SFFILM

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2017 Doc Stories

Filmmakers in Conversation: Non-Fiction Filmmaking in the Age of Trump

3 Nov
Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 4:00 pm PT
Vogue Theatre

Description

Non-fiction filmmaking can cover a broad range of topics, from the personal to the pointedly political. What, if any, difference does our current political climate make in filmmakers’ decisions about their documentary work? Join the creators behind several 2017 films to explore the complexities of filmmaking in present times. Participants include Yance Ford (Strong Island), Laura Gabbert (Monument | Monumento), and Peter Nicks (The Force).

Yance Ford
Yance Ford, who is transgender, is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellowship, and was among Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2011. For ten years, Ford worked as Series Producer for the PBS showcase POV, where his curatorial work helped garner more than 16 Emmy nominations. Ford is also an architectural welder, and while at Modern Art Foundry helped assemble the sculpture “Maman” by Louise Bourgeois—a series of three spiders exhibited at Rockefeller Center and now on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Laura Gabbert
Documentary director Laura Gabbert’s critically acclaimed films deploy full measures of humor and drama to unflinchingly put a human face on a range of social issues. No Impact Man (Sundance 2009), which the LA Times called “terrifically entertaining, compelling and extremely funny,” played theatrically in over 30 cities. Her previous film Sunset Story (PBS) won prizes at Tribeca and LAFF. Gabbert directed the feature film City of Gold (Sundance and SFFILM Festival 2015) about Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold. Most recently, Gabbert directed the Field of Vision short film Monument | Monumento about a unique spot on the US-Mexico border.

Peter Nicks
Peter Nicks is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker living in Oakland. He is currently working on a trilogy of cinema vérité documentaries set in that East Bay city. The first chapter, The Waiting Room (SFFILM Festival 2012), received numerous awards and nominations. The Force is the second installment. Amongst his other projects, Nicks was a second-unit camera operator on Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013) and he shared a News & Documentary Emmy in 2007 along with others for a segment on AIR: America’s Investigative Reports.