Claudia Escobar, Dear Homeland
SDFF 2020 Filmmaker Speaks Out On Health Care Desert, How Hospital Closures Have Impacted COVID
As COVID has torn through the country over the past several months, it has refocused attention on long-standing issues in American healthcare that have put low-income folks and people of color at much greater risk of both contracting and dying from the disease. SDFF 2020 selection The Desert (Bo Kovitz, 2019) documents the closure of an East Bay hospital that left almost 250,000, mostly low-income, people in the Bay Area over a 30 minutes away from the nearest hospital. Since COVID began spiking in California, Kovitz has spoken out eloquently on “health care deserts.” See her exclusive interview with SDFF co-Director Jean McGlothlin here.
Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival 2020 To Finish the Year Online
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SDFF 2019 Selection, The Silence of Others,
Garners Two Emmys
Image from The Silence of Others (Almudena Carracedo & Robert Bahar, 2018), SDFF 2019 official selection.
Tuesday night at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, SDFF 2019 Official Selection, The Silence of Others, won two Emmys. Filmmakers Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar garnered one Emmy for Best Documentary and a second for Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary.
The Silence of Others reveals the epic struggle of victims of Spain’s 40-year dictatorship under General Franco, who continue to seek justice to this day. Filmed over six years, the film follows victims and survivors as they organize the groundbreaking “Argentine Lawsuit” and fight a state-imposed amnesia of crimes against humanity, in a country still divided four decades into democracy.
The Silence of Others appeared as Episode 11 of PBS’s POV Season 32, and will be available on the PBS website for free until 10/08. It is also available on Netflix.
Vaunted for Innovation
Bellingcat, the independent, international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists, and the topic of SDFF 2020 Official Selection, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World (Hans Pool, 2018) is up for an Emmy Award for Outstanding New Approaches: Current News. Bellingcat and collaborator Newsy were nominated an Emmy in News and Documentary Award for a series of open-source investigations by the two entities over the past year.
The documentary Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World (Hans Poole, 2018), an official SDFF 2020 selection, won the International Emmy for Documentary in 2019, as well as a slew of honors from various European film festivals. The documentary explores the promise of open source investigation, going inside the exclusive world of the “citizen investigative journalist collective known as Bellingcat.
Claudia Escobar, Dear Homeland
Thanks to the support of Volunteers, Filmmakers, Partners, Donors and Patrons…
SDFF has Attained Coveted Recognition as Academy Award® Qualifying Festival
Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival is proud to announce that it has been approved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an Academy Qualifying Festival for the Documentary Short Subject category.
Currently in its 13th year, the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival’s mission to bring the best in documentary film to Sonoma County has just been enhanced by its inclusion as an Academy Award® qualifying festival. Of more than 8,000 film festivals currently listed on FilmFreeway’s entry portal, only 158 of those festivals have Academy Award® qualifying status. Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival is honored to be in their company.
Recipients of the SDFF Jury Award for Short Subject and Jury Award for Mini-Doc are now eligible for consideration in the Documentary Short Subject category of the Academy Awards® without the standard theatrical run, provided the film otherwise complies with the Academy rules.
Jury Awards for SDFF 2020 were scheduled to be announced on March 25 at Opening Night ceremonies. With the advent of the pandemic, those ceremonies were postponed. The award winners have been notified. It is with great pride that we list the winners below, noting that both the Short Subject and the Mini-Doc are eligible for consideration in the 93rd Academy Awards® Short Subject Category.
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