PLASTIC MAN

It was Janis Plotkin’s work as a community organizer that led her to develop an early interest in film as a tool for communicating values, history and culture. During that time she was invited to a press screening for a new start-up, the first ever Jewish Film Festival.  It was a life changing experience. She joined founding Director, Deborah Kaufman the next year to program and produce the groundbreaking, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest film festival of its type. While at the Festival she programmed high quality cinema and produced challenging panel discussions.  She was instrumental in building diverse audiences that reached 35,000 and reached thousands more programming films for public television KQED.

After 21 years at the Jewish Film Festival she resigned to pursue other interests in film. As Senior Film Programmer for the Mill Valley Film Festival she inaugurated the award-winning Vive el Cine!, a Spanish language film initiative. She taught college level film classes at Stanford University, UC Davis and San Francisco State University.  

In 2010 she joined film director William Farley to produce the: Plastic Man:  The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish. The 74-minute documentary screened in film festivals and art centers across the US, England & Germany, picking up an Audience Award along the way.  The film  was broadcast in 2017 on San Francisco’s PBS affiliate, KQED and Israel Television.

William Farley’s features, documentaries and short films have won countless awards and have been broadcast and screened in hundreds of film festivals around the world, including Sundance, New York, Mannheim, Chicago, and Sydney Film Festivals. Farley’s two dramatic feature films: Of Men and Angels and Citizen, opened at the Sundance Film Festival. Included among Farley’s 20 films are the artist biographies:  Shadow & Light: The Life and Art of Elaine Badgley Arnoux, 2007, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, 2007 and Darryl Henriques Is In Show Business 2006.  Other notable productions include Broke (1994 & 2004) and The Old Spaghetti Factory (2000).

FarleyFilm.com

Richard Levien co-edited the feature documentary D Tour, which won the Golden Gate award for Best Bay Area documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and appeared on the PBS series Independent Lens. Richard edited and crafted motion graphics for the short film On the Assassination of the President, which premiered at Sundance. He also edited the cult Internet hit, Store Wars, seen by 5.5 million people in its first 6 weeks of release.

As a director, Richard Levien’s Immersion, 2009, debuted at Slamdance Film Festival and also played Seattle, Sarasota, Palm Springs Shortfest, Mill Valley, Chicago International Children's and Media that Matters Film Festivals. Immersion won the "No Violence" Award at Ann Arbor film festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Short film. Richard was also awarded the prestigious Rainin Foundation screenwriting grant for his upcoming feature film.

Beth Custer is a San Francisco based composer, performer, bandleader, and the proprietor of BC Records. She composes for theatre, film, dance, television, installations and the concert stage. Beth has created scores for the contemporary chamber ensembles Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Zeitgeist, Earplay, City Winds, and Turtle Island and Kronos String Quartets; for the theatre productions of Campo Santo Theatre, Berkeley and San Diego Repertory Theatres, Magic Theatre, California Shakespeare, Overtone Industries, and Cornerstone Theatre; for the dance troupes Joe Goode Goode Performance Group, Roco Dance, Flyaway Productions, Ledoh, Harupin Ha, and Osseus Labyrinth; for the films of Cathy Lee Crane, Melinda Stone, Betsy Bayha, KQED, CBS/Film Roman, and Koohan Paik (aka Camera Obscura). Beth has created four musicals with award winning writer Octavio Solis. Her collaborative scores with inventor and MacArthur Fellow Trimpin lead her to compose Vinculum Symphony, a site-specific, large-scale work that unites chamber musicians with experimental instrument builders. She has over twenty-five recordings out with her ensembles Eighty Mile Beach, Clarinet Thing, Trance Mission, The Beth Custer Ensemble and Club Foot Orchestra. Her numerous awards include a six week artist residency in an Italian castle at Civitella Ranieri.

BethCuster.com