Keep It Brief: Short Films on the Rise

Joshua Moore is an award-winning filmmaker based in Oakland and the Artist Development Manager of Documentary Film at SFFILM. Joshua’s feature film, I Think It’s Raining, had its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where it was nominated for the Independent Camera Award. His documentary short, Oddball, was broadcast on KQED, played numerous film festivals, was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick, and won an Emmy Award. Joshua has also curated cinema for The Mill Valley Film Festival, SF IndieFest, and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

Adrian L. Burrell (Oakland, California) is a storyteller who uses film, photography, and site-specific installation to examine race, class, and intergenerational dynamics. His work focuses on notions of kinship, diasporic narratives, and the gaps between place and belonging. His series, Mama’s Babies, traces his family’s history through slavery, the Great Migration, and gentrification’s current displacement of Black people in Oakland. Adrian is a 2022 SECA award nominee. A United States Marine Corps veteran, Adrian earned a BFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History, where he is currently a Lecturer.

Natalie Jasmine Harris is a Black queer filmmaker from Maryland currently based in New York City. She received her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in May 2020. Her work spans narrative, documentary, and experimental forms but is centered around a mission to tell stories that capture coming-of-age experiences, showcase Black joy, and reimagine liberation for marginalized communities. Natalie’s most recent short film, Pure, received the 2020 Directors Guild of America’s Student Film Award and completed a film festival run that included over 40 festival screenings worldwide and is now streaming on HBOMax. Natalie is currently adapting the concept behind Pure into a feature-length film of the same name that has received support from SFFILM, The Gotham (formerly known as IFP), and The Outfest Screenwriting Lab. She was recently selected as a Creative Culture Fellow at The Jacob Burns Film Center in New York, where she will be developing two new short films this year.

Christine Kecher is the Senior Commissioning Editor for Op-Docs, the New York Times‘ award-winning series of short documentaries by independent filmmakers. Recent Op-Docs include Oscar® winner The Queen of Basketball, Oscar® nominee A Concerto Is a Conversation, and 2021 Sundance award-winner Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma. Prior to joining Op-Docs in February 2021, Christine served as the Manager of Feature Films at A&E IndieFilms, where she was part of the development, production, and distribution of features and shorts.

Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. He often collaborates with the theater collective Lagartijas tiradas al sol and actress Teresita Sánchez. His work has been the subject of more than 30 retrospectives and has been presented in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, New York, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim, and MoMA in New York.

Diana Sánchez Maciel (she/her) is a filmmaker, producer, and curator born in Mexico City and raised in California. She has produced films illustrating abstract experiences of war, migration, and identity in the Bay Area. Her work ranges from experimental films to documentary films about the veteran experience. Stemming from her background and expertise on experimental cinema, Diana is an advocate of artist-made, non-commercial, short-form cinema in projects such as The Archive Project at SFSU’s School of Cinema, her role as board president of San Francisco Cinematheque, and her work as a programmer at Argo Short Film Platform.