Pitch + Kvell takes place online via zoom on Tuesday, November 14 at 3pm PT. RSVP here.
Join us in kvelling over JFI’s 2023 Filmmakers in Residence as they pitch their works in progress at JFI’s third annual Pitch + Kvell online event.
Experience a critical part of a film’s development as the Residents, who have taken their films to the next level in the yearlong JFI Filmmaker Residency, “pitch” their projects to some of the film industry's foremost experts on film development for feedback and advice. This is a rare opportunity for the JFI community to see inside the filmmaking process and learn first-hand about upcoming JFI-supported films and all that it takes to complete them.
Pitch + Kvell is hosted by JFI Filmmaker Services Director Marcia Jarmel, who has helped the Residents develop their projects over the past year. The 2023 Pitch + Kvell panelists are Simon Kilmurry, Member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences; Josh Welsh, President of Film Independent; Anne Lai, Executive Director of SFFILM.
Varda Bar-Kar, Janis Ian & The Art of Song
In the mid-60s, Janis Ian, a tiny teenage Jewish singer-songwriter from New Jersey scores a hit (Society's Child, 1966) about an interracial relationship. For the next six decades, Janis overcomes homophobia, record industry misogyny, and a life-threatening illness to produce an indelible body of work that continues to draw large audiences around the globe.
Maya Cueva, A Rebel Without a Pause
A Rebel Without a Pause tells the inspiring and untold true story of how Doctor Quentin Young —personal physician to Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton — risked his life fighting to bring free healthcare to the people.
Daniel Hymanson, Wind Up
An artist must say goodbye to her historic Chicago home of 50 years to relocate to a senior apartment complex. Her filmmaker friend moves in and helps prepare the house for sale, as his own family joins together to confront a series of health crises.
Leigh Jurecka, A Night at the Stone Burlesk
A filmmaker's investigation into the theater her in-laws secretly ran in Detroit takes a dramatic turn when she and her husband uncover a trove of hidden films, photographs, and audiotapes that reveal decades of deeply buried family secrets, causing them to question everything they thought they knew about the family.
Sergio Maza, Echoes of Foreign Films, The Talbots' Legacy
Echoes of Foreign Films is an intimate portrait of Dan and Toby Talbot's personal and professional life and their extraordinary contribution to the art film industry, and a cinematic journey through some of the most influential foreign movies that the Talbots brought to the U.S. and Canada.
Renée Wilson, The 13th Percent
The 13th Percent is a personal documentary exploring filmmaker Renée Wilson’s unexpected discovery of her non-Jewish African American family’s 13% Ashkenazi Jewish heritage in a 2018 DNA report. The revelation offered a tantalizing clue to a longstanding family mystery, the identity of Wilson’s paternal great-grandfather and his family.