SFWFF 2011 Call For Entries Is Open!

The Women’s Film Institute announces its call for film and video entries in all lengths and genres for the 7th annual San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival (SFWFF). The festival will take place April 4-10, 2011.

“We’re open to professional and amateur filmmakers of narrative, documentary, music video, animation, and experimental works,” says festival founder Scarlett Shepard. “The only constant is that submissions must be directed or co–directed by women.”

SFWFF will be accepting online entries submitted via Withoutabox.com global filmmaker community (Deadline for submissions is December 1, 2010). Their internet-only submission platform uses one master entry form and is an economical, eco-friendly, and secure alternative to traditional hard-copy DVD submissions:
https://www.withoutabox.com/login/4231

“The festival is a powerful and vital forum that brings the voices of women to a wider audience, as well as celebrating their achievements in the world of cinema,” notes Shepard.

Founded in 2004, the SFWFF celebrates the achievements of women working behind the camera and raises awareness about the need for more opportunities for female filmmakers: http://www.sfwff.org

About the Women’s Film Institute (WFI):
WFI is the presenter of the annual San Francisco International Women's Film Festival (SFWFF), WFI Shorts Tour, and year-round educational programs and events. WFI aims to bring the highest quality films to the community. WFI is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media. Independent Arts & Media is a 501(c)(3) organization with a mission to expand civic dialogue by increasing access to independent voices. Independent Arts & Media is dedicated to producing and promoting independent media and supporting and serving independent artists and media producers: http://artsandmedia.net

Coming soon to SF Jewish Film Festival: You Won't Miss Me by Ry Russo-Young

San Francisco International Women's Film Festival is proud to co-present the following film at this year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival:

You Won't Miss Me (2009 | USA | Color and Black & White | 81 min) Directed by Ry Russo-Young

Loner, dissenter, flirt, enemy, lover, that's Shelly Brown, and 23-year-old alienated urban misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital. She's back in New York City seeking solace and affirmation but finding little of either.

Balancing order and abstraction, verite and high theatricality, Russo-Young applies a daring and emotionally honest style to the material reminiscent of indie filmmaking pioneers John Cassavetes and Agnes Varda.

Date: Sat, July 24, 2010 at 10:15 p.m.

Admission: $12.00 (General ), $10.50 (Senior discount)

Location: Castro Theatre, San Francisco, CA

For more information and to purchase tickets:

http://www.sfjff.org/film/detail?id=5093

Coming Soon: 30th Annual SF Jewish Film Festival

San Francisco Women's Film Festival (SFWFF) is proud to be a community partner at this year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

SFWFF co-presents a film screening of Grace Paley: Collected Shorts directed by Lily Rivlin

Lily Rivlin's (Gimme a Kiss, SFJFF 2002) intimate documentary is rich, inspiring portrait of Jewish writer and activist Grace Paley, who passed away in 2007. Paley's acclaimed first short story collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, established her reputations with its brilliantly sad and funny chronicles of Jewish American urban females much like herself.

Paley's New York tales, filled with an emotional and sexual frankness especially bold at the tail end of the frightened 1950's, soon became classics of the short fiction form. Not content to rest on her laurels, however, Paley combined her evolving literary career with passionate pursuit of her political concerns through the 1960's, 70's and 80's.

"Art is too long and life is too short," wrote the outspoken Paley, "There's a lot more to do in life than writing."Indeed she spent the rest of her life on the front lines of the anti-war and women's movements, where she endured being arrested time and time again.

Rivlin's film confidently juggles all aspects of Paley's extraordinary story, told in candid recollections and passionate reading by Paley herself, along with fond remembrances by literary critics, family and writer-friends Alan Gurganas and Alice Walker.

Throughout, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts casts and important and penetrating light on a brilliant and highly principled woman who consistently reinvented her life and art.- Thomas Logoreci

Location: Castro Theatre, San Francisco, CA

Date: Sunday, July 25, 2010

Time: 11:00 a.m.

Admission: $12.00 (regular), $10.50 (Senior discount)

For more information and to purchase tickets:
http://www.sfjff.org/film/detail?id=4871

New Podcasts: Interviews with Joan Braderman director of Heretics & LA Film Grant with Carole Dean

We are excited to relaunch our podcast that highlights notable women in the world of cinema.

Interview with Carole Dean

In this podcast interview, Lindsay Castillo talks with Carole Dean. In 1992 Carole Dean created the Roy W. Dean Grant Foundation in honor of her late father. To date Carole’s grant and mentor-ship programs have provided filmmakers with millions of dollars in goods and services and have played an instrumental role in establishing the careers of some of the industry’s most promising filmmakers. Learn more about Carole Dean and how to apply for the LA Film Grant (Due June 30, 2010).

Listen to podcast interview:

http://www.sfwff.com/podcast

Interview with Joan Braderman

In this podcast interview, Scarlett Shepard, Executive Director of the Women's Film Institute, talks with Joan Braderman about her latest documentary film 'Heretics.'

Braderman traces the influence of the Women’s Movement’s Second Wave on art and life, The Heretics is the exhilarating inside story of the New York feminist art collective that produced “Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics”.

In this feature-length documentary, cutting-edge video artist/writer/director Joan Braderman, who joined the group in 1971 as an aspiring filmmaker, charts the collective’s challenges to terms of gender and power and its history as a microcosm of the period’s broader transformations.

On the road with her camera crew from New Mexico to Italy, Braderman reconnects with 28 other group members. Still funny, smart and sexy, the geographically dispersed participants revisit how and why they came together and the extraordinary times they shared—supporting and exploring women’s art and demanding the right to be heard.

Listen to podcast interview:

http://www.sfwff.com/podcast

Coming soon to Frameline34

SFWFF is proud to be a community partner at this year's Frameline34, San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival!

SFWFF co-presents a film screening of Heretics directed by Joan Braderman on June 26th at 11:00 am at the Victoria Theater. Admission: $8 (General Admission) and $7 (Members).

For more information and to purchase tickets: 
http://www.frameline.org/frameline34

THE HERETICS uncovers the inside story of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement for the first time in a feature film or video. Joan Braderman, director and narrator, follows her dream of becoming a filmmaker to New York City in 1971. By chance, she joins a feminist art collective at the epicenter of the 1970’s art world in lower Manhattan.  In her first person account, THE HERETICS charts the history of a feminist collective from the inside out. 

That group, the Heresies Collective, published: “HERESIES; A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” from 1977-1992.  Unlike more traditional  “documentaries,” the film is framed with striking new digital motion graphics that extend the aesthetics of the magazine into the digital realm and onto the screen.  THE HERETICS focuses on The Heresies Collective as a microcosm of the larger international women’s movement, in which thousands of small, private groups of women met together in forms unique to their own settings, to consider their situation -- as women in a man’s world -- and to devise strategies for unlocking the potential in women’s lives. 

The hundreds of collective members, now scattered around the globe are accomplished artists, writers, architects, painters, filmmakers, designers, editors, curators, and teachers. Twenty-four of these women, speak intimately with the filmmaker about the extraordinary times they shared, challenging the terms of gender and power and re-imagining the lives of generations to come. 

Designing expressive ways to layer images, we work with: text, animation, archival stills and footage, the magazine itself, completed artworks and art as it is being made on sites world-wide. We collage all these elements in a language that evokes the collective experience and the aesthetics of the magazine.  The original soundtrack for THE HERETICS mirrors the "radical collage" aesthetic, mixing acoustic rock guitar, scat-singing, jazz piano and violin, made mainly by women.

Check out all 27 issues at:

http://helios.hampshire.edu/nomorenicegirls/heretics

Coming soon to Frameline34

SFWFF is proud to be a community partner at this year's Frameline34, San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival!

SFWFF co-presents a film screening of Heretics directed by Joan Braderman on June 26th at 11:00 am at the Victoria Theater.

Admission: $8 (General Admission) and $7 (Members).

For more information and to purchase tickets:
http://www.frameline.org/heretics

More about the film:
Welcome to the New York City art world of the 1970s, where women are underrepresented in the MOMA, in publishing, in theaters, as well as in pretty much every other artistic institution. What’s a group of feminist woman artists — painters, filmmakers, designers, writers, architects — to do? Form an art collective, hold endless meetings and publish a progressive magazine called HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. That’s what.

Filmmaker Joan Braderman, a member of the collective, tracks down twenty-four other members who are now accomplished artists living around the globe. The women talk about the magazine that published Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker and Barbara Ehrenreich.

They reminisce about what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world: from an instructor who praised Ida Applebroog, “That is good, you paint just like a man,” to Mark Rothko, who said to Lucy Lippard, “You’re too cute to be an art critic.” They also recall differences and disagreements; since editors changed for each issue, some women protested when it was determined that only self-identified lesbians would edit the magagzine’s Lesbian Art and Artists Issue.

A collage of intimate interviews, archival footage and photographs, digital animation, contemporary art works, and music by women, this is far from an historical piece. Rather, The Heretics emphasizes that collective feminism is as relevant today as ever. It’s a call to action to transmit this “gift, this collective energy of woman’s togetherness” to the younger generation.
— NANI RATNAWATI

The 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF53)

The 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF53) returns April 22-May 6 with more than 100 unique programs of the finest independent, documentary and international cinema, combining a range of marquee premieres, international competitions, digital media work and star-studded gala events into the best two weeks of the year.

Check out films made by women at SFIFF53: A Brand New Life, Budrus, Cairo Time, Cracks, Empire of Silver, Everyone Else, Father of My Children, Joan Rivers—A Piece of Work, Lourdes, My Dog Tulip, My Queen Karo, Night Catches Us, The Oath, Pianomania, La Pivellina, Russian Lessons, Seducing Charlie Barker, Way of Nature, White Material, and Winter’s Bone.

For more information and to purchase tickets:

http://www.sffs.org