Opening Night: Jerry Brown: The Disrupter
Description
Governor Jerry Brown has had a storied political life, and Marina Zenovich’s tremendous portrait of him captures the highs and lows, augmented by present-day interviews with her protagonist. Ahead of his time in many ways, especially as an environmentalist, he is the longest-serving governor in the history of California, who eliminated the state’s billion-dollar deficit and enacted historic environmental and criminal justice reforms. From his early days in San Francisco as the son of Governor Pat Brown to his current work around climate change and nuclear threats, Zenovich’s timely film proposes a hopeful alternative to the current political morass.
Biographies
Marina Zenovich is a two-time Emmy award-winning filmmaker whose films have been widely praised for their powerful storytelling and their thoughtful, sensitive approach to a wide range of subjects. Her film Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind was the Closing Night of the 2018 SFFILM Festival. Other work includes Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008), Water and Power: A California Heist (2017), and Lance (2020).
Miriam Pawel is an author, journalist, and independent historian. Her most recent book, The Browns of California — The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, traces the history of California through four generations of the family of Governors Pat and Jerry Brown; it won a Gold Medal in the California Book Awards and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history.