Movies: Citizen Film

This short film reveals the inspiration, motivation and political challenges at San Francisco City Hall during the frantic days leading up to the first government-sanctioned same-sex marriage....

Depicts what happens when students K-8 discuss LGBT-related topics in age-appropriate ways. Shot in six public and private schools (in San Francisco and New York City, as well as Madison, Wisconsin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts), It’s Elementary mode...

In 1996, Women's Educational Media released their groundbreaking documentary Its Elementary-Talking About Gay Issues in School. It's Still Elementary tells the fascinating history of why and how the 1996 film was made, the infamous response it provok...

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...

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...

The savory short features 2015 Berlinale Kamera honoree Alice Waters, whose vision started Berkeley Unified School District’s free, universal and delicious organic lunch program. The screening preceded a feature-length documentary, discussion with Wa...

At Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Fillmore, magic is happening. Throughout the 2024 school year, Magic Zone students in Citizen Film's filmmaking and media production class collaborated in painting murals that represent their community, cult...

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...

"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....

University of Washington professor Noam Pianko and his students collaborated with Citizen Film, the Pacific Northwest Jewish Archive and Seattle’s Jewish Community Federation to unpack and digitize archival photos and documents, then turn them into s...

"Throwing Curves" uses striking archival images, observational footage of the 97-year old industrial designer, Eva Zeisel, who is still an artist at work. this along with engaging interviews to capture her personality which is as daring and persuasiv...

The Fillmore was once a thriving, vibrant, and multicultural community with one of the most prominent jazz scenes on the West Coast and hundreds of black-owned businesses. The neighborhood’s prosperity quickly came to an end as urban redevelopment to...

Ron Padgett (1942- ) is a poet and editor whose artistic career took off during his teenaged years in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There, along with Joe Brainard and Dick Gallup, he produced The White Dove Review, an art and culture magazine. Both Padgett and Br...

This Ukrainian-Jewish teenager immigrated to San Francisco as a young child. Now on the brink of adulthood, she interviews her grandparents about their new lives yearning to see her American world through their eyes. Yelena understands that life in t...

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...

Rita Semel, interfaith pioneer and Jewish activist, is a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Awards "for her life-long successes in creating healthy, just, and inclusive communities in the Bay Area and worldwide. She builds...

“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...

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....

CHOOSING CHILDREN is a pioneering film about parenting in non-traditional families and helped to open dialogue about the meaning and reality of the "modern family." This film takes an intimate look at the issues faced by lesbians and gay men who deci...

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...