Movies: Citizen Film

“Factory-made wheelchairs are huge, heavy and ugly.” To counter this reality, wheelchair riders Ralph Hotchkiss and Omar Talavera began making beautiful, all-terrain wheelchairs. Their work draws on the resourcefulness of disabled people in the Third...

This playful short film was produced in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco as part of a multimedia installation entitled "We are not permanent but we are not temporary." The installation was designed to explore the imperm...

In July 1945, 19-year-old rifleman Stuart Canin found himself on the veranda of President Harry S. Truman’s temporary “little White House” in Potsdam, Germany. The president asked Canin to play the violin in order to break the ice of tense negotiatio...

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....

Making from-scratch meals for 5,000 kids is hard work for everyone, and it happens every day at the Berkeley Public Schools Central Kitchen. Part of the Lunch Love Community series....

Activist James Richards is an icon of the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. For 80 years, he has fought steadfastly to provide his community with what they urgently need: jobs. As a leader of the Aboriginal Blackman United (ABU)—whose slogan is “If...

"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....

In 2002, Sophie Constantinou interviewed Ron Padgett, Connie Lewellyn and Kenward Elmslie and recorded their recollections of Joe Brainard’s life, including his longtime partnership with Elmslie, and his works, including his noted garden collages. Th...

During the Great Depression, the Group Theater—including Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets—gave voice to a new generation of immigrants....

In 2002, Sophie Constantinou and Bill Weir interviewed Padgett about his life and works, specifically his friendship and collaborations with the New York School of Poets. These moments were captured as part a series of short films catalyzed by Kenwar...

This documentary recounts the adventure of a young Jewish mother who escaped the Nazis and joined the French Resistance. The film’s hauntingly poetic landscape conveys the intensity and mysterious exhilaration of her wartime years. Understatedly eloq...

A Foot in the Door tells the story of Kindergarten to College (K2C), the first universal children’s savings account program in the United States. Launched by the City and County of San Francisco, the program automatically provides a college savings a...

Jewish photographers had enormous impact in changing how Americans came to see themselves. The liberating power of their cameras, both in the past and today, is the theme of a multimedia exhibition and a course at the University of Michigan....

Moscow, January 1948. In the bitter cold, a large crowd attends the State Funeral of the Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels. An official proclamation mourns the death of "a great People's Artist of the Soviet Union." What people are really m...

Citizen Film partners with Stanford Math Professor Jo Boaler to help tell the story of her groundbreaking work at YouCubed.org. Housed at Stanford University’s School of Education, YouCubed.org’s mission is to give teachers, parents and students the ...

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....

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....

In 1939, Yiddish was the spoken language of three-quarters of the world's Jews. But when leading Jewish scholars convened in 1980, they estimated that only 70,000 Yiddish books remained in the world. This engaging, often funny documentary film chroni...

Chris Renfro doesn’t just grow and harvest grapes on a hillside high above San Francisco’s Highway 280 to make delicious local wine. He is dedicated to building a sustainable food community that nourishes every member of the local economy and ecosyst...

Afatasi The Artist is a San Francisco based mixed-media conceptual artist and futurist. Her artwork—which includes textiles and fine art tapestry, small paintings and murals, metal work and clothing design—is a continuous exploration of the intersect...