Test yourself. At what point in the 103-minute documentary California Typewriter do you decide that the analog machine is something you must have? If only you could mention this to collector and advocate Tom Hanks, you learn in the film, he would send you one for free. While that’s unlikely to happen, such is the seduction of Doug Nichol’s...
With 166 people exonerated, 2016 set the record for Americans wrongly convicted of crimes that they did not commit. Mission-based filmmaker Jamie Meltzer masterfully puts three human faces to this statistic. Over the course of five years, Meltzer followed a trio of innocent ex cons on an often painful but liberating journey to reclaim their lives, capturing their triumphs and...
You might have heard the Mission be called “ground zero” of gentrification in the city, but one local resident decided to explore a different microcosm of affordable housing loss: Parkmerced. His short documentary on the impending demolition of the housing there, “Who Killed Parkmerced?” will be shown at DocFest on Sunday and Tuesday. Nick Pasquariello, a Mission District resident and...
From activism to the environment, from spirituality to Rock’n’Roll, this year’s repertoire of real life stories told in 55 features and 55 short films screening at the SF Documentary Film Festival is sure to pique a range of interests. On Wednesday morning, the festival’s organizers gave a sneak peek of some of the featured material at a press conference held...
With a rap sheet that spans some three decades, one of the activists who famously hoisted a 75-foot “Resist” banner from a crane behind the White House last November is now the subject of a short documentary. The protest denouncing President Donald Trump’s policies made national headlines and landed Greenpeace activist Karen Topakian and a handful of others, including local...
A documentary exposing a small group within the medical community who — despite attending hundreds of hospital births – choose to have their own children at home will premiere at the Roxie Theater on March 26. Telling the stories of doctors, nurses, and midwives whose experiences with childbirth have driven them to seek out home birth for their own families, “Why...
In “Voices from the Mixtec Highlands,” documentary photographer and photojournalist Rodrigo Jardón documents an indigenous region of Oaxaca where his Mixtec grandmother, Adelaida, was born and raised. Jardón was born and raised in Mexico City but often would spend holidays in Oaxaca with his grandmother, in an area called Nundiche that has been perpetually affected by discrimination and violence, lack of economic resources,...
As the only country in the world to outlaw in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, Costa Ricans will be – for the first time in 15 years – presented with the possibility of having fertility treatments, according to an executive decree signed Thursday by the country’s president, Luis Guillermo Solis. This move comes amidst bitter opposition from the Costa Rican Catholic Church,...
Four years after approaching the subject, filmmakers Annelise Wunderlich and Richard O’Connell feel it’s the perfect time to finish their documentary on the nation’s first adult high school inside a county jail system: San Francisco’s Five Keys Charter Schools. Wunderlich, a Mission resident since 1994, easily lists reasons the time is right for a film on the education experiment —...
On March 9th, 2012, a group of undocumented youth and a few allies took a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. And then, they just kept walking. They continued past Oakland, through Utah, Kansas, and Kentucky, until, eight grueling months later, they arrived in Washington DC, carrying little more than a Native American spirit stick they’d received in the Mission...
Forever is Going to Start Tomorrow When the 11th annual Trans March (which starts today at Dolores Park with a brunch at 12 p.m., followed by a rally and march at 3 p.m.) culminates at Turk and Taylor it will enjoy a milestone for the transgender movement: the first city street to be named after a transgender person. Starting today, the 100 block of Turk Street...
