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The Team

Sheila Ganz, Director/Producer/Editor, her first documentary is the 56 minute first documentary is the 56 minute Unlocking the Heart of Adoption 2003, which screened at film festivals and adoption conferences and is in educational distribution worldwide.  Ganz created a Discussion Guide and three hour Curriculum on Loss and Identity to accompany the film.  Unlocking the Heart of Adoption had a NETA feed launch on public television 2005.  The film is currently airing on The Documentary Channel.  An activist for adult adoptee rights Ganz testified before the California House Judiciary Committee 2001.  Also that year Ganz testified before the California Senate Judiciary Committee for birthmother rights.  Ganz received the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s Angels in Adoption Award 2006.  Ganz taught Making Your First Documentary and Visualizing Your Documentary at Film Arts Foundation 2004-2007.  She wrote two stage plays Pretend It Didn't Happen about relinquishing her daughter for adoption 1984, which had a staged reading at the Julian Theatre, San Francisco.  And Leaving Joe about domestic violence 1986, which had staged readings at the EXITheatre, San Francisco and Palo Alto Playwrights Forum, Palo Alto, CA.  Ganz received the Best Work-in-Progress Documentary Award, San Francisco Women’s Film Festival for On Life's Terms: Mothers in Recovery  (formerly Moms Living Clean) 2009.  Ganz earned a  BA in  Sculpture; and MA, in  Interdisciplinary Arts, San Francisco State University.  Her artwork has been exhibited in and around Boston, MA, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

VIVIEN HILLGROVE, Consulting Editor, was a consultant on Ganz's first film Unlocking the Heart of Adoption.  Hillgrove has 40 years of experience.  She has specialized in dialogue editing, working as dialogue editor on The Right Stuff, Never Cry Wolf, and One from the Heart, and as dialogue supervisor on Amadeus, The Mosquito Coast, and Blue Velvet.  As picture editor, she cut Emiko Omori’s Hot Summer Winds and Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June.  The documentaries she has edited include: The Forest through the Trees, Yakoana, The Indigenous People’s Earth Summit, Heart of the Sea, and First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee with Deanne Borshay-Liem, as well as documentaries by Lourdes Portillo, including The Devil Never Sleeps and Senorita Extraviada, Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 2002.

JENNINE LANOUETTE, Story Consultant, in the past 18 years she has worked with Pixar Animation Studios, Independent Television Service, Film Arts Foundation, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and numerous screenwriters, directors and documentary filmmakers including: Smitten and Following Sean, POV (2007).  She teaches screenwriting at Lucasfilm and Pixar.  Her articles on story structure have appeared in Release Print magazine. As a free-lance journalist, she has written for Premiere, The Village Voice, Ms., Sight and Sound, Screen International, and The Independent. Currently, she is working on a book entitled Beyond Thrills and Chills: Toward a New Understanding of Character and Theme in Screenplay Structure.

FRANCES NKARA, Additional Camera, experimental documentary filmmaker of the 27 minute film Downpour Resurfacing which traces Robert Hall’s rekindling sense of self and strength, despite the childhood sexual and physical abuses that he recounts.  Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival 2003; No Violence Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival 2003; and Best Experimental Film, New Jersey Film Festival 2003.  National broadcast, Independent Lens.

SONG CHEN, Additional Camera, Associate Producer on the ITVS funded China Blues.  Following a pair of denim jeans from birth to sale, China Blues links the power of the U.S. consumer market to the daily lives of a Chinese factory owner and two teenaged female factory workers.  Filmed both in the factory and in the workers’ faraway village, this documentary provides a rare, human glimpse at China’s rapid transformation into a free market society.  National broadcast, Independent Lens.

Funded in part by: Pacific Pioneer Fund, Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund, Open Meadows Foundation, Inc., Penny Harvest Roundtable and Individual Donors.

Please contact us at: 415.564.3691 or sheila@onlifesterms.org if you or your group would like to host a fundraising screening.

 

(c) 2012 Sheila Ganz