FILMS IN THE NEWS

16 AUGUST 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. The Berkeley Film Foundation honored filmmaker Deborah Craig (A Great Ride, 2018) with the prestigious Saul Zaentz Award for her new film Sally, a biopic about lesbian feminist activist, writer and professor Sally Gearhart, who passed away a little over a year ago. SDFF audiences know Sally from her show-stopping appearance in […]

9 AUGUST 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. Two SDFF 2022 shorts, The Chemical Factory (Drew Leung, 2021) and Nuisance Bear (Jack Weisman and Gabriela Oslo Vanden, 2021), are official selections of the 18th Annual HollyShorts Festival, which runs Aug. 11-20. The Chemical Factory, in which an immigrant mother retraces her early years during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to her son, is one

2 AUGUST 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. Corbett Joan O’Toole, an activist and historian featured in Crip Camp (James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham, 2020) was one of 20 artists selected for the Disability Futures Fellowship. Created by, for, and with disabled practitioners, Disability Futures is an initiative—developed in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation,

26 JULY 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. Nefise Özkal Lorentzen’s Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam won the award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2022 NYC Independent Film Festival in mid-June. The film, an SDFF2022 fave, is a profile of Seyran Ateş, a Turkish-German lawyer, feminist, and one of Europe’s first female imams, who has garnered controversy for her stance

19 JULY 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. When Claude Got Shot (Brad Lichtenstein, 2022) was nominated for an Emmy in the category of Exceptional Merit In Documentary. The doc, which appeared on PBS’s Independent Lens in May, is one of three nominees in the category. Changing The Game (Alex Schmider, Hulu) and Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (Julia Marchesi/HBO)`were also

12 JULY 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. Five SDFF alumni filmmakers are among the 2022 cohort recently invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the professional organization best known for its yearly awards ceremony, The Oscars®. The SDFF alumni inductees for 2022 include: Ellen Bruno, whose shorts Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy, Samsara:

5 JULY 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. Nuisance Bear (Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden, SDFF 2022) won best film in the non-fiction short competition at the 24th Short Film Festival & Asia 2022 (SSFF & ASIA). Nuisance Bear is an unconventional and visually arresting study of the polar bears who draw tourists to Churchill, Manitoba. The festival

28 JUNE 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. For Love and Legacy (AK Sandhu, 2021) was part of Tribeca 2022’s Juneteenth Shorts, Portraits and Performance: Celebrating Black Art and Artists. Director AK Sandhu and collaborator/subject Fredrika Newton attended festival screenings of the film. In the SDFF 2022 documentary, sculptor Dana King’s hands and activist Fredrika Newton’s memories come together

21 JUNE 2022 NEW FILMS & PROJECTS FROM SDFF FILMMAKERS A new film by Madeleine Lim, Jewelle: A Just Vision, premiered at the 18th Annual Queer Women of Color Festival last week in San Francisco. The documentary profiles poet playwright, activist and GLAAD co-founder  Jewelle Gomez, an Ioway, African American, Wampanoag and Cape Verdean lesbian elder. The doc not only documents

14 JUNE 2022 AWARDS. HONORS. FESTIVALS. SPECIAL SCREENINGS. Nefise Özkal Lorentzen’s Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam was an official selection of two recent film festivals, the 13th Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival (June 1-5) and the 14th NYC Independent Film Festival (June 12-19). These showings prompted some recent coverage, an article in Cinestaan (Mumbai fest) about the film and its subject, as well as