Coates Promotes Bay Area Docs in Silverdocs Film Festival

The Bay Area will be well represented at this year’s show next week.
Besides Peter Nicks’s SFIFF award winning “The Waiting Room”, two of my own clients will be showing.

Debbie Lum’s “Seeking Asian Female” screens again after great critical success at Austin’s SXSW.
Seeking Asian Female screening schedule.

We have just wrapped my color grade and ZAP’s digital mastering of “Sweet Dreams” by Lisa and Rob Fruchtman of LIRO Films.

When the Fruchtmans asked me to finish color for a doc about Rwanda I knew there would be ghastly images and grim testimony of a terrible genocide that shamed the civilized world at the end of the 20th Century.

What I did not expect and was delighted to find was an exuberant women’s drumming group opening a film of beauty and reconciled joy. The ladies beat the blazes out of traditional African drums and dance ecstatically to it.
Then they go on to found an ice cream making collective in partnership with a Brooklyn business.
The country and the people of Rwanda are gorgeous and a colorist’s sweet dream assignment.

Sweet Dreams screening schedule.

Coates Promotes: “We Were Here”

My friends and clients David Weissman and Bill Weber made a magnificent film about the courageous response of San Francisco as a community to confront the AIDS crisis at the beginning in the early 80s and to overcome with a model now borrowed all over the world.
Cinematography by Marsha Kahm.

It premieres on PBS Independent Lens this week.

See the PBS website or their Facebook link for your local listings.