Watch Life in Hot, Dry Lands (California) (1949) Online Free

Margaret Kilgallen: Heroines

"I especially hope to inspire young women, because I often feel like so much emphasis is put on how beautiful you are, and how thin you are, and not a lot of emphasis is put on what you can do and how smart you are. I'd like to change the emphasis of what's important when looking at a woman." Filmed in San Francisco in 2000, Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) discusses the female figures she incorporated into many of her paintings and graffiti tags. Loosely based on women she discovered while listening to folk records, watching buck dance videos, or reading about the history of swimming, Kilgallen painted her heroines to inspire others and to change how society looks at women. Three of Kilgallen's heroines—Matokie Slaughter, Algia Mae Hinton, and Fanny Durack—are shown and heard through archival recordings. Kilgallen is shown tagging train cars with her husband, artist Barry McGee, in a Bay Area rail yard and painting in her studio at UC Berkeley (source: Art21).

Riding Giants

Riding Giants is story about big wave surfers who have become heroes and legends in their sport. Directed by the skateboard guru Stacy Peralta.

2004

Buchanan Stories / Buchanan Change

Buchanan Mall is five consecutive blocks of public parkland in the heart of San Francisco’s Western Addition. 7,000 low-income residents who live adjacent to Buchanan Mall face acute challenges: recent, rapid gentrification and decades-long cycles of unemployment and mass incarceration. Against this backdrop, a remarkable new story has unfolded. This predominantly African-American community has come together to re-imagine and reclaim Buchanan Mall as connective tissue, repairing the neighborhood’s fractured social fabric, celebrating local culture, creating small businesses, and advocating for safe, affordable housing.

California Nurses Foundation - A Little Different

Citizen Film worked closely with The California Nurses Foundation (CNF) to identify nurses who are strong storytellers, and engage them in creating first-person documentaries. These intensely personal narratives emblemize strategies for providing healthcare in an increasingly diverse State. Citizen Film collaborated with CNF to curate those stories into a digital curriculum that provides cultural-competency training to CNF’s very large constituency of healthcare providers around the state.

Back On Track - Out Of The System

Low-level narcotics offenders too often cycle in and out of jail, re-offending soon after they hit the streets. District Attorney Kamala D. Harris has convened City leaders to answer this problem and, along with key partners, has launched Back on Track, an innovative education and employment reentry initiative focusing on young adult drug offenders. Designed to increase community safety by reducing recidivism, Back on Track couples strict accountability and close supervision with education, employment support and health care. The purpose of Back on Track is to prevent young people from committing crimes by leading them to make life changing choices.

E4FC - 2013 San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Awards

The San Francisco Foundation presents 2013 Community Leadership Awardee, Educators for Fair Consideration (E4FC), with The San Francisco Foundation Award, made to an organization demonstrating exemplary commitment to improving human relations in the Bay Area. E4FC provides direct support to and advocacy for highly motivated, college-bound undocumented students who had come to the United States as children and wished to remain. They are a leader in the field of immigrant work, providing youth tangible support and the space for them to tell their own story. As a result, E4FC's work is an essential part of the DREAMers movement catapulting the organizations role as a leader in both the Bay Area and as a national model in supporting and empowering immigrant youth. www.sff.org/cla

Flood in the Desert

Explore the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the second deadliest disaster in California history. A colossal engineering and human failure, the dam was built by William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer who ensured the growth of Los Angeles by bringing the city water via aqueduct. The catastrophe killed more than 400 people and destroyed millions of dollars of property.

2022

Wild Window: Bejeweled Fishes

Bejeweled Fishes captures the spectacular beauty of the myriad fishes inhabiting coral reefs of the Tropical and Eastern Pacific. This Wild Window was captured in the Maldives Islands, Fiji, the Philippines, Mexico, California, and Indonesia.

2016

Street Dogs of South Central

Narrated by Queen Latifah, this documentary follows Elsie, a black Labrador mix, and her struggled to raise her puppies on the streets of Los Angeles.

2013

Coast Modern

A core group of architects embraced the West Coast from Vancouver to LA with its particular geography and values and left behind a legacy of inspired dwellings. Today, architects celebrate the influence established by their predecessors.

2012

Arabella Martinez: San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Awards 2005

Arabella Martinez, winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2005 Community Leadership Awards (The San Francisco Foundation Award), was recognized for her commitment to building culturally relevant services and resources necessary for strong and vibrant communities, and for her outstanding contributions to Oakland’s Fruitvale district and the creation of the Fruitvale Transit Village.

2009

The Beach Boys - California Surfin

2004

Center for Ecoliteracy: California Food for California Kids

The Center for Ecoliteracy advances school meal innovation and is pleased to introduce its California Food for California Kids initiative. Using the acclaimed Rethinking School Lunch planning framework and Cooking with California Food in K-12 Schools cookbook and professional development resource, the Center convenes food service directors from across California to support and inspire their work providing more fresh and freshly-prepared food for school children.

David Brower Center

Named for the man many consider the father of the modern environmental movement, the David Brower Center was founded on the idea that when diverse people engage, dream, and work together, they are more effective at finding solutions to today’s most pressing environmental and social problems.

The Bear Beneath

Once hunted to extinction, the California Grizzly survives only as a symbol, frozen on the state flag, waving over the land it once roamed. A century later, will California bring back its lost icon or leave it in myth?

2026

The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane

For decades, Barbara Dane lent her stellar singing voice to social-justice movements in the Bay Area and beyond, garnering an impressive FBI file along the way. Deeply respected by fellow luminaries in folk, blues and jazz, Dane built a far-reaching legacy with music, activism, and love. As Maureen Gosling’s celebratory portrait reveals, early solidarity with those suffering racial and economic injustice sparked Dane’s passion to use her talent to sustain marginalized people. Rather than chase stardom, she followed her own maternal instincts to root herself and her family among generations of activist performers. Bonnie Raitt, Jane Fonda and other notables attest to Dane’s unique way of shaping and being shaped by tumultuous social revolutions from the 1950s on. Nearing 90, Dane triumphantly tours with piano virtuoso Tammy Hall to celebrate a life of staying awake and connected, true to her ideals. One star among many illuminates so much.

2023

Puente de la Costa Sur

Puente de la Costa Sur, winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2004 Community Leadership Awards (John R. May Award) - for its creative, grassroots efforts to provide education, social justice advocacy, direct services, and community connections enabling immigrant men in rural San Mateo County to improve their living and working conditions

2009

Harmonium in California

Through concerts and interviews, folk-progressive group Harmonium takes Quebec culture to California. This documentary full of colour and sound, filmed in California in 1978, recounts the ups and downs of the journey of the Quebec musical group Harmonium, who came to feel the pulse of Americans and see if culture, their culture, can succeed in crossing borders.

1980

Popular Science L-8-5

Gigantic machine combs beach in southern California and retrieves articles lost in sand; synthetic gems made by new chemical process; aviation school holds classes in grounded transport plane; how seaweed is processed for scientific use.

1949

Life In Mediterranean Lands (California)

Pictures Southern California as the area in America most like the Mediterranean lands in climate. Shows that the two areas produce similar crops.

1949