Speakers
Roko Belic
Roko Belic worked on a film for the first time when he was seven years old.
A friend borrowed a super-8 movie camera from his parents and, together with
Belic's brother Adrian, the team created a number of animation epics and Star
Wars ripoffs. In 1989 Belic enrolled at the University of California
at Santa Barbara, majored in studio art and studied Russian, Swahili and Arabic
languages. Having made films sporadically throughout his educational career, Genghis
Blues was the first film he made as an unemployed adult. Genghis
Blues won the Sundance Audience Award 1999 and was nominated for an Academy
Award in 2000. Currently, Belic is working on Twilight Men,
which he shot over the past four years in the Himalayas. The film, a collaboration
with writer/filmmaker Folco Terzani, tells the "true" story of a
Western seeker and an Indian holy man whose lives intertwine during a search
for an enlightened master. Weaving a fictional narrative out of primarily documentary
footage, the filmmakers are creating a “true film” experience - halfway between
reality and illusion.
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Carlos Bolado
Carlos Bolado received international recognition in 1991 for his editing of Like
Water For Chocolate (Como Agua Para Chocolate) and for Like a Bride
(Novia Que Te Vea), winner of the Toronto International Film Festival Audience
Award 1993. Bolado has edited twelve other feature films in Mexico and edit doctored
many films including the Mexican feature Amores Perros. Bolado's
1999 directorial feature film debut, Bajo California, El Limite del Tiempo
(Under California, The Limit of Time), was selected by film festivals worldwide
and won numerous awards including seven Mexican "Ariels" (the Mexican "Oscar")
for Best Film, Best First Film and Best Editing, the Audience Award for Best
Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Best Film at the Los
Angeles Latino Film Festival, and the Grand Jury Prize and OCIC Award at Amiens
International Film Festival (France). Bajo was also shown at Sundance
and the Toronto International Film Festival. Bolado is directing, editing and
producing an experimental documentary feature called The Imaginary Line ,
now in post-production, that takes viewers on a fascinating journey along the
entire length of the U.S.-Mexican border. Bolado is the recipient of a Fellowship
from the Rockefeller/ MacArthur Foundation and belongs to the National System
of Art Creators in Mexico. He was nominated for an Emmy for his editng of Promises. He
will begin directing his next feature movie, “What God Knows,” in July.
He will work with Diego Luna of “Y Tu Mama Tambien ” and Alice Braga
of “City of God.”
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John Chater
John Chater is a freelance Director of Photography. Since starting out at the
documentary department of the BBC in London 18 years ago, John has worked on
hundreds of broadcast documentaries and filmed in over 30 countries. After moving
to the US in 1992, he continues to work on films for PBS, HBO, National Geographic,
Discovery, BBC and UK Channel 4. Films that he's been involved with have won
numerous television and film festival awards. John graduated in 1991 from the
University of Surrey with a first class BA (Honors) in Photography.
Among is most recent feature length documentaries are The
Future of Food and Small
Ball: A Little League Story. From canola farmers in Saskatchewan to
the corn fields of Oaxaca, this 90- minute The Future of
Food explores how the
biotech industries have hijacked the worlds food production and changed the way
we eat. Small
Ball: A Little League Story is a 90-minute PBS feature documentary
which follows the incredible fortunes of a small local little league baseball
team, all the way the World Series.
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Sophie Constantinou
Sophia Constantinou's work demonstrates an artistic commitment to representing
diverse images of women and tackling controversial topics. As a director/producer,
Constantinou's films have been recognized worldwide. Her documentary Trans ,
about a female-to- male transsexual, was incorporated into The Whitney Museum
of American Art's program of lesbian genders. Her last experimental film, Impact
Zone, was awarded the Best Experimental Film at the New York Underground
Film Festival 1997, The Athena Award 1997 for Outstanding Filmmaking and was
honored at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Her experimental documentary, Between
the Lines, a film about women and self-injury, was awarded a Golden Spire
by the San Francisco International Film Festival 1999. Her recent feature-length
documentary, Divided Loyalties , an intensely personal film about the
conflict in Cyprus won a Golden Gate Award. Constantinou's recent cinematography
credits include HBO's Unchained Memories (2003), PBS's Presumed
Guilty (2002) and KQED' s Emmy Award winning Home Front (2001).
She complements her shooting with teaching filmmaking to under-represented teens
and at-risk youth. She received her undergraduate degree in Film Studies from
the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and a Master's in Humanities
from San Francisco State University in 1993.
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Gail Dolgin
Gail Dolgin is an independent documentary filmmaker living in Berkeley and working
out of the Saul Zantz Film Center. Most recently she produced and co-directed
(with Vicente Franco) Daughter from Danang, winner of the Sundance
Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, nominated for an Academy Award and broadcast
on the PBS American Experience series. Originally from New York, Dolgin
graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Art History. Returning
to New York, she studied photography and joined Newsreel, a social issue driven
film collective that launched her interest and ultimately her career in film. The
year was 1969, the issues were hot, and the place to be was San Francisco. (Her
first visit to Berkeley was seen through a veil of tear gas.) Her path towards
documentary filmmaking is a winding intersect of political activism, teaching,
photography and storytelling with the bottom line being the desire to produce
films of passion that stimulate viewer reaction. Her producer-director
credits include Cuba Va: The Challenge of the Next Generation, New
Bridges, Face to Face, and Why Vote. She was associate
producer on the Academy Award nominated Forever Activists: Stories
of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and has produced and directed
a number of educational/informational programs.
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Bob Elfstrom
Recognized as one of the most respected documentary cinematographers in the
world, Robert Elfstrom's recent work includes photographing “ Finding Lucy ,” a
portrait of Lucille Ball, for American Masters on PBS that won the Emmy for
Best Documentary 2001. His work spans cultural, scientific, historical and political
programming, including numerous episodes of Nova, Frontline and National
Geographic . Elfstrom has worked with Bill Moyers on his PBS specials on
addiction and on religion and with Tom Brokaw on his NBC primetime special on
Bill Gates. He photographed NBC's Lifelines , a groundbreaking prime-time
documentary series on hospitals often cited as the precursor of the drama series ER .
Elfstrom also worked on the feature-length documentaries Gimme Shelter and Other
Voices, the powerful Academy Award nominated verité film about
schizophrenic teens.
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Jon Else
Jon Else, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley,
is best known for his documentary, The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer
and the Atomic Bomb, as well as Yosemite:
The Fate of Heaven (produced for the Sundance Institute), and A Job
At Ford's, part of the PBS series The
Great Depression. He produced and directed Cadillac Desert: Water and the
Transformation Of Nature,
Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle and most recently, Open
Outcry. He was series producer and
cinematographer for Henry Hampton's Eyes On The Prize: America's Civil Rights
Years, and has shot
hundreds of documentaries for PBS, the BBC, ABC and HBO, including the BBC/PBS
History Of Rock And Roll,
Who Are The DeBolts (Academy Award 1976), and the new Paramount/MTV
feature documentary, Tupac
Resurrection. Else was a MacArthur Fellow from 1988 to 1993 and has won
four National Emmys (for writing, producing, directing, and cinematography),
several Columbia-DuPont and Peabody Awards as well as several Academy Award
nominations, the Prix Italia, the Sundance Special Jury Prize and Sundance Filmmaker's
Trophy. He graduated from the University of California in 1968 and earned a
Master's in Communication from Stanford in 1974. He has just returned from doing
camera work on a documentary about Afghanistan's constitutional Loya Jirga and
is beginning a new film about nuclear weapons.
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Karen Everett
Karen Everett is an independent filmmaker living in San Francisco. Her award-winning
documentaries and personal film memoirs have played in festivals worldwide,
aired on television and are distributed to the educational and home video markets.
She is currently directing a personal documentary, Many Ways to Fall, the
intimate story of seven women navigating their love lives. Her first film, Framing
Lesbian Fashion (1992 ), was broadcast
on KQED and received the Best New Documentary nomination from the American
Film Institute. Her other films include Sweet Boy (2001), entering
the worldwide film festival circuit; My Femme Divine (1999), a personal
documentary and winner of the Director's Award at the San Diego LGBT Film
Festival, and I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs (1996),
a 60-minute biography broadcast on PBS from 1997 to 2000 and recipient of the
Silver Apple Award from the National Educational Media Association and Best
Documentary Nomination, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Everett
teaches editing at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where
she received her Master's degree in Journalism in 1991. She received her undergraduate
degree from Smith College in 1987.
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Sam Green
Sam Green received his Master's degree in Journalism from the University of
California at Berkeley where he studied documentary filmmaking with acclaimed
filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His most recent documentary film, The Weather Underground,
was nominated for an Academy Award, premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival
and will air on PBS this spring. Green's previous documentary, The Rainbow
Man/John 3:16 , premiered at Sundance 1997 and screened at festivals worldwide,
winning the Grand Prix at the USA Film Festival in Dallas and Best Documentary
awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Underground Film Festival in
New York and Chicago. Green teaches at the University of San Francisco and
was recently an artist-in-residence at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
in San Francisco and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito.
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Vicki Funari
Vicky Funari is an independent filmmaker. She is currently producing and directing
a documentary about women workers in Tijuana's assembly factories. Maquilopolos explores,
through these women's eyes, how globalization transforms a city and its people.
Funari produced, directed and edited the acclaimed non-fiction feature film Paulina ,
about a resilient Mexican woman whose parents traded her for land when she
was a child. Paulina screened at the Sundance, Locarno, Havana and
Amsterdam film festivals, among others, and received numerous awards, including
a Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival. Paulina screened
theatrically in 1999 and aired on the Sundance Channel in 2000. Funari co-directed
and edited the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite! a fierce and funny
account of the first strippers' union in the USA. The film premiered at the
2000 SXSW Film Festival, won a Golden Spire and the Audience Award at the San
Francisco International Film Festival, enjoyed a national theatrical release
and aired on Cinemax in 2001. Funari also produced and directed SKIN-ES-THE-SI-A,
an award-winning short experimental work that explores the cultural codification
of the female body. Funari began her film work in 1985, as producer of the documentary Alternative Conceptions and
as assistant director of the fiction feature film Working Girls ,
directed by Lizzie Borden. From 1996 - 2000, she served on the Board of
Directors of the Latino media arts organization Cine Acción.
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Viven Hillgrove
Vivien Hillgrove has more than 32 years of experience as an editor for both
narrative feature films and documentaries. She has edited six Documentary films
by Lourdes Portillo including La Ofrenda: The
Days of the Dead, The Devil Never Sleeps, Corpus: A Home Movie for
Selena and Senorita Estravianda, which won a special
jury prize at Sundance and the 2002 International Documentary Award.
Her other documentary credits include Yakoana, First Person Plural (POV), Heart
of the Sea (Independent Lens) and recently completed The Future
of Food, an activism documentary advising the public on genetically
modified food. The narrative feature films she has edited include Henry
and June (picture editor), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (picture
editor and supervising dialogue editor) by Phil Kaufman and Hot Summer
Winds (picture editor) for American Playhouse directed by Emiko Omori.
She was dialogue editor on One From the Heart by Francis Ford
Coppola, The Right Stuff by Phil Kaufman and Never Cry Wolf by
Carroll Ballard. She was supervising dialogue editor for Blue Velvet by
David Lynch, The Mosquito Coast by Peter Weir, and Amadeus by
Milos Forman, which won 11 Academy Awards in 1984.
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Carrie Lozano
Carrie Lozano studied film and political science at the
University of California at Berkeley with an emphasis in
experimental and documentary film. She was a health care policy
analyst for the federal government before entering the field of
journalism. She is a freelance writer and the former editor of
Film/Tape World magazine and has worked as a writer and editor
for the San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco
Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival.
She will receive her master's degree in journalism from Berkeley
in 2005.
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Frances Reid
Frances Reid has been producing, directing, and shooting documentary films
for more than 30 years. Her most recent production, with Deborah Hoffmann,
was Long Night's Journey Into Day: South Africa's Search for Truth and
Reconciliation. It won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at Sundance
2000, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001, a DGA award in 2002, and
has been exhibited at festivals worldwide, including the Jerusalem Film Festival
2000 where it won the In the Spirit of Freedom award. In 1995 she
produced and directed Skin Deep, a film exploring race relations on
college campuses. Skin Deep was broadcast nationally on PBS and is
now in use by nearly 2,000 colleges and universities in the United States.
In 1994 she received an Academy Award nomination for her documentary short Straight
From The Heart. Additional producing and directing credits include such
films as the groundbreaking documentary on lesbian mothers and child custody, In
the Best Interests of the Children (1977), a Blue Ribbon Winner at the
American Film Festival. Her film The Faces of AIDS (1992) won a First
Place at the Black Filmmakers' Hall of Fame. Her cinematography credits include: The
Times of Harvey Milk, Visions of the Spirit, The Ride to Wounded Knee an d
Reno's Kids. She was also the cinematographer for Hoffmann's Complaints
of a Dutiful Daughter. Reid is one of the original members of Iris Films,
founded in 1975. Most recently she served on the Grand Jury for the 2002 Sundance
Film Festival. She is a recipient of the James Phelan Art Award in
Video.
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Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts is an Emmy-nominated editor of independent, feature documentaries. Her credits include:
Lost Boys of Sudan, which won a 2004 Independent Spirit Award, is currently in theatrical
distribution, and will be broadcast on POV in 2004; Daughter From Danang, which won the
Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2002, was nominated for an Academy Award, and was broadcast nationally on
American Experience; Daddy & Papa, which also premiered at Sundance 2002, went on to win Best
Documentary prizes at more than a dozen film festivals and was broadcast nationally on Independent Lens;
The Wolf, which was produced by Jon Else's Center for New Documentary and broadcast nationally
on CBS; Great Wall Across the Yangtze, which received a coveted independent national feed on PBS,
and A Hard Straight, funded by ITVS, currently in post-production for release this year. She
was the Second Editor on the Academy Award nominated Long Night's Journey Into Day (Grand Jury
Prize winner at Sundance 2000). Roberts has also edited for the PBS series, Frontline World, and is a
writer/director of both documentary and fiction films. Her first fiction feature, Wilderness Survival
for Girls, will premiere at the IFP Los Angeles Film Festival in June. Her
short films have won many awards, including a Student Academy Award and Golden
Gate Award. Roberts received her Master's degree in Documentary Film Production
at Stanford University.
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Jay Rosenblatt
A recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, Jay Rosenblatt has been
making films since 1980. His films include: I Used to Be A Filmmaker,
to be broadcast this year on HBO/Cinemax; Nine Lives (The Eternal Moment
of Now ), winner of the Best Short Award at the Aspen Shortsfest; King
of the Jews , screened at Sundance and recent winner of the Grand Prize
at the USA Film Festival; Human Remains, the winner of 26 awards; The
Smell of Burning Ants , winner of the Grand Prize at the 1995 Hamburg International
Short Film Festival; Short of Breath; I Like it A Lot and Friend
Good. One week after September 11th, Rosenblatt and fellow filmmaker
Caveh Zahedi asked more than 150 experimental and documentary filmmakers to
take part in a collective project about the events of that day and their aftermath.
The result was Underground Zero , shown across the country and broadcast
on Cinemax on September 11, 2002. In addition to co-producing the project, Rosenblatt
contributed the film Prayer,
screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Tampere Film Festival and
IDFA. Rosenblatt has taught film and video production at film schools throughout
the Bay Area, including Stanford University, San Francisco State University,
San Francisco Art Institute and the College of San Mateo. He has a Master's
degree in Counseling Psychology and, in a former life, worked as a therapist.
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Kris Samuelson
Kris Samuelson has been an independent producer for thirty years. Her filmmaking credits include: Time
Has No Sympathy, Arthur and Lillie, 2 A.M.
Feeding, An Artist's Journey, Wrong Place, Wrong
Time, Empire of the Moon, Riding the Tiger, and The World
As We Know It. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the
Arts and Entertainment Network and screened at numerous film festivals, including the Sundance Film
Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival (Special Jury Prize),
British Short Film Festival, Mostra Internazionale de Montecatini, Athens Film Festival (Best of Category),
and Charlotte Film Festival (Best Experimental Documentary). Samuelson was nominated (with Jon Else and
Steve Kovacs) for an Academy Award for Arthur and Lillie and has received Artist's Fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. In addition to a Dean's Award for
Distinguished Teaching, she has been awarded the Undergraduate Teaching Award in the Department of
Communication and a Bing Teaching Award. She received her B.A. (cum laude) from the University of
California at Los Angeles and has a Master’s in Communication from Stanford University. She is currently
the Vice Chair of the Board of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and the Director of the
Documentary Film and Video Master of Arts Program at Stanford, where she is also a professor.
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Jason Spingarn-Koff is a New York-based documentary filmmaker specializing in science and technology. His film Robofly, about the quest to build the world’s first robotic fly, was nationally broadcast on PBS and won a Student Emmy in 2001. He has produced and directed two documentary specials for MSNBC, hosted by Forrest Sawyer. Nature’s Weapon: The Hidden Plague investigated the history and threat of plague, from the Black Death to Soviet bioweapons. MSNBC Reports: The Next War explored how the U.S. military is adapting to fight a new type of warfare in the wake of 9/11. Most recently, he has been working for WGBH/NOVA as a development producer on a 6-part series about global public health. He received his Master's degree in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley and a BA in History from Brown University.
Michael Smith
A journeyman documentary filmmaker with a seasoned knowledge of media production,
Michael Smith studied under the late Marlon Riggs and MacArthur Fellow
Jon Else while earning a Master's degree in Journalism at the University of
California at Berkeley. His first work was Jesse's Gone, the story
of a young African American hip hop artist who was killed in a drive-by shooting
just when it seemed he was going to break into show business. Jesse's
Gone characterizes Smith's ability to tell stories of sensitive human
situations without sentimentality while at the same time achieving emotional
impact. The production went on to win the top award in its category at the San
Francisco International Film Festival and was honored by the National Black
Programming Consortium and the IDA. Jesse's Gone was broadcast
on PBS and in the United Kingdom. Smith also has a track record of producing
quality programming for commercial television. As lead producer, he delivered
programs to Court TV and A&E Television. He has successfully produced
in a wide range of physical and cultural environments, including Louisiana's
death row, the Brazilian Amazon, Mexican countryside and urban American street
corners. In his most recent effort, Smith produced the Court TV Special, Al
Roker Investigates: The Farmingville Incident . Scheduled during prime
time, the program was an investigation of a brutal hate crime in Suffolk County,
New York. He is currently producing an hour-long program for Discovery Health.
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Caveh Zahedi
Caveh Zahedi has been making autobiographical films for more than ten years.
His first feature, A
Little Stiff, re-enacted a crush he had had on an art student by using
all of the actual participants to play themselves. It premiered at Sundance
in 1991, was broadcast on German television and the Sundance Channel and was
released on home video. His second feature, I Don't Hate
Las Vegas Anymore,
was a self-reflexive documentary in which he attempted to bond with his estranged
father and teenage brother by getting them to take Ecstasy with him. It won
the Critics' Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1994 and was released
on home video. His third feature, In the Bathtub of the
World, was a video
diary self-portrait chronicling the year 1999. It has been shown on the Independent
Film Channel and has recently been released on DVD. His short films include:
I Was Possessed By God, a cinema verite account of a five gram mushroom trip
and The World is a Classroom, a cinema verite response to the events of September
11th. He has also acted in the films Waking Life, A
Sign From God, and Citizen
Ruth. He is currently in production on a film entitled I
Am A Sex Addict.
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