A mode of representation defined by its relationship to reality, documentary has a troubled history in connection with race and racism. It is a genre that for a number of reasons is tightly bound-up with science, and developed alongside, and as evidence for, racial pseudo-science. From the motion studies of Félix-Louis Regnault to the commercial ethnography […]
Docs + Social Justice: Focus on Race + Representation Read More »
SDFF 2019 Official Selection, America ReFramed: DEEJ, is streaming for free this month and will be rebroadcast on World TV (KQED) on July 14 at 8 p.m. as part of a month-long commemoration and celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act and the #MoveToInclude initiative. The film is an SDFF 2019 Official Selection,
Deej Helps Commemorate ADA’s 30th Anniversary Read More »
2018 Doc Resonates in Present Day, Provides Context for Hillbilly Elegy Adaptation & Its Critical Reception When Netflix delivered Ron Howard’s film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family in Crisis to the small screen after the 2020 election, it returned the autobiographical work and the ways in which it had
Revisiting Hillbilly Read More »
After visiting the Navajo nation earlier this month, filmmaker Karney Hatch (Overdrawn, Plant This Movie!) was overcome by the staggering number of cases and the scale of the loss facing the community and decided to volunteer in hopes of helping the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund raise money by shooting some footage for
SDFF’s 2020 selection, Bellingcat: Truth In A Post-Truth World (Hans Pool, 2019) and some of the journalists affiliated with it have been making the news over the past month. Bellingcat the film is tells the story of the eponymous online investigative collective. Collective leader Eliot Higgins was interviewed on 60 Minutes on July 12 to talk about an investigation he had spearheaded into the
Bellingcat Investigations and Coverage Make Mainstream News in U.S. Read More »
COVID-19 has laid bare the severity of a perpetually escalating health care crisis that had been quietly impacting daily life for millions of Americans for decades. Despite animating political discourse, the reality of this crisis was largely invisible for those unaffected by it, pre-Coronavirus. This was the context in which Bo Kovitz made her documentary The
Bay Area Filmmaker Documents Local Hospital Closures, Speaks To Impacts on COVID Era Read More »
While COVID-19 has so far prevented us from bringing you the excellent feature documentary and SDFF 2020 Official Selection Gay Chorus, Deep South (David Charles Rodrigues, 2019), it hasn’t prevented us from sharing this beautiful original composition of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The piece is dedicated to COVID-19 first
SF Gay Men’s Chorus Dedicates Original Piece to COVID-19 First Responders Read More »
SDFF 2018 filmmaker and conflict photographer Kate Brooks participated in a live, online education event for Earth Day, “Confronting Extinction,” which is now available via free streaming. The Last Animals filmmaker and conflict photographer Kate Brooks spoke on filmmaking/journalism as methods activism and conservation during an Earth Day presented by The Last Animals Foundation and
SDFF 2018 Eco-Documentarian Confronts Extinction In Free Earth Day Live Lessons Read More »
While SDFF 2020 may have been postponed, our commitment to encouraging nuanced analyses and public discussion of the current media environment and the relationship between truth and representation that has been focalized in popular discourse. To that end, we hope you’ll take a look at this a clear-eyed, sharp examination of the outbreak of disinformation
SDFF 2020 programmers selected Brian Gersten’s The Great Toilet Paper Scare in the Fall, for its effective, humorous take on an early iteration of “fake news.” The film’s titular event, a toilet paper shortage, took shape following a Johnny Carson joke in 1973, and can be seen as prototypical of present day fake news that inundates social media.
