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The Festival’s 2023 Mel Novikoff Award, named for the legendary San Francisco exhibitor and awarded to those who enhance appreciation of world cinema, goes to Firelight Media. Founded by award-winning filmmakers Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith out of a desire to make their filmmaking lives more sustainable, the organization has moved well beyond that scope as the nonprofit expanded to support emerging documentary filmmakers of color. SFFILM Festival programmer Amber Love, whose short film, Lifetimes, was part of Firelight Media’s 2022 collection of regional shorts, HOMEGROWN: Future Visions, will engage Nelson and Smith in conversation as part of the awards presentation, followed by a screening of Nelson’s Emmy-nominated documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.

“It’s a thrill,” Smith says of sharing a stage with a filmmaker who has taken part in a Firelight Media program.

“And kind of surreal, but it’ll be fun,” Nelson adds.

How did Firelight Media begin?

Love is one of over 200 filmmakers that have come under the Firelight Media umbrella to date. The organization became operational in 2000. Nelson and Smith married and wanted to work together but it wasn’t practical given the nature of documentary filmmaking where projects can take years to reach fruition and raising money is always a struggle. It is a never-ending cycle. Forming a nonprofit production company to even out the highs and the lows of funding made collaborating on projects possible.

“That was really the inspiration for the organization,” Smith says. “The irony, of course, is we’re now supporting other people for the same reasons. That is still very much part of what we do. One can make the argument that documentary makers should be able to make a living making their work because what they’re doing is so important.”

In 2008, the company split into two arms. Firelight Films was born as a for-profit documentary production company under Nelson’s leadership. As president of nonprofit Firelight Media, Smith oversees the programs designed to help launch up-and-coming filmmakers, including its Documentary Lab; The Goundwork Regional Lab, which convenes in underserved communities to introduce the documentary world and apprise new filmmakers of opportunities that exist for them; and much more, including funding programs.

Smith says mentoring emerging makers was something that she and Nelson had been doing all along and it is something she says is common with documentary filmmakers. As that kind of work increased, it became evident that they should institutionalize the work they were doing.

“We built a structure and a framework to support other filmmakers, and that is what became the documentary arm,” Smith says. “That was the evolution of that.”

“Part of the realization came when I made a film called Shattering the Silence, which was about academics of color in major institutions all across the country,” Nelson says. “One of the things they constantly told us was that there was an extra expectation on them to mentor people. If you’re a Black professor, you’re supposed to mentor all the Black students you could gather. If you’re a Latino academic somewhere, you’re supposed to work with all the Spanish-speaking people. It made me think about that, that that was an expectation of filmmakers of color, and that there was a way to institutionalize that mentoring we were all doing anyway and that filmmakers would benefit if the thing was institutionalized and there was a structure.”

The Importance of Documentary Filmmaking Today

One thing Smith emphasizes is that while some think this is a golden age for documentaries, the ones that have the easiest time getting funding are celebrity-driven or true crime. The type of serious documentaries that Nelson and Smith make, like 2021’s Oscar®-nominated Attica (written and co-directed by Nelson and executive produced by Smith), and the kind of work being done by makers in Firelight Media’s programs still face challenges. Yet, the work they do is vital, particularly in light of mainstream media’s often shallow reportage and state governments, such as Florida, that are outright hostile to teaching subjects as basic as American history.

“We used to argue 20 years ago that documentaries played an important role because of mergers and the corporatization of newspapers and radio and television news,” Smith says. “But now, in some states, I think documentaries are going to be the only way you know anything about history. That makes the work all the more important. It was already important but now it is critical. It’s one of the things that gives me a powerful sense of mission.”

“It’s a cliché but we have to look at history in a clear light, the light of day, as we say. It’s just really that fundamental,” adds Nelson. “History doesn’t blame anybody; it doesn’t shame anybody.”

“One of the things that film does is introduce you to subjects in a very entertaining way. You might not want to read a 700-page book but you’ll watch a documentary that’s an hour long or two hours. You start to learn a little bit, then maybe you will want to read that 700-page book…As the media keeps shrinking, documentaries become more and more important, where you look behind the story and investigate the news. TV news, cable news are not doing that at this point.”

What began as a way for married filmmakers to work together and support their family has grown into something so much bigger as Firelight Media helps so many others achieve their own ambitions. When Smith and Nelson look back over the past 23 years, how do they feel?

“I feel really proud,” says Smith. “I think a lot of organizations that started in 2000 are not around anymore. But we are and we plan to be here on into the future, for the next 50 years. Because the reason we exist, it’s not going to go away. So, we plan to be here.”

“When we started out, there were two things that we felt. One is that this thing, Firelight Media, was sustainable, that we could raise money and sustain it,” says Nelson. “It’s been different. It’s very different from making a film where you raise the money and you’re done and now you make the film. This is an ongoing process, raising money.

“Two, and probably more importantly, there are filmmakers out there who are really talented and have great stories to tell. We can help them tell their stories. They can stand on our backs and make the leap. Every year we find more talented filmmakers than in the last. It’s been an incredible ride.”

Mel Novikoff Award: Firelight Media + “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution”: 3:15 PM, Sat., April 15, CGV San Francisco. Click here for further information and tickets.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

A native of Guadalajara, Mexico, writer-director Lorena Padilla didn’t want a quinceañera when she turned 15. Instead of a celebration marking her journey from girlhood to womanhood, she asked for a trip, traveling north to San Jose to visit relatives. With two of her cousins, she spent a day in San Francisco, describing it as a rite of passage. Since then, Padilla collaborated on the story of Bay Area filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes’s documentary 499, but she never made it back here again. Until now, that is, as Martinez, her first feature, screens at the SFFILM Festival with Padilla in attendance.

“You have no idea how thrilled I am,” she says during a recent video chat. “It’s a dream come true…I feel like everything is falling into place. It is such an honor.”

What is Martinez about?

A Fantastic Woman star Francisco Reyes plays the titular character in Padilla’s drama that blends deadpan humor and poignancy. A Chilean immigrant who lived in Mexico for 40 years and spent decades at his office job, Martinez is thrown for a loop when human resources informs him that he must retire. Not only that, but he is also obligated to train his replacement, Pablo (Humberto Busto), an amiable goofball, under the jaundiced eye of Martinez’s office frenemy, Conchita (Martha Claudia Moreno). Meanwhile, the loner and lifelong bachelor’s life undergoes further upheaval when a neighbor he barely knew dies and a compulsion drives him to collect some of her abandoned belongings, further nudging Martinez out of his apathetic slumber.

When Padilla began working on her script, it was an attempt to understand her father, whose personality she describes as “peculiar,” something she used to struggle with when she was younger. But while she did gain more insight into her dad as she was writing, the project also changed.

“It started with that realization, ‘Oh, now I get it. Now I get why he was behaving the way he was behaving,” Padilla says. “It started like that and then it kind of evolved. I was talking about myself. Everything was kind of mixed up in that.”

What Inspired Lorena Padilla’s Story

A Fulbright scholar who got her MFA in dramatic writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Padilla also spent a year in London, taking a course on art direction in film and supporting herself as a waitress. She would take the city’s red double-decker buses to get around the city and read the free newspapers. It was in one of those that she discovered another of Martinez’s story threads, a small item about a woman whose body was discovered in her apartment.

“It was heartbreaking; reality is always worse than fiction,” Padilla says. “She had been dead for two years and she had been wrapping Christmas presents. What stuck in my head was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot believe that can happen in a big city.’

“One thing led to the other and I said, ‘What had to happen in order for my dad, or Martinez, to change, was to be confronted with mortality.’ And that’s when this woman came back to me.”

Casting an actor to play Martinez presented a challenge. Padilla originally looked at Mexican actors but they all misread the character. They felt sorry for him and his situation and that found its way into their interpretations of him, portraying him as a sweet old man, a far cry from the curmudgeon who existed in Padilla’s screenplay. It was a Chilean friend who suggested Reyes. A Fantastic Woman was not yet out in Mexico, but Padilla was able to watch the trailer for Sebastián Lelio’s film in which Reyes played the much older lover of a transsexual woman. From that tiny slice of his performance, she saw her Martinez.

Padilla sent Reyes her script and met him over a video call, later traveling to Chile to shoot a teaser to make sure he was, in fact, the right actor for the part. Reyes learned of A Fantastic Woman’s Golden Globes nomination for best foreign language film while she was there (it would go on to win the Oscar® in that same category) and feared that he might not want to work with a first-time filmmaker on her independent movie but he remained committed to the project.

The actor and director have something in common that gives both extra insight into the loner that Padilla created. Reyes lived in Paris for a time. Padilla has resided in five countries, and in 10 cities in the past 15 years, including Dallas where is she is a film professor at Southern Methodist University.

“I think being an immigrant, you always have this lonely place inside yourself,” Padilla says. “If you’re lucky, you can go back to your country once in a while, but you don’t belong there and you don’t belong to the new place, either.

“Francisco Reyes and I had a long conversation about that, that’s how we connected. He would say that even though you love a place and you have friends and you are lucky enough to have a house, there is always an emptiness inside you when you’re an immigrant. You’re like more a Mexican abroad or a Chilean abroad. In Mexico, I’m not Mexican enough and in the US, I’m not American enough. It’s like you’re never enough. It’s like you’re just in limbo, in that in between. For us, for Francisco Reyes and me, that was very important.”

Martinez’s Impact on Viewers

A project that began as a way for a daughter to better understand her father turns out to have wider implications. Long before Padilla had an opportunity to show Martinez to an audience, indeed, even before she began assembling her final cut in postproduction, she found that this character she wrote and gave to Reyes to so vividly inhabit was already striking an emotional chord.

“Everyone on the crew, but I mean, everyone, every single person was telling me, ‘My dad is like that,’” Padilla says. “He was like a common experience, because in Mexico, there’s a lot of machismo and it affects everyone. Men are not supposed to express their feelings. So we were all watching our own dads on the camera, and were understanding them and that this was part of our culture, this dynamic our society has.

“(Making the film) was such a cathartic experience; it was such a learning process…I think I understand my dad even better now. I don’t have that weight on my shoulders anymore. It was such an interesting experience that I was very lucky to have.”

Martinez: 7 PM, Fri., April 21, BAMPFA; 3 PM, Sun., April 23, CGV San Francisco. Click here for further information and tickets.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

When Joan Baez was 13 years old, she wrote an essay declaring who she was, prescient words from a precocious teen who would grow up to be a towering figure in American folk music and political activism. A phrase from it worked its way into the title Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle’s documentary that screens at the Festival on Tuesday, Apr. 18. Baez herself has thoughts on that essay.

“I was just thinking of the one thing we didn’t mention, which is the fantasy part, my ‘I’m going to start a peace movement and we’re going to save the world,’ Baez says during a recent video call with O’Connor and Navasky. “It was all very real to me, you know, I have to laugh. On the other hand, that’s the direction I went without ever looking back.

“But just to add, it is a funny combination of this shy, don’t-feel-good-about-myself, less than and, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to save the world.’”

What is Joan Baez I Am a Noise About?

Baez may not have saved the world in the end but not for lack of trying, as expressed through her music and her dedication to the civil rights and antiwar movement. But that is only one facet of I Am a Noise, a rich documentary that is as much about Baez’s complicated family story and her relationships with Bob Dylan and former husband, antiwar activist David Harris, as her career and politics. It is also as much about the present as the past as the filmmakers capture her during her 2018/19 “Fare Thee Well” tour. The 82-year-old artist is never less than frank and the filmmakers take a similar approach. This is not hagiography.

“I wanted to leave an honest legacy and you can’t do that if you pretty it all up,” Baez say. “So, it’s not pretty. I just held my nose and jumped in. I said, ‘Okay, here are the keys to the storage unit… What a Pandora’s box I let them open up and they just ran with it.”

O’Connor and Navasky are Emmy-winning filmmakers who frequently collaborate. The pair previously worked with O’Boyle (also the editor of I Am a Noise) when she co-produced and edited their 2015 PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Trans. The trio’s connection to Baez begins with O’Connor, who first met Baez in the mid-‘80s on a documentary project , the two women becoming friends. Filming for the documentary began several years before the Fare Thee Well tour but it was the idea of a final tour that kicked the project in high gear.

“There wasn’t a commitment to a last tour but the idea of a potential last tour gave Miri, Maeve, and I an opening to think about the value in documenting that with Joan. It would give us a window into somebody who had been famous for 60-plus years coming to the end of a kind of amazing career.

“There was no guarantee that would end, which made it even more interesting,” she adds. “The film itself could be a process of discovery. It was an opening and we knew it would be a narrative anchor. Over the course of time, the film shifted dramatically. As we all got in deeper and deeper and as Joan entrusted us, particularly with the family archive, the film really took a huge turn.”

O’Connor observes that Baez’s parents, Albert and Joan, kept everything. Albert, a physicist, made home movies of his family that included Baez’s older sister Pauline and younger sister, singer-songwriter Mimi Fariña. The family were also letter writers, Joan sending long written or recorded missives to her parents from the road. For the filmmakers, the trove was a gold mine.

“It cracked open the film in a lot of ways but particularly in terms of how to represent the past,” O’Connor says. “We had a chance to make the past come alive through the original source material that could make this a very different kind of biography. It would feel more like time travel than biography, so that we could see how Joan experienced things at the time rather than from the remove of 60 years later. There’s an immediacy and immersiveness that we wanted to capture in every strand of the film.”

How did the Filmmakers Find Balance?

One of the challenges of the film from the outset was how to balance the documentary’s many aspects of Baez’s family life, activism, and music career. But just in the way that she conducted her life, the filmmakers discovered some of the work was already done for them.

“The balancing of politics and music was almost natural to her from the time she was a teenager,” Navasky says. “In her letters, there is music and politics and family, they’re all interwoven. In some ways, following the course of her original primary material guided us.

“She’s had an incredibly packed life,” she adds. “We were constantly struggling with we could and couldn’t leave out.”

Baez has a son, Gabriel Harris, and a granddaughter, Jasmine, and she is an aunt to her sister Pauline’s children but she is the last of her birth family. The filmmakers were able to get footage of Baez’s mom before she died at 100 in 2013 and Pauline before she passed away at 77 in 2016. (Albert died in 2007 at 94, and Mimi in 2001 at 56.) But for the most part, it is Joan observing and speaking for her family.

“I hope I did them justice as well as I could,” Baez says. “I obviously couldn’t have made the film until they were all gone. For the Baez line, this is the end of the road. So, that, too, is part of leaving a legacy, of trying to leave an honest legacy. My family was nothing, if not honest, each in his own way.”

Joan Baez I Am a Noise is stuffed with music, from the beginning of Baez’s career when she was a teenager sensation all the way through the decades to that last tour of a venerated veteran performer. All that music will pour out of the Castro Theatre’s speakers during the film’s SFFILM Festival screening where O’Connor and Navasky and longtime Woodside resident Baez will be in attendance along with Baez’s friends and family.

“It’s different, seeing it on a big screen, because if you’re going to be overwhelmed, that’s the way to do it,” Baez says. “So each time I see it, there are different reactions and sometimes they’re very deep. They’re very sad. Sometimes I’m just delighted at the silly parts of it. I mean, does it bring up stuff? Absolutely. Absolutely, each time. Some of it I really don’t want to think about and I have to. With other parts of it, it’s okay.”

Joan Baez I Am a Noise: 5 PM. Tues., April 18, Castro Theatre. Click here for further information and tickets.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

Woo Ming Jin embraced the chance to make Stone Turtle, his eerie drama that won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2022 Locarno International Film Festival and makes its California premiere at the SFFILM Festival on Saturday, April 15. It was the middle of COVID, a time of punishing lockdowns in Malaysia. In those bleak times, the filmmaker’s career seemed at a standstill.

“During COVID, there was a feeling that I wasn’t sure whether I would make another film,” Woo says during a video call. “I had the opportunity to make this film very quickly, and I thought, ‘You know, I’ll just do something that I truly want to do without any sort of expectations from anyone else.’”

What is Stone Turtle about?

The title, Stone Turtle, refers to a Malaysian folk tale, a kind of romantic tragedy involving a turtle couple who become separated, leaving the female turtle to search ever after for her missing mate. The lore comes alive in beguiling animated sequences, directed by Paul Raymond Williams (assistant animator on Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle).

The animation is woven into the story of Zahara (Asmara Abigail), an Indonesian migrant living on the titular island off the east coast of Malaysia. The place is sparsely populated, the province of women, all outsiders like Zahara and her 10-year-old niece Nika (Samara Kenzo). Zahara’s biggest concern besides selling enough turtle eggs to sustain her small family is getting Nika into school, a high hurdle when only Malaysian citizens are allowed to register for public education. But those challenges are soon supplanted by one far more dangerous. An interloper arrives on the island, Samad (Bront Palarae). He claims to be researching leatherback turtles but Zahara recognizes him and doubts his intentions are so benign.

As Zahara and Samad face off, violence and mystery envelop their conflict, embroidered with elements of ghost stories and revenge, and shot through with alternative timelines that have led some critics to compare Stone Turtle to the classic Harold Ramis comedy Groundhog Day.

“In terms of Groundhog Day, I suppose it’s the seminal sort of time loops movie,” Woo says. “When we started making this, and I was discussing it with my producer, we thought it could be a day repeating itself but it could also be parallel realities, so like one version after the other.

“So time loops weren’t strictly on my mind as we were making it, but as we edited and the film became more crystallized, it became obvious it was a time loop. So, unconsciously absolutely, Groundhog Day, or I really enjoyed that Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow. Maybe I was thinking more of that in terms of this looping element.”

Woo was a boy when he first visited the island that became his mythical Turtle Island. He spent holidays and vacations there fishing, starting when he was in high school. Then a few years ago, he spent a few months there while working on a project and got to know some of the villagers who eked a subsistence living turtle poaching. With turtle populations declining, it is a practice that could be disastrous but conservation groups in the region have become the villagers’ customers, ensuring the safety of the eggs.

“It was sort of like a symbiotic relationship,” Woo says. “I found it really fascinating. That was the catalyst for the film, and I had really wanted to make a film on the east coast. That region where we shot is really well known for that folklore, the legend of the stone turtle. It was really my desire to basically tell a contemporary version of this folklore and I was inspired by some of the people I’ve encountered in the region.”

To the folk tale and the turtle poaching, Woo added in elements highlighting the situation for migrants in a society where they have few rights or opportunities and also observes the perilous status of women in patriarchal society. At the same time, Woo didn’t want to make a heavy-handed social issues movie.

“In terms of the genre, I just wanted to have some fun with it,” he says. “Maybe it was a reaction to COVID. We were all stuck and feeling miserable and I thought, ‘This is an opportunity. I’m just going to do something fun.’ I say ‘fun’ in quotation marks as cinematic.

“I wanted to do something that’s important but also play with genres. And I’d always wanted to mix animation with live action, and then came the idea of looping time, because this place where we shot is pretty magical.”

Woo wrote Samad with Palarae—whom the director describes as a kind of Malaysian Michael Shannon—in mind. The men are friends, and Palarae appeared in Woo’s film Zombitopia (2021), as well as one Woo produced, Barbarian Invasion (2021). The actor occasionally works in Indonesia and suggested Abigail, with whom he’s appeared in several films, to Woo.

“I had seen a few films Asmara’s been, and she was really brilliant,” Woo says. “She had this sort of natural instinct about her. Even though she’s professionally trained, she has this feral sort of instinct about her that I really liked. We cast her and immediately knew she had chemistry with Bront, because that was important. Even though they were playing good/bad person, they still needed to have some sort of on-screen chemistry.

“And so, we worked together on this character, Zahara. There was a lot of input that Asmara gave that I really welcomed because, for me, I’m writing the lines but I always enjoy it if the actors take the role and sort of sort of carve it to make it their own.”

Woo Ming Jin’s San Francisco Homecoming

When it comes to Stone Turtle’s appearance at the festival, the film represents a kind of homecoming for Woo. The very first film festival Woo attended was what was then the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005, when his first feature Monday Morning Glory screened as part of a spotlight on Malaysian cinema programmed by Roger Garcia. Four years later, another of his features, Woman on Fire Looks for Water, delighted Festival audiences. Woo can’t attend in person this year but he is thrilled that Stone Turtle will represent him at the Festival.

“I’m very happy to screen it in San Francisco,” he says, “There is something special about screening to an audience in San Francisco.”

Stone Turtle: 9 PM, Sat., April 15. CGV San Francisco. Click here for further information and tickets.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.