Filmmakers

Erin Palmquist has worked for independent filmmakers as well as Lucasfilm, National Geographic Explorer, and PBS. From Baghdad to The Bay is her first feature length documentary. She produced, edited, and filmed BDSM: It’s Not What You Think! a half-hour documentary that premiered at the Frameline32 Film Festival in 2008. She is the director of photography on 5 Blocks, a feature length documentary chronicling the revitalization of the Central Market Street neighborhood in San Francisco. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Erin is also a producer and director of photography for the documentary shorts series Oakland Originals. During the summer of 2014 over 24,000 viewers saw Oakland Originals shorts before feature films at the Grand Lake Theater.

In her film work, Erin seeks to bring communities of people together by telling poignant stories in an entertaining and visually compelling ways. With a strong focus on ethical filmmaking, she strives to share stories that challenge our “understanding” of the world around us.

www.erinpalmquist.com

Frances Reid has been producing, directing, and shooting documentary films for over 30 years. Her production Long Night’s Journey Into Day: South Africa’s search for Truth & Reconciliation won the Grand Jury Award for best Documentary at Sundance 2000, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 and a DGA award in 2002, and has been exhibited at festivals worldwide.

Her film Skin Deep, exploring race relations on college campuses was broadcast nationally on PBS and is now in use by nearly 2,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. In 1994, she received an Academy Award nomination for her documentary short Straight From The Heart.  Additional producing and directing credits include such films as the groundbreaking documentary on Lesbian mothers and child custody, In the Best Interests of the Children (1977), a Blue Ribbon Winner at the American Film Festival. Her film The Faces of AIDS (1992) won a First Place at the Black Filmmakers‚ Hall of Fame. Her cinematography credits include The Times of Harvey Milk, Visions of the Spirit, The Ride to Wounded Knee, Reno’s Kids, and scores of other award-winning documentaries including Deborah Hoffmann’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.

Eli Olson is an Emmy Award winning film editor. Eli won an Emmy for her work on “My Flesh and Blood” for HBO Films, which also won an Emmy for Best Documentary, and the Audience Award and Best Director Prizes at Sundance Film Festival. In 2014, Eli co-directed the documentary “’Stories from Tohoku” about the courage and strength of the survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. “Tohoku” won a Jury Prize at the 2014 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and was featured on PBS.  Other editing projects include “Heaven Adores You”, a documentary on singer Elliott Smith featured at San Francisco International Film Festival, and “3 Still Standing”, a documentary about the rise and fall of three San Francisco comedians.  “Standing” was featured at the 2014 Mill Valley Film Festival. In 2015, Eli edited “The Nine”, a non fiction feature by acclaimed photographer Katy Grannan, and “Saving Eden”, a documentary by Oscar winning director Bill Couturie. Eli also edited the feature films, “And Then Came Lola,” a comedy, and “Mrs. Menendez” a feature length documentary for A&E Films. Other non-fiction television credits include “Sam Cooke: Crossing Over” for PBS’ American Masters, “Amelia Earhart” and “The Boston Strangler” for National Geographic, “True Life” for MTV,  “Sports Wives” for A&E, and “Rocket Dogs” for Animal Planet.

Andrew Gersh is an award-winning documentary film and video editor based in Berkeley, California. His work has appeared on Netflix, Amazon Prime, PBS, ABC, MSNBC, National Geographic, Discovery, Turner Broadcasting, the BBC and Channel 4, UK and in museums and theaters worldwide. He is a Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow.

His latest feature documentaries include CRIP CAMP, winner of the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. CRIP CAMP was acquired by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions and Netflix.

For REAL BOY, he was awarded the Karen Schmeer Excellence in Documentary Editing Award at the 2016 Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFBoston 2016), and the James Lyons Editing Award For Documentary Feature at the 2016 Woodstock Film Festival. The film has won best-of-fest awards around the world, and had its national broadcast premiere on PBS’ Independent Lens.

Neva Tassan worked for nine years as a criminal defense attorney and is passionate about giving a voice to stories that would otherwise not be heard. Neva is also the production manager of One, a feature film by East Side Sushi producer Julie Rubio, which is currently in pre-production. Neva received her BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and JD from Golden Gate University School of Law.

Jennifer Huang has been a documentary filmmaker in the Bay Area for 14 years. She recently co-produced a four-hour documentary series, Standing on Sacred Ground, about indigenous people fighting to save their sacred sites, including locations in Papua New Guinea, Canada, Peru, Ethiopia.  At the documentary department at Lucasfilm, she wrote and produced Harlem’s Black Hellfighters: Black Soldiers of World War I, and contributed to nine other films, with topics ranging from Gertrude Bell to Dracula, from Tin Pan Alley to the Congo. She has worked as a writer, field producer and associate producer on productions for PBS, the Travel Channel, HGTV, TNT and AZN TV, and she co-founded Hyphen, an Asian American news and culture magazine. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Social Welfare and Ethnography through Cinema.

Joe Brody is a PromaxBDA and Emmy Award-winning Motion Graphic Designer. Originally from New York, he graduated with a BFA from Alfred University and now resides in the Bay Area where he enjoys spending time outdoors as much as possible.  He won the Emmy for the live broadcast of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Parade on KTVU for Art Direction and Motion Graphics. He currently works at Pac-12 Networks as the Senior Motion Designer and works on graphics for live sporting events including image campaigns and support for the network’s studio shows.

William Ryan Fritch is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has scored and contributed music to numerous award winning documentary and narrative films; including recently the 2016 Academy Award nominated documentary “4.1 Miles.” His music has been featured in films, shows and miniseries for Netflix, HBO, Amazon, AMC, CBS, IFC, Showtime, Discovery, and PBS as well as for numerous dance and theatre productions, art installations and in national ad campaigns and PSA’s. In addition to his commissioned multimedia work, he has an active recording career, releasing more than 30 albums of his unique amalgam of Folk, Contemporary Classical, and Experimental music. His distinct, organic sound is the product of his diverse talents as an instrumentalist and recording engineer, we he utilizes a vast and varied arsenal of live, acoustic instrumentation  to fully realize his compositions and scores as a solo endeavor.

Raised in Palo Alto, CA and educated at UC Santa Cruz and SF State University, Dan Olmsted joined the staff of Berkeley’s Saul Zaentz Film Center in 1987, and spent 15 years working there as a sound editor and re-recording mixer. The Zaentz company produced such well-known films as ‘Amadeus’ and ‘The English Patient’, and also provided sound design for many other documentary and feature films.

Now working at Berkeley Sound Artists, Olmsted continues to design and mix sound for a wide variety of films. When he’s not teaching or mixing films, he plays guitar in the local bands, Loretta Lynch and Mushroom.

Gary Coates has been continuously working in the San Francisco Film Industry since 1975. He came to San Francisco in 1975 to study cinema at San Francisco State University. W.A.Palmer hired him as an apprentice color timer in his motion picture laboratory. In 1985, he entered the telecine practice at Diner+Allied. One Pass Video hired him in 1987 to be a post production supervisor for their telecine department. In 1991,Western Images brought him on as a telecine technical director and then as the senior colorist. After the company closed in 2001, he freelanced at other San Francisco telecine houses including Varitel Video, American Zoetrope, Retina, and SpyPost. Since 2004, he has been working on ways to make my craft affordable, practical, and a creative advance for filmmakers especially in the San Francisco Bay Area and now internationally in Hong Kong. Gary is a committed advocate for the independent cinema and in particular social issue non-fiction. He has also trained others in the craft and welcome inquiries from universities and colleges.

Scott Schwerdtfeger is the director of photography, editor and post-production manager at Little Thunder Films. He has served as an Assistant Editor on the short documentary Halmoni. He is also a freelance videographer and editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Scott graduated from UC Davis with a B.A. in Technocultural Studies & Film Studies in 2013.

Kat Cole is a Bay Area artist working within independent film and contemporary dancetheater as a director and producer. She holds an MFA in Film from California College of the Arts and was a fellow with the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

Recent film projects include producing short films directed by Chris Mason Johnson (TEST) and by Dana Genshaft, and line producing for the San Francisco Dance Film Festival’s Co-Laboratory Program.

She co-founded and co-directs the IZZIE-nominated detour dance as well as the annual Tiny Dance Film Festival.  detour dance’s short films have been screened across the globe, receiving 1st place in the SF Weekly’s Masterminds Competition and a 1st place Audience Award in the Barbary Coast Film Festival.  detour has been the recipient of grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Horizons Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Fund, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Zellerbach Family Foundation and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Erica Marcus has been working on documentary and narrative films for more than twenty years. She began her film career working in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan.  Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, she assisted the Cannes award winning filmmaker Hu Jin Quan (胡金铨 or King Hu).  In the mid-nineties, Erica was based in China where she produced and directed Behind the Scenes (电影与电影人), a popular weekly prime time program on international film and film festivals.  Her documentary films include My Home, My Prison, which premiered at Sundance in the Documentary Competition and the ITVS funded film, Alive in Limbo about Palestinian refugee youth in Lebanon. Erica is currently co-directing with Christiane Badgley, the NEH Bridging Cultures funded documentary Guangzhou Dream Factory about the African community in Guangzhou, China.

As a cinematographer, her work is distinct for its heart, energy and perspective. Every project she dives into becomes an opportunity to discover, create and inspire. She was awarded Best Emerging Filmmaker by SF International Women’s Film Festival in 2005. Since then, she has continued to be a trusted collaborator of many directors, shooting projects funded by organizations like San Francisco Film Society, Danish Arts Council and French National Center of Fine Arts. Her works have screened in film festivals around the globe including the Rotterdam International Film Festival & Busan International Film Festival among others. In 2013, she received a Cinematography Special Jury Award from the LA Asian Pacific Film Fest for lensing the documentary Harana. A New Color, her 2nd feature documentary, premiered at the 2015 Mill Valley Film Festival. Both feature documentaries won Audience Awards in various film festivals and have aired on PBS.