On June 13, 1978, the punk bands the Cramps and the Mutants played a free show for psychiatric patients at the Napa State Hospital in California. We Were There to Be There chronicles the people, politics, and cultural currents that led to the show and its live recording.
It is well known that San Francisco is a city shrouded in fog. In this short documentary, a local Theoretical Meteorologist uncovers the surprising hidden truth behind San Francisco's notorious, world-famous fog. Or does he?
The bleak outskirts of San Francisco act as the backdrop for this view into a jaded generation. Floating through their mid-twenties, four strangers interweave on one fateful day none of them are prepared for.
Several days in the lives, and profiles of, the owners and players of the open air street chess tables in downtown San Francisco. An informative and insightful portrait of a freely public, yet effectively anonymous, subculture: a unique and colorful patch of eccentric americana in the urban quilt of an international city. —Anonymous
“Last Men Standing,” the first feature-length documentary from The San Francisco Chronicle, Northern California’s largest newspaper was selected for entry into a series of prestigious LGBT festivals being held in the U.S. and Canada this spring. One of the few newspapers to write, direct and produce a feature-length documentary, this film follows the lives and experiences of eight long-term AIDS survivors.
Mash is a group of friends: racers, artists, students, musicians, designers, and photographers, all connected through bikes. What started as a small video project and have grown into a team of racers, a line of bikes produced with Cinelli, and an outlet for friends to support each other through bikes. The accompanying video takes a narrower view than the book, focusing primarily on street-riding in San Francisco. With exceptional riding and up-close cinematography, the video captures the joy of riding track bikes in a city like SF and passes that excitement along.
Drama starring Alexandra Clayton and Andy Dulman.
This pseudo-newsreel uses special effects to illustrate the fire caused by the San Francisco earthquake. A miniature model of downtown San Francisco is set ablaze and filmed.
The San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway comes to life in this elegy for modernity. The Freeway was deemed a triumph of engineering, a monument for human inventiveness. With the 1989 earthquake, however, the freeway was severely damaged and with it all the industrial-technological promises it held. Premonition shows the situation before the crisis, a deceptive moment of industrial harmony.
"Straight Outta Hunters Point", the award-winning Hip Hop documentary by Hunters Point filmmaker Kevin Epps is a stark cinematic portrait of a community struggling to stop the forces of gentrification -- denial of jobs, police brutality, environmental racism and more -- that have pushed 23 percent of San Francisco's Black population out of the City in the past decade. It has won the acclaim of critics and audiences at independent film festivals around the U.S., including Sundance and the Santa Fe Film Fest, where it was described as "a gritty, uncompromising film about the evolution and perseverance of a black culture in the shadow of poverty, race riots and gang-related rap wars."
Documentary on legendary San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Metal band Death Angel.
The Rejected is a made-for-television documentary film about homosexuality, the first of its kind to be broadcast on American television. It was first shown on KQED on September 11, 1961, and was later syndicated to National Educational Television (NET) stations across the United States, receiving positive critical reviews.
1994 at the Ambassador Hotel, 55 Mason Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California. From 1978 to 1996, the hotel was managed by Hank Wilson, a San Francisco LGBT activist who made the hotel a model for harm reduction housing. 134 run-down and exhausted rooms populated by homeless men and women, sometimes even children. All of them in urgent need of care, compassion and humanity. Nobly provided by voluntarily working professional health care and social workers staff, various benefactors, volunteers, neighbors, and community contributions.
Super-light lyrical entertaining quickie film of a Golden Gate soft shoe crossing.
As only National Geographic can, The Great Quake tells the terrifying and inspiring tale of a pitched battle between man and nature told by the stories of people who lived through it. On April 18, 1906 the greatest natural disaster in American history strikes without warning. Concrete buildings explode into clouds of dust and rubble and fires break out by the thousands. For the next three days, San Francisco's corrupt and charismatic Mayor takes the helm of this city under siege, making decisions that are swift and radical. This is the terrifying and inspiring tale of a pitched battle between man and nature told by the stories of people who lived through it.
Following the death of his wife, Andrew Lockney is assigned a special mission codenamed Two Forty-Six, but Andrew and everyone involved with the mission become prey to a mysterious killer.
A collage of live performance, intimate interviews, and cityscapes featuring San Francisco punk club Mabuhay Gardens. With Flipper's Will Shatter, The Avengers' Danny Furious, Negative Trend and more.
A repeating journey across the San Francisco Bay Bridge becomes a journey into disintegrating visuals, video transformation, with an accompanying sound track taken from "40 years of Radio". As a film, it anticipated the end of the film medium, and the emergence of the video medium.
Unable or unwilling to conform to the rigid atmosphere of Washington and Lee College as a freshman, Ed bailed out after a brief stint there to attend—and graduate from—Miami of Ohio. After graduate work at UK, he left for the Left Coast, and it suited him just fine. The first stop was a writing instructorship at Oregon State, then enrollment into the Stanford Writing Program, a move shared by Jim, Wendell, and Gurney. There he cultivated, among other things, relationships with Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, and—most importantly—Ken Kesey. Ed didn’t just experience the 1960s; he wallowed in them. Also, a bonus interview from 1996 program, Signature Live.
Michelle needs a break. A computer programmer who's fed up by what she sees as the greed and idiocy of the Internet, Michelle requests and is granted a monthlong sabbatical from her job in this 2001 independent film by Maria Breaux.