Julie Ethel Dash is an American filmmaker, music video and commercial director, author, and website producer. Dash received her MFA in 1985 at the UCLA Film School and is one of the graduates and filmmakers known as the L.A. Rebellion. The L.A. Rebellion refers to the first African and African-American students who studied film at UCLA. Through their collective efforts, they sought to put an end to the prejudices of Hollywood by creating experimental and unconventional films. The main goal of these films was to create original Black stories and bring them to the main screens. After Dash had written and directed several shorts, her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust became the first full-length film directed by an African-American woman to obtain general theatrical release in the United States. In 2004, Daughters of the Dust was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Stemming from the film's success, Dash also released novels of the same title in 1992 and 1999. This film even inspired Beyoncé, arguably the music industry's most influential artist, with her 2016 album titled Lemonade.
Burning Man is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" held annually in the western United States. The event's name comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, that occurs on the penultimate night, the Saturday evening before Labor Day. Since 1991, the event has been at Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. According to Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten stated principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
The Cacophony Society is an American organization described on their website as "a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society". It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco.
Olivier Assayas is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. Assayas is known for his eclectic filmography, consisting of slow-burning period pieces, psychological thrillers, neo-noirs, and comedies. He has directed French, Spanish, and English-language films with international casts. The son of filmmaker Jacques Rémy, Assayas began his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. There he wrote about world cinema and its film auteurs, who later influenced his work. Assayas made several short films, and made his feature debut with Disorder in 1986.
Larry Harvey was an American artist, philanthropist and activist. He was the main co-founder of the Burning Man event, along with his friend Jerry James.
Roswell Christopher Bottum is an American musician, best known as the keyboardist for the San Francisco alternative metal band Faith No More. He is also guitarist and co-lead vocalist for the pop group Imperial Teen, best known for their 1999 single "Yoo Hoo" used in the movie Jawbreaker. In addition to popular musical career, Bottum also scored three Hollywood movies and composed an opera entitled Sasquatch: The Opera, which premiered in New York in April 2015.
Paris Is Burning is a 1990 American documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it.
The San Francisco International Film Festival, organized by the San Francisco Film Society, is held each spring for two weeks, presenting around 200 films from over 50 countries. The festival highlights current trends in international film and video production with an emphasis on work that has not yet secured U.S. distribution. In 2009, it served around 82,000 patrons, with screenings held in San Francisco and Berkeley.
Flaming Lotus Girls is a volunteer-based group of artists who make large-scale kinetic fire art. FLG has been described as a "women-focused anarchist art collective." The group began in 2000, in San Francisco, California, as a group of six women and two men who wanted to gain the fabrication skills and design experience needed to create large sculptural installations. The group includes over a hundred members of all genders, and a majority of the members are women. Many of the sculptures have interactive elements, allowing the audience to control the lighting, flames, sound, or other effects. The collective's work has appeared throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands.
Christian Ristow is an American robotic artist. He is known for his robotic performance art under the name Robochrist Industries, his animatronics work in film and television, and his large-scale interactive sculptures.
Your Mommy Kills Animals is a 2007 American documentary film written and directed by Curt Johnson. Filmed in several locations across the United States, the film is about the animal liberation movement and takes its name from a 2003 PETA comic book of the same name. The film was picked up for distribution by HALO 8 Entertainment after successful festival response.
John Law is an American artist, culture-jammer, and neon sign technician. He was a primary member of the Cacophony Society and a member of the Suicide Club. He is also a co-founder of Burning Man which evolved out of the spirit of the Cacophony Society when a precursor solstice party was banned from San Francisco's Baker Beach and merged with another Cacophony event on the Black Rock desert in Nevada. Originally from Michigan, Law has lived in San Francisco, California since 1976, and has maintained the signage and clock face of the Tribune Tower in Oakland, where he also has an office, since 1996.
Illusion is a 2004 American drama film directed by Michael Goorjian in his feature directorial debut. The screenplay, written by Goorjian, Ron Marasco, Chris Horvath, and Tressa DiFiglia, is loosely based on Pierre Corneille's 17th-century play L'Illusion Comique. The film stars Kirk Douglas, Goorjian, Marasco, and Karen Tucker. It tells the story of a legendary film director who is shown three visions of the life of the son he never knew.
Like Dandelion Dust is a 2009 drama film directed by Jon Gunn and based on the novel by the same name by Karen Kingsbury. The film won 26 awards at 23 film festivals.
Mark Nichols is an American playwright, composer, and lyricist, best known for his musicals Little Boy Goes to Hell (1988), Joe Bean (2003), and How to Survive the Apocalypse (2009). He is also known in the northwestern United States for his work with Fred Jamison for whom he arranged 20 Northwest Coast Native songs for orchestra, girl choir, and rock band, performed by the Seattle Symphony in 1996.
Pepe Ozan (1939–2013) was an Argentine sculptor, artistic director, and filmmaker. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, and is known for his lasting influence at Burning Man, an annual experimental arts festival in Nevada, United States.
The Red Turtle is a 2016 animated fantasy drama film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit who co-wrote the film with French screenwriter Pascale Ferran. The film is an international co-production between Studio Ghibli and several French companies, including Wild Bunch and Belvision. The film, which has no dialogue, tells the story of a man who becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and meets a giant red female turtle.
Menelik Shabazz was a Barbados-born British film director, producer, educator, and writer, acknowledged as a pioneer in the development of independent Black British cinema, having been at the forefront of contemporary British filmmaking for more than 30 years. Shabazz is best known for the 1981 film Burning an Illusion, his first feature. He was also co-founder in the 1980s of Kuumba film production company and Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, as well as being "founding father of the BFM media project" as the publisher of Black Filmmaker Magazine (BFM) and creator of BFM International Film Festival.
Desert Siteworks was an event held on the Black Rock Desert for three years (1992-1994). Participants built art and participated in self-directed performances.
Going Furthur is an American-Canadian documentary film about taking Ken Kesey's bus Furthur back on the road in 2014 for a 75-day trip covering 15,000 miles, along with a group of new Merry Pranksters.
