Citizen Film

Bishop William Swing, winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2006 Community Leadership Awards (The San Francisco Foundation Award) - for creating a more just and compassionate community. He reaches out across religions and takes risks to push for innovative solutions to social problems. Bishop Swing's perseverance in fighting homelessness, raising HIV/AIDS awareness, and providing equal access to healthcare has left an indelible imprint on local, national, and international communities.

Sylvia Rosales-Fike is the founder, president and chief executive officer of AnewAmerica Corporation. She has earned the Robert C. Kirkwood Award made to an individual in recognition of outstanding community service, commitment and inspired leadership. Sylvia has spearheaded social and economic development opportunities that empower individuals to improve their economic lives. Her innovative, passionate, and collaborative spirit enables immigrants to bring their own families out of poverty. Sylvia has founded organizations including CARECEN, Community Bank of the Bay, and AnewAmerica and received a San Francisco Foundation award in 2010.

EDC designs, implements, and evaluates programs to improve education, health, and economic opportunity worldwide. Collaborating with both public and private partners, we strive for a world where all people are empowered to live healthy, productive lives.

"People of the Graphic Novel" is a playful introduction to the history of an art form: from the first "funny pages" to seminal artists including Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman.

Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2008 Community Leadership Awards (The San Francisco Foundation Award) - for building unity and alliances across traditional racial and gender lines, and for serving as a selfless and inspirational advocate for oppressed peoples around the world.

"Mission Asset Fund's work cuts to the core of the financial pain points families everywhere face." - Sam Ruiz

Take a journey with master graphic novelist Joann Sfar as he finds inspiration in his Algerian-Jewish heritage and the lively streets and cafes of his current home in France. This collaboration between Citizen Film, KQED Presents and Paris-based Les Films du Poisson was telecast on PBS stations around the U.S. in 2012.

Aim High is a recipient of the San Francisco Community Leadership Awards "for closing the achievement gap through programs that inspire a love of learning and a strong sense of community. Through its innovative, free summer school program, it supports the educational and developmental needs of middle-school-aged children, providing the tools for learning, a commitment to their community, and the hope for their future." - San Francisco Foundation

MEMORY PATHS by Zoe Pollak - Currently, physics does not allow for time travel to the past or future. But you travel back in time every day. Memory paths is a web module designed to mimic involuntary memory.

Proximity Designs is a sustainable development group that works to improve the lives of the rural poor in Myanmar. Proximity Designs boosts agricultural productivity by designing, producing, and distributing affordable products for people living on less than $2 a day.

The San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Awards presents Jordan Simmons, artistic director of the East Bay Center for Performing Arts, with the Helen Crocker Russell Award for building a better future for young adults through music and cultural programs. As a musician and arts administrator, he has changed the lives of thousands of people in Richmond's Iron Triangle through rigorous artistic training, school-based outreach, and performances of traditional and original work.

The San Francisco Foundation 2013 Community Leadership Awards presents Nancy Hom with the Helen Crocker Russell Award, made to an under-recognized, mature artist who has made a significant and ongoing contribution in the Bay Area. Nancy Hom, has used the arts as a means to reclaim and affirm the histories, struggles, and contributions of multicultural and underserved communities. Through her silkscreen posters, illustrations, 3-D installations, and curatorial work, Nancy has addressed a range of social issues and causes. In addition to being an artist, curator, and writer who continues to push the boundaries of her art after forty years, she has also nurtured the artistic and organizational growth of over a dozen Bay Area arts organizations. Her projects have had a profound influence, from healing historical trauma to mentoring the next generation of artists to build community through art. www.sff.org/cla

Legendary short story writer Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) captured moments of grace in the cafeterias and laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) was a poet, writer, publisher and playwright whose work has been associated with the Beat movement. Born and raised in New York City, she associated with poets such as Amiri Baraka, Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara, co-editing The Floating Bear magazine with Baraka in the 60s and co-founding the Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre. Throughout her life in New York and later out West, both her sense of anarchic limitlessness and her zeal for collaboration guided her work.

Gary's Story is part of a collective filmmaking project that looks at relationships between teenagers and their grandparents in families that have recently immigrated to the US from the former Soviet Union. Gary's family is from Moscow.

Join former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, historian David Kennedy and a diverse group of Americans to explore whether a unifying set of beliefs, an American creed, can prove more powerful than the issues that divide us.

Wired for What? visits four very different elementary schools grappling with computerization to find out if technology is helping to change our schools for the better or if it is dulling students’ creativity and draining precious resources from other crucial educational needs.

This short film reveals the inspiration, motivation and political challenges at San Francisco City Hall during the frantic days leading up to the first government-sanctioned same-sex marriage.

When filmmaker Debra Chasnoff faces stage-4 cancer, she turns her lens on herself and the disease. What emerges is a portrait of her extended LGBTQ family —a story about hanging on while letting go.

Born in Ozan, Arkansas in 1933, White traveled the world observing and documenting the Black experience from Nigeria to France to Chicago. He arrived in the Bay Area in 1958, and opened the first Black owned art gallery in San Francisco.