Click on the photos below to view excerpts from some of our work.
CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT!
A sculptural multimedia installation created collaboratively by Citizen Film, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), and Stanford University professor Ari Kelman, features 14 short films exploring T-shirts as canvasses for meditation on contemporary identities. The installation “airs out the laundry” of Jewish cultural identity, and offers a meditation on how contemporary ethnicity is manufactured and marketed.
CURRY STONE DESIGN PRIZE: HUNNARSHALA
Hunnarshala (winner of the 2014 Curry Stone Design Prize), founded in the wake of the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, India, facilitates community-driven, artisan-led reconstruction in post-disaster areas, as well as long-term redevelopment of cities and informal settlements. This film, directed by Citizen Film’s Sophie Constantinou and produced by the Curry Stone Foundation to promote its annual design awards, shows how Hunnarshala takes the long view on rehabilitation by training artisans and helping them start businesses, and facilitating sustainable economic development in places that are past the point of crisis.
HOOVER INSTITUTION: POTSDAM REVISITED
This multimedia collaboration between Citizen Film and the Hoover Institution showcases how a humanities archive can become a vehicle for public engagement with history using today’s digital technology. Directed by Sam Ball, and produced by Abraham D. Sofaer, the story of violinist Stuart Canin, who, as a 19-year-old GI performed a private concert for the Big Three on the outskirts of Berlin and ruins, is told in different media, transporting audiences back to an extraordinary intersection of history and music. Components of this project include a short film, a physical archive, an online archive at www.potsdamrevisited.org and a series of live events and audio segments that utilize a great story to invite audiences to explore a historical event and its implications.
JEWISH MUSEUM OF NEW YORK: BALANCING ACTS
This documentary, written and directed by Sam Ball, narrated by Ed Asner, captures a fleeting moment when avant-garde performers, musicians and artists—including Marc Chagall and the great Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels—risked their lives to create a Jewish theater with unprecedented mass appeal.
“Balancing Acts” was the centerpiece film in the Jewish Museum New York and Contemporary Jewish Museum San Francisco 2010 multimedia exhibition Chagall and the Artists of Russian-Jewish Theatre, 1919-1949. “Balancing Acts” was also presented in Paris’ Musée de la Musique exhibition on Marc Chagall in Fall 2015.
KQED PRESENTS: JOANN SFAR DRAWS FROM MEMORY
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, and a second film was co-produced for European public television dissemination by ARTE. The filmmakers follow the prolific, bestselling graphic novelist Joann Sfar from the nib of his pen to the wellsprings of inspiration in his mixed North African and European Jewish heritage and the lively streets and cafes of his current home in France. Directed by Sam Ball, and produced by Valerie Joseph.
POUMY
A selection of MoMA-New York’s Documentary Fortnight in 2005, this documentary, directed by Sam Ball and produced by Marian Sofaer, tells the story of a young mother in the French Resistance. It was distributed to classrooms by Alexander Street Press and—thanks to support from the Koret Foundation—was viewed and discussed by more than 10,000 high school and middle school students.
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SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY: SECOND CENTURY
Each of four short films Citizen Film created for the Symphony portrays a different aspect of the Symphony’s work building a community of music-lovers and musicians. Directed by Kate Stilley Steiner and produced by David Collier of Studio B.
SWISS BROADCASTING CORPORATION: MONA CARON
Mona Caron, a native of Ticino, now works as a muralist in California, creating large-scale paintings on walls. Citizen Film’s Kate Stilley Steiner caught up with the artist in San Francisco for a series of short films exploring the work of Swiss expatriate artists and designers, commissioned by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation.
WENDY MACNAUGHTON DRAWS CASTRO COMMONS
“Wendy MacNaughton Draws the ‘Castro Commons’– A Temporarily Permanent Space” was produced for Citizen Film’s 2012 collaboration with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on a “digital sukkah” multimedia installation for the center’s atrium.
Produced by Dan Wolf in association with 3200 Stories, a program of the JCC SF. Directed by Sam Ball.