Film consultant for various film festivals, including the Seattle International Film Festival and Zurich Film Festival. She previously worked for the San Francisco International Asian Film Festival as assistant director. Based in Hong Kong but more at home up in the air, she is most often spotted at ramen joints and karaoke bars near the film festivals she attends.
Jon Korn, born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, is currently a shorts programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and Outfest, and a partner in Cinemad Presents, a distributor of new and unusual films. Previously, Korn worked as an associate programmer at AFI FEST and as associate creative producer for CineVegas. He is the cocreator of the Echo Park Time Travel Mart and a Jeopardy! champion.
Jan Krawitz has independently produced documentary films for 35 years, exhibiting work at film festivals in the United States and abroad. Her most recent film, Big Enough, was broadcast in two consecutive seasons on the national PBS series POV and in 18 countries. Earlier films, including Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People and Drive-in Blues, received national broadcast on PBS and the Discovery Channel. She is a professor at Stanford University, where she directs the MFA program in documentary film and video.
Youth Works Jury
Emma Amar is a 17-year-old student at Le Lycée Français la Pérouse who has always loved cinema. She moved from Paris to San Francisco two years ago. Amar has been taking audio-visual classes for the last year in which she directed a music video and is now working on a documentary. She is seriously thinking about studying film.
John Dilley is a director and filmmaker whose films have screened at the Sundance, Clermont-Ferrand, Los Angeles and San Francisco Independent film festivals, among many others. His work has been broadcast on PBS and featured at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Dilley is involved in several local youth programs teaching filmmaking and media literacy to Bay Area teens.
Leah Ofman is a 14-year-old student at AP Giannini Middle School. She has made several movies including Cell, a science fiction drama, and The Singing Tree, a peace-promoting documentary that captures Laura Marshalls vision of fostering peace through the arts in public schools. Although she has only been making films for a year, she has been interested in acting her whole life. Ofman has been in the San Francisco Opera and several theater productions. Learning about the filmmaking process has given her a whole new perspective on movies. She hopes to one day be a professional actress.
Keelan Williams is a junior at Berkeley High School and an aspiring filmmaker. He was a curator of Screenagers, a statewide film festival for teens presented at the Pacific Film Archive. He has attended film camps at UCLA and New York Film Academy and made several short films. Williams is a member of the Berkeley High School student senate, an illustrator for the school newspaper and his small school’s leadership council representative. In addition to film, he is also interested in politics, sports and social justice.
Family Films Jury
Jim Capobianco received the 2008 Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Ratatouille. A 13-year veteran of Pixar, Capobianco wrote and directed Your Friend the Rat and the Wall•E end titles. He recently opened Aerial Contrivance Workshop in order to develop his own properties geared toward educating through entertainment.
Kelly Smith Cole has lived in San Francisco for 20 years, where she and her husband are proudly raising two city kids. She earned a Master’s in nonprofit administration from USF and teaches at Farallon Academy. In her spare time she is a fan at SF Riptide lacrosse games and Marsh Youth Theater performances, and has aspirations to study Spanish in Guatemala this summer.
Holly Higgins has been teaching elementary school for 11 years in Oregon, Manhattan and California. Higgins won the Herbst Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence in 2011 at Kittredge School, where she currently teaches. She has also been enjoying her new gig as mama to her 20-month-old daughter. A lover of the arts, children and great entertainment, Higgins is thrilled to be a judge on this year’s panel.
For a full list of films in competition, see the Golden Gate Award Competition Official Selection list.
For tickets and information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request interviews or screeners contact your SFIFF publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
55th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 19-May 3 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, the Castro Theatre, SF Film Society Cinema and SFMOMA 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 $70,000 in cash prizes, upwards of 100 participating filmmaker guests and diverse and engaged audiences with more than 70,000 people in attendance.