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.

Deep in the editing of my new film A Thousand Thoughts – a live documentary collaboration between myself and the legendary Kronos Quartet. I was telling someone recently that I feel like if this were a marathon, I’d be at mile 18 — you’re deep in it and on some level you know you are going to make it, but at the same time, you know it’s gonna get ugly between here and the finish line. There’s a lot of ground still to cover. Editing is intense. I love it though. And Kronos is a great muse.  I always say to Kat, “This is the hardest film I’ve ever made – I’m not sure I can do it.” And she always says, “You say that with every film.” And I say, “Really?” And she says, “Yeah.” But this one really is the hardest!

Sarah Jacobson’s films will be screening in NYC on July 13 and SF on July 15-16. If you’ve never seen Sarah’s work, she was a indomitable force in underground film in the 1990s – a fierce and totally radical feminist voice in cinema and culture years before Girls. Come see Sarah’s masterwork feature Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and a selection of her fantastic shorts, including a film that Sarah and I made about the making of cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. (the photo is of us with Fee Waybill from the Tubes who starred in The Stains).

I am thrilled to announce the Kickstarter campaign for my new documentary film A Thousand Thoughts! Join me in getting this project across the finish line!

Had the great honor and pleasure recently of filming Terry Riley at his ranch in Northern California for the Untiled Kronos Project.

I made a new VR piece with Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Urbanized) about Buckminster Fuller and his signature creation – the geodesic dome. We shot “This is What the Future Looked Like” at some of the great extant domes in North America, including the Montreal Expo 67 dome and the dome that Fuller built and lived in in Carbondale, Illinois. The piece is a meditation on design, the utopian impulse, and the virtual reality form itself.

Original music by Yo La Tengo and additional music by Todd Griffin.

“This is What the Future Looked Like” premiered at the True/False Film Fest in March and will screen all over the place this year.

We interviewed Tanya Tagaq this week for my Kronos Quartet live cinema project.

Wow!

If you don’t know Tanya’s work, she is an Innuit throat singer who has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet many times over the years. She is an absolutely mesmerizing and stunning performer and, on top of that, she is righteous in her politics and a fascinating thinker about music and life. Thrilled to have her presence and voice in this film.