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.

Meet SFFILM’s 2019 FilmHouse Residents

It’s almost the new year, which means it’s time for a new batch of Bay Area–based storytellers to take up residence at FilmHouse, SFFILM’s dynamic shared workspace for independent filmmakers. FilmHouse residencies, made possible by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation with additional funding from the McBaine family, supports both narrative and documentary films by providing 12-month residencies to filmmakers actively engaged in various stages of production.

In addition to flex use workspace, FilmHouse residents are provided with dedicated rooms for writing and editing their features, and special access to established industry professionals offering mentorship, office hours, and deeper artistic guidance from their various areas of expertise. Other resident benefits will include a robust guest speaker series, featuring lectures and presentations by leading industry professionals; workshops led by prominent filmmakers and other members of the independent film industry; peer-to-peer support; work-in-progress screenings; bi-weekly production meetings; access to meaningful networking opportunities; and numerous other community-building programs.

Let’s meet the 40 (!) residents that will be taking their projects to the next stage —whether it be screenwriting or post-production — at FilmHouse in 2019.

2019 FILMHOUSE RESIDENTS — 12-MONTH TERMS
(* denotes extension of previous residency)

Fawaz Al-Matrouk* — Anwar — narrative feature, screenwriting

Liz Anderson — Cordyceps — narrative feature, screenwriting

Joseph Applebaum* — Minister of Loneliness — documentary feature, production

Natalie Baszile — Good People — narrative feature, screenwriting

Yael Bridge — Socialism: An American Story (working title) — documentary feature, post-production

Javier Briones — Our Nightly Walk — documentary feature, development/pre-production

Christy Chan — Dear Wizard — narrative feature, screenwriting

Daniel Chein — Sonsplitter — documentary feature, post-production

Alexia Colette-Sauvageon* — Untitled — narrative feature, development

Darren Colston — Grandpa’s Hands — narrative feature, screenwriting

Maria Fortiz-Morse* — The Departure — documentary feature, development

Daniel Freeman — Teddy, Out of Tune — narrative feature, production

Jason Hanasik* — Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body — documentary short, pre-production

Dee Hibbert-Jones — Run with It — documentary feature, production

Alexandra Hsu — Queens — narrative feature, screenwriting/development

Emily Cohen Ibañez — Fruits of Labor — documentary feature, production

Yvan Iturriaga — American Babylon — narrative feature, screenwriting

Joshua Losben — The Unbabymoon — narrative feature, screenwriting

Stewart Maddux* — Minister of Loneliness — documentary feature, production

Benjamin MulHolland* — The Lake Merritt Monster — narrative feature, development

Cameron Mullenneaux* — Untitled South Dakota Project — documentary feature, production

Hung Nguyen — TBD — documentary feature, production

Nicole Opper — The F Word: A Foster-to-Adopt Story — web series, production

Elena Oxman* — Outerlands — narrative feature, screenwriting/development

Erin Persley — Human Shield — documentary feature, development and pre-production

Tijana Petrovic — 10,000 Years — documentary feature, production

John Picklap — Perennial — documentary feature, development

Victor Pineda* — 12 Bends — documentary feature, post-production

Rajal Pitroda* — Untitled Race & Criminal Justice Project — documentary feature, post-production

Maria “Vicky” Ponce* — Washing Elena — narrative feature, screenwriting/development

Débora Silva — Black Mothers — documentary feature, production

Andrew Smith — Untitled Walt Whitman Project— narrative feature, screenwriting

Kristine Stolakis* — Pray Away — documentary feature, production

Molly Stuart — Bedding — documentary short, development

Cyrus Tabar — My Body Electric — narrative feature, screenwriting

Nomi Talisman — Run with It — documentary feature, production

Deniz Tortum — Hospital with two exits — documentary feature, post-production and distribution

Marcus Ubungen* — Beyond the Fields — documentary feature, production

Dawn Valadez — Fruits of Labor — documentary feature, production

Julie Wyman — Untitled Dwarfism Project — documentary feature, development/production

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