I’m honored to be the recipient of a 2018 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship! The Sundance Documentary Fund is a great force in the doc field and it’s a thrill to be involved with them in this way. It’s also a plus that I’m a big fan of all of the other fellows’ work: Natalia Almada, Deborah Stratman, and Sky Hopinka.
I filmed an interview with Kane Tanaka, the oldest person in the world, in Fukuoka, Japan the other day. She’s 115 years old and credits her long life to family, sleep, not thinking too hard about things, and playing Othello. It was a great inspiration to meet her. The interview is for the ongoing documentary project I’m working on, The Oldest Person in the World.
Tickets are now on sale for our upcoming shows of A Thousand Thoughts in Los Angeles (Dec. 7) and New York (April 25)!!! Please get your tix early; both shows are likely to sell out, and we don’t want you standing outside the venue, feeling like a shmoe.
We had a great show of A Thousand Thoughts at the National Opera House in Athens! Wow – what a venue! It was a free show put on by the Summer Nostos Festival. It was our first time presenting this piece in a country where English is not universally spoken, so I was unclear how it might resonate. Would the humor translate? Was it too “American” to be meaningful to a Greek audience. They projected subtitles, and it seemed to all work fine. It was a packed house and a great audience – big standing ovation for the Kronos Quartet. Thank you to Christos Konstantakopoulos for making the screening happen. We’re off for the summer now – more screenings in the fall and then 2019. Check out https://athousandthoughts.film/shows/ for details.
Just got back from great screenings of A Thousand Thoughts at the Barbican in London and the Brighton Dome in Brighton. In a few weeks we head to Athens, Greece to do a show at the National Opera House. This photo was taken last month after a show we did at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. It was a great hometown event, and we won the festival audience award to boot! (Photo: Pamela Gentile)
If you’re at the CPH:DOX film festival in Copenhagen, I’ll be yakking about live cinema with Thom Powers on March 21st. Should be an interesting conversation – hope you can make it!
Absolutely thrilled about the premiere of A Thousand Thoughts the other night!! Two sold out shows, standing ovations, wow! With a film you never really know what you have until you experience it with an audiences. Profound thanks to everyone who helped make it happen: Joe Bini, Kirsten Johnson, Josh Penn, Janet Cowperthwaite, Kronos Quartet, C41 Media, Tommy Kriegsmann, Pete Sillen, Brendan Doyle, Evan Neff, Ayumi Ashley, Rich Bologna, Sierra Pettengill, Anna Hudak, Work-Order Design, Carl Williamson, Gary Hustwit, Jessica Edwards, Yoni Brook and many, many others!
Last couple of shoots for A THOUSAND THOUGHTS as we sprint towards the finish line and the Sundance premier next month. Filmed with Laurie Anderson the other night – she was a mesmerizing presence!
I’m happy to announce that A Thousand Thoughts, my new live cinema collaboration with the legendary Kronos Quartet, will be premiering at Sundance in the New Frontier slate along with my recent short, Julius Caesar Was Buried in a Pet Cemetery. Can’t wait to perform this new work!
We were thrilled to recently announce the recipients of the 2017 Sarah Jacobson Film Grant: Alyx Arumpac and Ja’Tovia Gary. Their projects knocked us out and you can get more details about both of them here. I’m grateful to Katie Bradshaw for help with the grant and the two panelists this year, Veronica Majano and Natasha Mendonca. For those of you who don’t know, Sarah Jacobson was a great underground/indie filmmaker and an inspiration and dear pal of mine. She died of cancer in 2004 and we’ve been doing this grant for ten years now to keep her spirit alive. She’d be thrilled by this year’s grantees and to know that her name is helping to get radical and feminist work out into the world.