Meet the Makers: FilmHouse Residency Spotlight

Natalie Baszile is the author of Queen Sugar, which is being adapted for television by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey. Her new non-fiction book We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating Black Farmers, Land & Legacy, is forthcoming from HarperCollins (April 2021). Natalie has had residencies at Ragdale Foundation, VCCA, Hedgebrook, and Djerassi, where she was the SFFILM and Bonnie Rattner Fellow. Her non-fiction work has appeared in Lenny Letter, The Bitter Southerner, O, The Oprah Magazine, and numerous anthologies. She has taught fiction at Saint Mary’s College and Sierra Nevada University. She is currently a second-year resident at SFFILM.

Luke Lorentzen is a graduate of Stanford University’s department of Art and Art History. His most recent film, Midnight Family, tells the story of a family-run ambulance business in Mexico City. The film has won over 35 awards from some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals and organizations including a Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Editing from the International Documentary Association, and the Golden Frog for Best Documentary from Camerimage. Midnight Family was shortlisted for the 2020 Best Documentary Oscar and was a New York Times ‘Critics’ Pick’. Luke’s other work as a director and cinematographer includes one of Netflix’s most watched original series, Last Chance U, which has been nominated for an Emmy and Critics Choice Award. Experimenting with the ways in which non-fiction stories are told, his films take viewers into hidden worlds to meet otherwise overlooked, hard working people. Originally from Connecticut, Luke currently lives in San Francisco.

Simran Mahal is an independent producer based in Oakland, CA. She is in the early stages of writing a feature narrative with the support of SFFILM. As a producer, her current projects include the short films Americanized and He Won’t Belong. She was also on the producing team of Don’t Be A Hero, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Simran graduated with a BA in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC Berkeley, and prior to launching her career in film she spent five years cooking at New York’s best restaurants and two years working as an organ transplant coordinator. As a first-generation Indian American, Simran focuses her work on diverse stories that shift perspectives.

Reaa Puri is a director, cinematographer, and producer whose work addresses sexual and state violence, as well as collective power and healing. She is a TEDX speaker and recipient of two Cannes Lion awards, the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize and the SFFILM Holbrook Female Filmmaker Fund. Her short films have been showcased at South by Southwest, London Asia Film Festival, SF IndieFest, and BAMPFA. Reaa is a co-founder of Breaktide Productions, a women-of-color-owned production company rooted in intersectional solidarity and producing films on issues of environmental racism, human rights, and Indigenous sovereignty. Breaktide was named to the YBCA 100 list of change-makers in 2019. Reaa earned her bachelor’s degree in film and media studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her film practice is informed by her queerness, Kashmiri-Sikh heritage, and upbringing between Berkeley, Mumbai, Delhi, and Kuwait. Reaa is a 2020 resident at SFFILM’s FilmHouse, a UnionDocs’ EP lab fellow, and a recipient of the Bay Area Video Coalition’s doc-filmmaker development program.