Get to know the 2019 SFFILM Documentary Film Fund finalists

The SFFILM Makers team has selected 11 outstanding projects to be in the running for this year’s Documentary Film Fund grants, which support feature-length docs in the post-production phase. A total of $125,000 will be distributed to the winning projects in this cycle, the results of which will be announced in late August.

Find out more about this and other filmmaking grant opportunities at sffilm.org/makers.

The Doc Film Fund has supported a wide range of important non-fiction films in recent years, including Ljubo Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s Honeyland, which won a record number of juried awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival; RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which won a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at Sundance 2018; Peter Nicks’s The Force, which won the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for documentary and SFFILM Festival’s Bay Area Documentary Award; Peter Bratt’s Dolores, which won the 2017 SFFILM Festival Audience Award for Documentary Feature following its Sundance premiere; and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which won Sundance’s Directing Award for documentary and was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; among many others.

Since its launch in 2011, the SFFILM Documentary Film Fund has distributed $750,000 to advance new work by filmmakers nationwide. The 2019 Documentary Film Fund is supported by the Jenerosity Foundation.

2019 DOCUMENTARY FILM FUND FINALISTS *

Apolonia, Apolonia
Lea Glob, director; Sidsel Lønvig Siersted, producer
Underground rebels meet money and high society in the art scenes of the world — with bohemian Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen, New York, and Los Angeles as backdrops, this coming-of-age story portrays a French-Polish female painter’s personal and artistic development, from the maturing of a talent to the leap into the commercial art scene.

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Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson, co-directors/producers
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project pushes the boundaries of biographical documentary film to reveal the enduring influence of one of America’s greatest living artists and social commentators. Combining parallel cinematic story editing with visually innovative treatments of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, along with intimate vérité, rich archival footage, and her own captivating contemporary performances, this film recounts the story of the artist and her works of resistance through the tumultuous historical periods in which she lived — from the Civil Rights Movement, to the Black Arts Movement, to present-day Black Lives Matter.

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The Golden Thread
Nishtha Jain, director/producer
Outside Kolkata, several jute mills crank on, virtually unchanged since the industrial revolution. Powered by steam and sweat, work is a dance to the dictates of profit and century-old machines. Putting such work into conversation with the creative labor of filmmaking, The Golden Thread puts the analogue and digital, the early industrial and post-industrial, into experimental recombination.

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Idaho
Nicolas Molina, director; Josephine Schroeder, producer
Joaquín Agüil and Victor Jara, both Patagonian gauchos, are hired as sheep farmers at a ranch in the west of the United States, to look after thousands of sheep. Accompanied only by their horses and dogs, they have a mission: take a thousand sheep up into the mountains for the summer and come back with all of them at the end of the season. They will herd their flocks, protecting them from coyotes and pumas, in extreme conditions, in a foreign land that they think they can handle.

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Light Darkness Light
Landon Van Soest, director/producer; Paul Trillo, Tom Yellin, Jo Budzilowicz, producers
Ian Nichols, a 76-year-old blind Anglican priest, becomes one of the first people in the world to attempt sight with an implanted bionic eye. Through Ian’s extraordinary odyssey, the film explores timely, provocative questions about perception, memory, faith, technology, and the nature of human reality that have broad implications for us all.

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Mayor
David Osit, director/producer
Mayor follows a charismatic leader’s quest to build the city of the future in a land paralyzed by its past.

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The Neutral Ground
CJ Hunt, director; Darcy McKinnon, producer
The Neutral Ground is a feature-length documentary about New Orleans’ fight over monuments and America’s centuries-long relationship with the Lost Cause. The film follows writer and comedian CJ Hunt as he documents the struggle to remove and the struggle to preserve New Orleans’ confederate monuments. After witnessing this fight in his adopted city, Hunt then explores how we understand a collective history as a nation with a contentious past.

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Tomboy
Lindsay Lindenbaum, director; Eleanor Emptage, producer
Tomboy shines a light on a hidden generation of women drummers, in a field that was once the exclusive domain of men. The dynamic narratives of these trailblazing women interweave, launching a timely dialogue on gender and artistry that extends far beyond the musical sphere.

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Xa-lyu K’ya (World of Mountaintops)
Carlo Nasisse, Geronimo Barrera, directors/producers
What begins as a story of man’s relationship to the land quickly evolves into something much more, as mist, jaguars, carbon, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and dreams announce themselves as crucial actors in an environmental and epistemic conflict. In Xa-lyu K’ya (World of Mountains), the Oaxacan Chatino people, international corporations, and environmental NGOs become entangled in the debate over the fate of Mexico’s rapidly disappearing cloud forest.

* Due to the sensitive nature of their subjects, two finalists elected to omit their project details from this announcement.

Get to know the Spring 2019 SFFILM Rainin Grant finalists

SFFILM and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation have announced the finalists for the Spring 2019 SFFILM Rainin Grant, the flagship artist development program offered by SFFILM Makers. Twelve filmmaking teams are in the running to receive funding for their narrative projects in various stages of production.

SFFILM Rainin Grant program is the largest granting body for independent narrative feature films in the US, and supports films that address social justice issues — the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges — in a positive and meaningful way through plot, character, theme, or setting and benefit the Bay Area filmmaking community in a professional and economic capacity.

Awards are made to multiple projects twice a year, in the spring and fall, for screenwriting, development, and post-production. In addition to a cash grant of up to $50,000, recipients are offered a 2-month residency at FilmHouse and benefit from SFFILM’s comprehensive and dynamic artist development programs.

The program is open to filmmakers from anywhere in the world who can commit to spending time developing the film in San Francisco. The fall 2019 grant cycle is now accepting applications; learn more at sffilm.org/makers.

SPRING 2019 SFFILM RAININ GRANT FINALISTS

Amal
Waleed Alqahtani, writer/director/producer; Gina Hackett, writer; Lauren López de Victoria, producer — screenwriting
Spitfire Amal returns home to Saudi Arabia insisting it’s temporary, but she’s shocked to find her once wealthy family coming apart at the seams. As her younger sister’s wedding looms, Amal stays to search for their estranged father for support in an effort to keep the pieces together.

Flash Before the Bang
Jevon Whetter, writer/director; Delbert Whetter, producer — development
In this funny, heartwarming and inspiring true-life tale, an underdog, ragtag Deaf track team and their checked-out coach must overcome their school’s indifference, outsiders’ low expectations, and their own self-doubts to make it to the State Track & Field Championship.

Kayla & Eddie En Français
Iyabo Boyd, writer/director; Joseph Boyd, contributing writer — screenwriting
Straight-laced hotel consultant Kayla Williams lands in Paris for work when her rambunctious, recovering addict father Eddie shows up unannounced, hoping to prove himself as a supportive father. Though suspicious of his sudden presence, Kayla cautiously lets Eddie back into her life as they navigate the local French African hipster scene and Paris’ Narcotics Anonymous community, unpacking years of strife and facing what it means to be a family in recovery.

A Lo-Fi Blues
Ed Ntiri, writer/director; Winnie Wong, Bryan Lindsay, Jason Garcia, producers — screenwriting
An aging blues musician, who believes that his late wife is trapped inside of a song, develops a unique friendship with his nephew, an aspiring lo-fi hip-hop producer in Oakland, California.

NSFW
Brittney Shepherd, writer/director, producer; Katherine Craft, writer; Sinclair Swan, producer — screenwriting
When a newly engaged woman’s family discovers that her fiancé is a BDSM adult performer, the couple struggles to maintain their relationships, their jobs, and their lives in the ensuing fallout.

7 Slaves
Alexandre Moratto, writer/director/producer; Thayná Mantesso, writer; Ramin Bahrani, producer— screenwriting
To provide a better life for his family, 17-year-old Mateus accepts a job as a manual laborer in São Paulo. When his employers force him to work for no pay and threaten his family, he becomes trapped in the violent world of modern-day slavery. As his enslavers notice his leadership capabilities, he is forced to decide between working for the very people who have enslaved him or risk his family’s safety.

Shit & Champagne
D’Arcy Drollinger, writer/director/producer; Brian Benson, Michelle Moretta, producers — post-production
Shit & Champagne is a high-octane, high-camp, slapstick send-up of the iconic exploitation films of the 1970s. Underneath the ridiculous comedy narrative of a stripper with a heart of gold who is forced to take the law into her own hands, is a story where outcasts find each other, where heart does emerge, and where friendship is sacred.

So Unfair
Lori Webster, director; Asia Nichols, writer; Chao Thao, Twilla Amin Tanyi, and Lauren Nichols, producers — screenwriting
Subverting age-old fairytales, this five-part anthology film explores Black womanhood through a forest-haired girl confined to a terrarium, a magic-pesticide cook with dreams of being her own boss, a musical sawist obsessed with severed limbs, a house sitter haunted by dancing fetuses, and a skin-bleaching actor stuck in a live-studio limbo.

Taminex
Anya Meksin, writer/director; Kristie Lutz, Chanelle Elaine, and Veronica Nickel, producers — screenwriting
When a deadly pandemic plunges the city into an anti-immigrant panic, a young Iranian woman must go outside official channels and venture into the underbelly of a corrupt society to procure the only drug that can save her boyfriend’s life and her own — Taminex. Taking place over one breathless night in a city on the verge of collapse, Taminex is a harrowing journey of survival that exposes the sickness of xenophobia infecting our society.

Teddy, Out of Tune
Daniel Freeman, writer/director; Drew Connick, writer — screenwriting
A nomadic street musician is followed by a documentarian while traveling through the western United States with his truck, his new piano, and a Tupperware container holding his mother’s ashes. With these objects, he embarks on an emotional journey to Canada that is repeatedly derailed by mental illness and an inability to cope with past trauma.

Wit Gesigte (Pale Faces)
Chantel Clark, writer/director — screenwriting
In the late 18th century, in the Dutch Cape Colony, the brilliant and rebellious daughter of an exiled Imam travels to the remote estate of a mysterious Dutch Commissioner to plead with him on behalf of her persecuted community. There, the dark secrets underlying the power of the colonial occupation begin to unravel.

Zana
Antoneta Kastrati, writer/director; Casey Cooper Johnson, writer/producer; Sevdije Katrati, Brett Walker, and Miguel Govea, producers — post-production
A Kosovar woman is sent to witch doctors to cure her infertility, but when she becomes pregnant, her wartime past comes back to torment her.

Meet the finalists for the Spring 2019 SFFILM Westridge Grants

SFFILM and the Westridge Foundation have announced the finalists for the Spring 2019 SFFILM Westridge Grant, the newest narrative program offered by SFFILM Makers. The winning projects from this group of finalists will be announced in May.
 
The SFFILM Westridge program is designed specifically to support the screenwriting and development phases of narrative feature projects whose stories focus on the significant social issues and questions of our time. Providing support at these critical early stages protects filmmakers’ creative processes, and allows them to concentrate on properly crafting their stories and building the right strategy and infrastructure to guide them through financing and production.

The SFFILM Westridge Grant is open to US-based filmmakers whose stories take place primarily in the United States. The application period for the Fall 2019 round opens in late May, with a final deadline in late July. Find out more at sffilm.org/makers.

In addition to the cash grants, recipients receive various benefits through SFFILM’s comprehensive and dynamic artist development program, as well as support and feedback from SFFILM and Westridge Foundation staff.

SPRING 2019 SFFILM WESTRIDGE GRANT FINALISTS

After Birth
Ben Nabors, writer/director; Carly Hugo, producer; Brendan McHugh, producer; Matt Parker, producer — development/packaging
Estranged college friends gather in an isolated mansion to introduce their babies and reconnect after a year apart. Amidst veiled pleasantries and slow-burning threats, terrible secrets surface that put their friendships and their children at risk.

The American Society of Magical Negroes
Kobi Libii, writer/director — screenwriting 
Omar, a young black man, is recruited into an undercover society of Magical Negroes who secretly conjure literal magic to make white people’s lives easier. Although initially enamored with his new powers, once he realizes they are using supernatural means to do the very thing he’s felt obligated to do his whole life, he attempts to buck the system and put his own dreams first.

Beware the Boomerang 
Justin Luis Denis, writer/director — screenwriting 
Clay Stuart, a wealthy Black grad-school-dropout-turned-aspiring-public-intellectual, spends his days researching the origins of “The Hintahood Fresh Age,” a revolutionary cultural movement that took place in the notorious neighborhood of his mother’s birth. But when his sole resource is destroyed, he must venture back to its source, uncovering a history far more mystifying and personal than he ever imagined.

Coyote Boys
Haley Anderson, writer/director/producer — screenwriting 
Homeless and living on the streets of New Orleans, Trey hangs on a promise that his estranged, graffiti-writer brother, Marcus, will come to claim him. After Trey learns of Marcus’s passing on the website Squat the Planet, he meets Luke, a train hopping crust punk who he has seen in a pictures with his brother, an apparent friend. With nothing to lose and the possibility of retracing Marcus’s impossible paths, Trey joins Luke and his family of runaways, artists, and activists on illegal train rides that take him deep into a world off the grid. 

Dry Summer
Lakshmi Simhan, writer/director — screenwriting 
Leela is the only child of an unorthodox comp lit professor and a poet in the throes of writer's block. She's 17, Indian, and a recent transplant to the ranch country of the Columbia River Gorge. It's the summer before college and she falls in with a group of Ukrainian teenagers. As her parent’s marriage slowly dissolves, she's caught up in a world of guns, religion, and mounting acts of petty violence. 

El Otro Lado (The Other Side)
Barbara Cigarroa, writer/director; Julie O’Leary and Animal Kingdom, producers— screenwriting 
Set in Brownsville, Texas, during the child migration crisis, El Otro Lado (The Other Side) centers on Lucy, a low-income Mexican American teen, who is forced to confront her own need for escape when her father decides to sponsor two undocumented minors for money. 

The End of Guilt
Ian Olds, writer/director; Paul Felten, writer — screenwriting 
An ambitious young journalist goes undercover to expose a provocative online therapist and libertarian “thought leader,” only to find herself trapped in the increasingly dangerous web of his family and followers.

Fight
Musa Syeed, writer/director — screenwriting 
In the American Rust Belt, two young boxers — one Arab-American and one African-American — train for their first professional bout. As their lives collide in a makeshift ring in a church rec hall in Ohio, the fight takes a fateful turn that alters the lives of both men, their families, and their communities.

Leche 
Gabriella Moses, writer/director; Marttise Hill, Julius Pryor, Shruti Ganguly, producers — development/packaging 
Nina is a ten-year old Dominican American girl who believes she can perform miracles after resurrecting an albino deer. She discovers that what sets her apart may be more of a blessing than a curse in this magical realism coming-of-age story. 

Nobody Nothing Nowhere
Rachel Wolther and Alex Fischer, co-writers/co-directors; Josh Penn, Michael Gottwald, producers — development/packaging 
Ruth is one of the non-people: human-looking beings designed and trained for the sole purpose of filling in a realistic world for a bland guy named Dave, the only person to actually exist on Earth. Tired of serving as an extra in someone else’s life, she has the audacity to demand a life of her own.

Queen of Wands
Deborah S Esquenazi, writer/director — screenwriting 
In this gay phantasmagoric coming-of-age story set in 1989 amidst a looming hurricane in the Southern Gulf, Violet, a Cuban American teen, struggles with her sexuality, as her uncle, a famous designer, is rapidly deteriorating—mind and body—from the AIDS virus. Before his death he leaves Violet a grim message about the world that will change her destiny.

Sunshowers
Joosje Duk, writer/director; Nicole Quintero Ochoa, producer — screenwriting 
In Hatterville, a whimsical town where it rains all year, residents forcefully focus on positivity and use bright umbrellas to forget the grayness of their existence. When gifted teenage artist Sea Wade wins the honorable challenge to design Hatterville’s newest umbrella, she suddenly loses her ability to see color, making it seemingly impossible to complete her task. Through the eyes of Sea, Sunshowers tackles mental health issues in a surreal, colorful setting.

Meet the Winner of SFFILM’s 2019 New American Fellowship

One of SFFILM Makers’ newest and most exciting support programs has chosen a winner, in what was an extremely tight race among an amazingly strong group of finalists. Filmmaker Siyi Chen, who splits her time between the US and her native China, has been selected to receive the $25,000 grant and FilmHouse residency in support of her current documentary work, including My Grandma’s a Dancer (in development) and People’s Hospital (in post-production).

The first of its kind in the US film industry, the New American Fellowship is made possible thanks to SFFILM’s collaboration with the Flora Family Foundation and is open to independent directors or producers who have recently moved to the United States. Designed to amplify the voices of international filmmakers and to champion their work in the US, the New American Fellowship seeks to support films by new American artists, ultimately providing meaningful and challenging experiences to public audiences.

The panelists who reviewed the applicants’ submissions are Serge Bakalian, Founding Executive Director at Arab Film and Media Institute; Claudia Escobar, filmmaker and KQED contributor; Lauren Kushner, SFFILM Senior Manager of Artist Development; Abhi Singh, Member, Board of Directors at Flora Family Foundation; and Jenny Slattery, SFFILM Associate Director of Foundations and Artist Development.
 
The review panel said in a statement: “We were deeply impressed by the strength and originality of the submissions we received in the second year of this fellowship, which reflected a fascinating array of voices from a wide range of countries around the world. We are thrilled to have selected Siyi Chen as the 2019 New American Filmmaker Fellow — her delightful sense of humor, strong storytelling instincts, and deep empathy for her subjects have made us thrilled to support her work on this project and to watch her career unfold in the many years to come.”

“Living across cultures can be confusing,” said Chen. “I still can’t figure out why I’m always dying for a Chinese soap opera on a rainy winter day in New York or why I’d only crave for Five Guys in my in-the-middle-of-nowhere hometown. But being an in-betweener also made me realize that people are more similar than different across borders. I am grateful to receive a fellowship that embraces people who might be a little bit of a lot of things. With the help of this fellowship, I’m excited to tell more stories in which no one is ‘the Other’ and everyone is ‘one of us.’”

Applications for the 2020 SFFILM New American Fellowship will open in August 2019. Visit sffilm.org/makers for more information.

Siyi Chen is a documentary filmmaker from China. Born and raised in Zhejiang and educated in New York, she currently splits her time between these two places. Chen received a B.A. in World History and Chinese Literature (dual degree) from Peking University (Beijing) and a M.A. in News and Documentary from NYU. She has produced, shot, and edited dozens of short web docs that have appeared on Quartz, CNN and PBS. Among her works, Chen documented a pioneering artificial intelligence experiment in a Chinese nursing home, covered the thriving new industry of paid cuddling in the US, and profiled an amateur roboticist from Hong Kong who spent $50,000 and three years building a extremely life-like robotic “Scarlett Johansson.”

About My Grandma’s a Dancer
Granny Ma never expected to retire in a foreign country, spending the rest of her life raising a grandkid that doesn’t speak her language. But life leaves her few choices, as her government forced her to have a child who then decided to leave China to pursue a better life in the US. Hundreds of families like the Ma’s must decide what to sacrifice to keep their families together…

About People’s Hospital
People’s Hospital tells the story of a female doctor from a small-town Chinese hospital, who, after devoting 27 years to saving lives, is secretly contemplating quitting. That doctor is the filmmaker’s mother, and that hospital is, as she affectionately calls it, the “daycare center” where she grew up. Armed with a camera, director Siyi Chen returns to the hospital to make sense of her mother’s career crisis — not expecting to encounter a fractured healthcare system and her own family’s battle with cancer.

This is the second year of the SFFILM New American Fellowship, whose inaugural recipient was Carlo Velayo, in support of his film Lingua Franca.

Siyi Chen was selected from a group of 10 finalists in this application round for the New American Fellowship. It’s an awe-inspiring group from all over the world, all of whom are filmmakers to watch in the months and years ahead:

Juan Avella, Venezuela/Italy
Zoe Sua Cho, Korea/New Zealand
Feras Fayyad, Syria
Andrés Gallegos, Chile
Sam Hamilton, New Zealand
Antoneta Kastrati, Kosovo
Igor Myakotin, Russia
Jiayan Jenny Shi, China
Débora Souza Silva, Brazil

As always, for more information about SFFILM’s artist development programs, visit sffilm.org/makers.