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The 2022 Sundance Film Festival makes its return on January 20 and two projects supported directly by SFFILM Makers are in the lineup! We are thrilled that SFFILM Invest continues to fund projects that go on to Sundance and more, and beyond proud to see Reid Davenport’s project I Didn’t See You There from our inaugural SFFILM Rainin Filmmakers With Disability grant as both part of the slate and the winner of Sundance’s US Documentary Directing Award. We hope you get a chance to check out these inspiring projects at the festival this year and as they hit streaming sites in the future. Congratulations to all the films and filmmakers making their Sundance debut!

Here are our SFFILM Makers-supported films:

A Love Song
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(USA) Max Walker-Silverman, director; Dan Janvey, Jesse Hope, Max Walker-Silverman, producers
— SFFILM Invest

After unhitching her camper at a lakeside in the mountains, Faye finds her rhythm cooking meals, retrieving crawfish from a trap, and scanning her old box radio for a station. She looks expectantly at the approach of a car or the mailman, explaining to neighboring campers that she’s waiting for a childhood sweetheart she hasn’t seen in decades. When he does arrive, Lito and Faye, both widowed, spend an evening reminiscing about their lives, losses, and loneliness.

A whimsical romance, Max Walker-Silverman’s captivating debut feature shows an “American West” full of quietude, compassion, and introspection. It’s both naturalistic and vaguely surreal, blurring our sense of time and beauty, loss and vivacity, the grandiose natural world and intimate humanism. Career performances from Dale Dickey and Wes Studi bring an inescapable presence to people we don’t often see portrayed on film. They are gentle outliers possessed of resilience and existential spirit, seeking to process something elusive: a feeling of love for what’s no longer there. Like Faye turning her radio dial, they listen hopefully for the faint trace of a song.

Mija
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(USA) Isabel Castro, director; Tabs Breese, Isabel Castro, Yesenia Tlahuel, producers
— SFFILM Catapult Documentary Fellowship

Doris Muñoz desperately longed for better representation in the indie music she listened to as a teenager. At 23, she took matters into her own hands and began a career in music talent management, passionately advocating for rising Latinx artists. Her swift success transformed her into a pillar for a community of first- and second-generation Americans seeking collective acceptance and healing through song. When Doris receives news that forces her to reconsider working in music, she finds Jacks Haupt, an auspicious young singer eager to break out of her parent’s home in Dallas, Texas. Beyond the sweet moments of joy, glitter, and hope, Doris and Jacks share the ever-present guilt of being the first American-born members of their undocumented families. For them, the pressure of financial success is heightened because it facilitates green card processing and family reunification.

Mija is an immensely emotional and intimate portrait honoring the resilience of immigrants and their children. Director Isabel Castro’s debut feature constructs an ethereal love letter to their indomitable spirit in the face of constant instability, and heartily affirms that all humans have the right to shine and to dream.

I Didn’t See You There
US Documentary Competition
Winner of the U.S. Documentary Directing Award
(USA) Reid Davenport, director; Keith Wilson, producer
—SFFILM Rainin Filmmakers With Disability Grantee

As a visibly disabled person, filmmaker Reid Davenport is often either the subject of an unwanted gaze — gawked at by strangers — or paradoxically rendered invisible, ignored or dismissed by society. The arrival of a circus tent just outside his apartment prompts him to consider the history and legacy of the freak show, in which individuals who were deemed atypical were put on display for the amusement and shock of a paying public. Contemplating how this relates to his own filmmaking practice, which explicitly foregrounds disability, Davenport sets out to make a film about how he sees the world from his wheelchair without having to be seen himself.

Informed by his position in space, lower to the ground, Davenport captures indelible images, often abstracted into shapes and patterns separate from their meaning. But the circus tent looms in the background, and reality regularly intrudes, from unsolicited offers of help to careless blocking of access ramps. Personal and unflinching, I Didn’t See You There forces the viewer to confront the spectacle and invisibility of disability.

Two screenwriters, Christopher Au and Jonathan Sethna, have been selected to receive funding through SFFILM’s Sloan Stories of Science Development Fund, which is part of a suite of screenwriting programs that cultivate narrative feature films exploring scientific or technological themes and characters. This artist support program was developed in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities, and focuses on the adaptation of important scientific and technological discoveries to the big screen.

The Sloan Stories of Science Development Fund supports the screen adaptation of specific scientific articles and discoveries, catalogued in the Sloan Stories of Science Sourcebook as inspiration for filmmakers. These winners each receive a $10,000 cash grant and access to a two-day filmmaker retreat designed to provide guidance and mentorship from scientists, science and tech journalists, and film industry professionals to help them shape their storytelling vision; and from producers and legal advisors to help navigate adapting true stories to the screen.

Christopher Au, writer

Project

Airborne
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a scrappy group of university research scientists take on skeptics, conservative politics, and the World Health Organization to uncover a startling truth about the nature of coronavirus transmission.

Biography
Christopher Au wrote, directed and produced the comedy series Bulge Bracket on Amazon Prime, which was featured on the front page of Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance, and was selected for the Gotham Week Project Market (formerly IFP) and SeriesFest, among others. His feature film producing credits include the neo-noir mystery Drive All Night, which debuted at Cinequest in 2021. As a commercial producer and director, Au won an Emmy for his work with Fox Sports Net. He was previously Head of Business Development for the iBrands group at AOL (now Verizon Media), overseeing strategic partnerships for its portfolio of media brands including TechCrunch, Engadget, Autoblog, Moviefone, MAKERS and others. He serves on the Board of Directors at the Center for Asian American Media, and holds film and business degrees from Yale and NYU respectively.

Jonathan Sethna, writer

Project

Fishes & Phages
When an antibiotic resistant Vibrio Bacteria outbreak threatens to wipe out local fish and oyster farms, the conservative fisherfolk of Greenport are forced to call in Dr. Manning Cesario, a flamboyant bacteriophage expert from the Philippines, for help. Culture clashes and science skepticism are tackled head on as Manning and his local liaison Jaxi, the town pariah, deal with more than just the marine contagion.

Biography
Jonathan Sethna writes contemporary narratives about the promise and peril of cutting-edge technologies and radical ideas. He lives in New York, but is proudly inspired, informed, and guided by the values and spirit of the Bay Area and the Jedi Order.

2020 SFFILM FilmHouse residents. Author Patricia Lee in the bottom square.

On Being Like Water by Patricia Lee

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it.” — Bruce Lee

I am a filmmaker and current SFFILM FilmHouse resident.
Three years ago I could not have fathomed that sentence applying to me. I had never written a screenplay or worked on any movies. I had only imagined what it might be like to have the energy to write. The luxury of endeavoring into a creative and personal project seemed elusively out of reach, but three years later here I am. Writing a blog post for SFFILM on becoming a filmmaker.

I hope sharing my story of how I began a daunting midlife transition to writing and filmmaking might be helpful to anyone else considering a major change or creative journey. I know in beginning my own transition, I sought out stories of others who had made huge changes in their lives in order to build up the courage to attempt it for myself.
Three years ago I was working in a full-time management role at an architecture and engineering consultancy that I had been with for over twelve years. It was a role that had come to define me in friendships, leisure reading, and the comfort of a regular paycheck. I worked with colleagues that I cared for and respected. Yet, in my mid-thirties, for more reasons than one, I knew it was time to step back and give myself some space to imagine new possibilities. I was expecting a second child and hoped to find something that was a bit more flexible and community oriented. I had little nagging thoughts that this “something else” could be creative work.

When I finally decided to move to a part-time role and take that extra time to sit down and write, I found I didn’t know where to begin. There was no deluge of creativity, no flood of ideas. I had over time been pounded and compressed into a dense, rocklike hardpan. I had become immovable earth — very good at enduring the daily weather of running a small business, but cracking under the pressure of the vast blank page.

The disappointment of not accomplishing enough each day combined with the self applied pressure of having to write something “good” stifled any trickle of creativity hidden within. Panic attacks soon followed. Why had I left a perfectly fine job only to be defeated by a blank computer screen alone in a tiny room? All of those amazing ideas I had before I sat down to write now seemed to lack any substance.

There was work I had to do internally to excavate the hardpan and make room for change before I would be able to create anything.

Finding the Well
It became clear that I needed help if I was going to find any wells of creativity that might be hiding within. I was not going to break down these learned habits or my internalized self critic sitting alone in a room. I began speaking with a therapist to manage the debilitating panic attacks (shout out to my husband for helping me with this — can go on a whole other aside on the importance of proper mental health support!) and enrolled in an online children’s book illustration and writing class. My god how I embraced the structure of that class!

There were deadlines, expectations, assignments! All the familiar approaches of how I had been programmed to get things done in school and at work for the past thirty plus years helped me move past the existential dread of the blank page. I had a little plot of desk I could call my own and made it an inviting place to sit and think. The writing started to trickle out, a little zine about sentient protozoa, the plucky adventures of a young seal, a teenage magician constantly getting into hi-jinx with her guinea pig sidekick. I was writing. By no means were these stories great, or even good, but that was not the point. The dread of the blank page started to turn into the excitement of what idea may (or may not) present itself that day.

Everyday was an exploration into the unknown. For me it required more of the blind faith of dowsing rather than the scientific rigor of a geotechnical survey in search of water. One day might be a day of reflection, another day might be reading and research, and another might involve actually writing (and then likely rewriting it all later). There were no KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure or daily goals to meet. I had to learn to follow the story and the characters and the ideas. I had to be okay with not knowing exactly where it was all leading. When I started to loosen up without overthinking or criticizing myself before I even began, the ideas finally started to flow. I had found an entry point into the creative waters flowing below the dry earth and I was finally pumping some of it up and into my writing.

The online children’s book class also made me realize the value of community in the creative process. I found that my fellow classmates offered the encouragement, critiques and inspiration that I lacked sitting alone in a room. It was fascinating to see how different everyone’s style and approaches were to writing when given the same assignment. It helped remove some of the doubt I had on whether I had any stories important enough or interesting enough or novel enough. Being in community with others made it ever more clear that we each had our own stories to tell and each of our voices were unique.

This exploration took energy. I would end the day exhausted, having used every brain cell I had to imagine a world and story and characters. I was spent in ways that an office job had never taxed me before. I realized I could only sit and write for about four hours at a time if I was to be a functional human and mother to my children afterwards. I also found that while some learned habits had to go to make way for the creative process, other skills I had gained in the decades I spent working in an office were invaluable to the process.

Through my time doing corporate office work I gained a hard earned confidence I did not have when I started off in the professional world. I began my office job barely able to send a benign professional email without being wracked with doubt on if I had used the right words. Should I use “Best” or “Sincerely”? Start with a personal greeting or get straight to the point? Over twelve years I had grown from an anxiety prone entry level assistant into a manager who could go toe-to-toe with chauvinist mansplainers and ruthless real estate tycoons. I had learned focus, confidence, and the importance of a good team. I had grown accustomed to taking two steps forward and one step back in working towards long term goals. This perspective gave me the courage and energy to keep going even when I would end a day disheartened about my projects or when it came time to scrap everything that I had written or when I decided to pull together an application to a film residency — cue SFFILM FilmHouse!

A Confluence of Streams
When I got word that I was a finalist for the SFFILM FilmHouse Residency I was in shock. Could they truly be so open-minded to find a story about an elderly, first generation immigrant, divorcee worth supporting? By a first time screenplay writer no less?

Just before the pandemic hit us in 2020 I had begun meeting a few folks in the film industry who had been incredibly supportive and generous with their time. They offered connections to other filmmakers, advice on process, and generally were excited to meet someone else also trying to make films. One particularly generous and experienced mentor put together a rough budget for my film and introduced me to the person who is now producing my short film, “Hannah’s Biography.”

I was amazed by the welcoming community of filmmakers I was meeting in the Bay Area. Many of them suggested I look to SFFILM as an organization with great programs supporting new filmmakers. Upon reviewing the different programs at SFFILM I decided to apply to the residency program. At minimum, I thought, the structure of an application deadline would be motivation to fine tune the script for my short film. The application process turned out to be much more than that. It was the first time I was asked to write about myself as a filmmaker, my artistic process and my motivations. The application process itself was a journey and required a rigor that I had not placed on this new craft before. It helped me distill the story for “Hannah’s Biography” and my reasons for telling it.

Now about seven months into the residency I can only say how grateful I am to be a part of this cohort. I have been able to form friendships (even through Zoom meetings) and expand the community of amazing artists and mentors in my orbit. The inspiration continues, the projects are fascinating and to see how others approach their craft and their stories is eye opening. I like to call it my own independent study film school. The access to industry members and resources has been invaluable and gave me the boost I needed to get my project ready for production. I know I am still very early on in this journey and have much more to learn and experience, but for now the waters are flowing towards making this film, strengthened by the overflowing reservoir of SFFILM.

I am a filmmaker and current SFFILM FilmHouse resident. If I can say it, maybe someday you can too.

The FilmHouse Residency application deadline is Friday, August 13.