Nancy Kates is an independent filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She directed Regarding Susan Sontag, a feature documentary about the late essayist, novelist, director and activist. Through archival footage, interviews, still photographs and images from popular culture, the film reflects the boldness of Sontag’s work and the cultural importance of her thought, and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.
This Is Nollywood is a 2007 Nigerian documentary film by Franco Sacchi and Robert Caputo, detailing the Nigerian film industry, much along the same lines as the acclaimed 2007 documentary Welcome to Nollywood by Jamie Meltzer
The Frameline Film Festival began as a storefront event in 1976. The first film festival, named the Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films, was held in 1977. The festival is organized by Frameline, a nonprofit media arts organization whose mission statement is "to change the world through the power of queer cinema". It is the oldest LGBTQ+ film festival in the world.
Judy Irving is an American filmmaker. She directed the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, about writer Mark Bittner's relationship with a flock of wild parrots. The film won the Genesis Award for "Outstanding Documentary Film" in 2005, and is one of the 25 top-grossing theatrical documentaries of all time with over $3 million in box-office receipts. On May 29, 2007, Parrots was featured on the PBS series Independent Lens.
Welcome to Nollywood is a 2007 documentary film directed by Jamie Meltzer, which premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and also played at the Avignon Film Festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival in the summer of 2007.
Eric Daniel Metzgar is a filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco.
Debra Chasnoff was an American documentary filmmaker and activist whose films address progressive social justice issues. Her production company GroundSpark produces and distributes films, educational resources and campaigns on issues ranging from environmental concerns to affordable housing to preventing prejudice.
Joel P. Engardio is a local news columnist in San Francisco. He is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and civil liberties advocate. Engardio served as a member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee. Engardio's PBS documentary Knocking won the jury award for Best Documentary at the USA Film Festival. At the American Civil Liberties Union, Engardio combined reporting and multimedia storytelling skills to pioneer more effective ways to mount lawsuits and communicate public education efforts. He was the ACLU’s first “story finder” and implemented a process that applied journalism methods to plaintiff-finding. Engardio found plaintiffs who had narratives that played well in both the court of law and public opinion. He also started a video department that produced shorts for online audiences, which prompted mainstream media to cover the same stories.
Brandon Michael Darby is an American conservative blogger and activist. He first became known in the fall of 2005 for actions in New Orleans in efforts to help residents, where he was a co-founder of the Common Ground Collective organized there. It coordinated the efforts of hundreds of volunteers from across the country for years.
Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. He is currently working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities..
The Oath is a 2010 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras. It tells the cross-cut tale of two men, Abu Jandal and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whose meeting launched them on juxtaposed paths with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the September 11 attacks, US military tribunals and the U.S. Supreme Court. The film is the second of a trilogy, with the first being My Country, My Country (2006), documenting the lives of Iraqi citizens during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The third, Citizenfour (2014), focuses on the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. The Oath is distributed both theatrically and non-theatrically in the US by New York-based Zeitgeist Films.
Wish Me Away is a 2011 documentary film directed by Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf. Winner of 12 film festival awards, it is about the coming out of the country music singer and gay rights activist Chely Wright. In May 2010, she had become the first major country music performer to publicly come out as gay.
Lindsey Dryden is an Emmy award-winning British film director, producer and writer.
Andrew Ahn is an American film director and screenwriter who has directed the feature films Spa Night (2016) and Driveways (2019).
Better This World is a 2011 documentary film that was directed by Kelly Duane and Katie Galloway. It had its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 23, 2011, where it won two Golden Gate Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Bay Area Documentary Feature.
Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four is a 2016 documentary directed by Deborah Esquenazi and produced by Sam Tabet about the persecution of four Latina lesbians in 1997 and 1998 who allegedly gang-raped two young girls. The story investigates the wrongful convictions of Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh, and Anna Vasquez in the midst of the Satanic Panic witch-hunt era of the 1980s and 1990s.
Johnny Symons is a documentary filmmaker focusing on LGBT cultural and political issues. He is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he runs the documentary program and is the director and co-founder of the Queer Cinema Project. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA in documentary production from Stanford University. He has served as a Fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program.
Michael J. Saul is an American filmmaker best known for his 2015 dramatic feature film The Surface.
It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School is a 1996 American documentary film directed by Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen. It provides educators with information on how to teach elementary schoolchildren to be tolerant of gay and lesbian people. The film was noted as the "first of its kind" and was generally well received, although there was some backlash from conservatives. It was released in several film festivals, and had screenings in the 2000s.
Down a Dark Stairwell is a 2020 documentary about the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley in New York City. The film made its debut broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens on April 12, 2021.
