READ MORE: The Oscar Documentary Race After the Fall Festivals
While the fall calendar in New York and Los Angeles is packed with varying awards events aimed at voters, the Academy contingent in San Francisco came out to screenings full of local opinion-makers and folks from the tech community, as well as an SFFS brunch including some 15–20 key doc branch members along with area voters from other branches, and about 25 local filmmakers. Several doc filmmakers worked the room, including Heineman and others with films screening at the fest: Liz Garbus (“What Happened, Miss Simone?”), Amy Berg (“Janis: Little Girl Blue”) and David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s “Thank You for Playing.” Also in the room were Morgan Neville (“Best of Enemies”), Stevan Riley (“Listen to Me Marlon”), Kim Longinotto (“Dreamcatcher”), Irene Taylor Brodsky, Molly Thompson, Field of Vision’s AJ Schnack, Rob Epstein, B Ruby Rich and Zoe Reiniger, among others. “Spending a morning eating a yummy brunch with top doc filmmakers from SF and around the world in an environment away from the chaos of awards season in Los Angeles was refreshing,” said Berg.
“The battle lines extended North,” said SFFS executive director Noah Cowan, who worked with programmer Rachel Rosen to assemble Doc Stories around an area doc funders convention. Doc Stories also featured a one-day private Doc Congress, a workshop gathering for a number of documentary funders to discuss emerging trends in the field, present case studies and explore best practices in documentary financing and distribution. The festival estimates that some $1 billion in wealth got together to find ways to improve the Bay Area’s doc filmmaking culture and impact US doc production. The major national family foundations and several key individual funders joined the day of discussion, as well as Simon Kilmurry, Executive Director of the International Documentary Association.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.