Todd Norris is an award-winning filmmaker whose film The Wonderful Way-Ahead Machine won two awards at the 2009 Kansas City Film Fest. He is no stranger to the festival, taking home top awards for his films L…, Parallax and Killing Michael Bay in previous years (when it was known as the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee). In addition to directing his own films, he has served as Director of Photography on many Kansas City productions including the feature Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula, Rhubarb Pie, and First Date which screened at Sundance in 2006. Norris is also an Emmy Award-winning Promotions Videographer/ Editor for NBC Action News.

In 2009, he acquired a Panasonic GH1, an inexpensive still camera that shoots high-resolution video, and quickly realized that cameras of this variety would change independent filmmaking forever. His latest project is Candy Apple Red, which he wrote, directed and photographed. The film was shot with his Panasonic GH1, and will begin screening at festivals later this year.

Jeff Goldsmith is senior editor at Creative Screenwriting Magazine. Originally raised in Kansas City, Jeff attended USC for theater and film and is an award-winning commercial, music video and Sony PlayStation video game director. As producer of the CS Magazine screening series, he does on-stage Q&A interviews which are then podcast for free in iTunes.

Heather Laird is a principal owner of the Kansas City based casting company WRIGHT/LAIRD CASTING. Her credits include more than 55 features and made-for-television films, 10 TV series, and more than 1,000 commercial & print advertising projects. Ang Lee’s Ride With the Devil, Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, Robert Altman’s Kansas City, and the Hallmark Hall of Fame tele-series Sarah, Plain & Tall, represent some of the more memorable projects that her company has worked on. Heather also cast the Sundance Award winning CSA: The Confederate States of America, (Spike Lee, Executive Producer) and more recently, the independent features Last Will (Tatum O’Neal and Tom Bearinger), The Only Good Indian (Wes Studi), the feature adaptation of the award winning children’s book Beekman’s Big Deal, and Dove award winner All Roads Lead Home with Peter Coyote and Jason London. Heather also worked on the feature Winter’s Bone, which filmed in the Branson area last year. Just this January, Winter’s Bone took the top honor at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the coveted Grand Jury Award for US Dramatic Film.

Heather is also the creator, writer, producer, and director of the web series NEXT!, starring John Jackson (Sideways, American Zombie). The fictitious series follows the trials and tribulations of a real-life casting director.

Heather is on the boards of the Greater Kansas City Film Commission and the University of Kansas Film Advisory Board.

Don R. Lewis is obsessed with film. Having written for the newly relaunched Film Threat for over 8 years and now a contributing editor, he is also a filmmaker in his own right. His short documentary films STRINGERS and DRAG KING have played numerous film festivals and garnered a few awards and the feature film he Co-Produced, THE VIOLENT KIND, recently premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Don holds a Masters Degree in Cinema Studies from San Francisco State and resides in Northern California with his wife, daughter and dog named Igby.

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Tall, sandy haired, mustachioed actor from Texas born Justus McQueen in 1927, L.Q. adopted the name of the character he portrayed in his first film, Battle Cry (1955). Jones, with his craggy, gaunt looks, first appeared in minor character roles in plenty of WWII films including The Young Lions (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), and Battle of the Coral Sea (1959). In 1962 he team up with maverick director Sam Peckinpah for the first of Jones’ five appearances in his films: Ride the High Country (1962); Major Dundee (1965) with Charlton Heston; The Wild Bunch (1969); The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970); and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

Jones then directed the cult post-apocalyptic film A Boy and His Dog (1975) starring a young Don Johnson. This won LQ a Hugo Award from America’s science fiction writers.

Working in television, Jones had recurring characters on such western programs as Cheyenne (1955), Gunsmoke (1955), Laramie, Two Faces West (1960-1961), and 25 times on The Virginian (1962) as ranch hand Andy Belden.

He turned in an interesting performance as a seemingly good ol’ boy Nevada cowboy who was actually a powerful behind-the-scenes player in state politics who leaned on Robert De Niro’s Las Vegas mob gambler in Martin Scorsese’s violent and powerful Casino (1995). Followed up by roles in The Edge (1997), The Mask of Zorro (1998), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006).

A San Francisco based director, Rob Nilsson and co-director John Hanson won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for NORTHERN LIGHTS and Nilsson won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for HEAT AND SUNLIGHT. He is the first American film director to have won both awards. He is also the creator of the Direct Action style of digital filmmaking taught in the Tenderloin yGroup Actor’s Ensemble, San Francisco and featured in workshops conducted around the world. Nilsson is a pioneer in the techniques of video to film transfer which led to today’s digital revolution. In 1985 SIGNAL 7 was the first small format video feature to be blown up to film and distributed around the world.

CHALK, his first feature with the Tenderloin Action Group (now the Tenderloin yGroup) a San Francisco inner city acting workshop, was featured in the Locarno and Toronto film festivals and played in theatres around the country in 2000. It was voted one of the top films of the year by the Village Voice. Production on the 9 @ Night film series with the Tenderloin yGroup was completed in 2007 it included STROKE (2000), SINGING (2000), SCHEME C6 (2001), ATTITUDE (2003), NOISE (2003) and NEED (2004), PAN (2006), USED (2007), and GO TOGETHER (2007).

Nilsson has traveled the world collaborating with local organizations to create digital feature films using his Direct Action Cinema methodology. Films telling indigenous stories have been made in Japan, WINTER ORANGES (2000); in South Africa, FRANK (2003); in Jordan, SAMT (2004); during a residency at the UC, Berkeley, SECURITY (2005), in Kansas City with the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee, OPENING (2006).

Recent awards include the Ted M. Larson Award for “outstanding contributions to the film industry” from the Fargo International Film Festival, the Indie Pioneer Award from the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee, a Filmmaker of the Year award from the Silver Lake Film Festival, Los Angeles and the Milley Award from the city of Mill Valley for achievement in the Arts. His book of poetry, FROM A REFUGEE OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA was released in September 2007 and is available at Authorhouse.com.

PRESQUE ISLE, a narrative feature co- produced by the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking and Citizen Cinema was screened at KC FilmFest in 2009. Rob’s latest film, Imbued, from a story by Kansas Citian, Denny Dey, and featuring Stacey Keach will screen at this year’s KC FilmFest.

Meaghan Brander holds a degree in Film Studies from Canada’s Queen’s University. She has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival Groups for three years, most recently as a Programming Assistant at Film Circuit, TIFFG’s division devoted to promoting Canadian cinema across Canada and abroad. In this capacity, she has had the opportunity to coordinate screenings of some of Canada’s best and most popular films at festivals and other venues as far-reaching as Iceland and Mumbai.

She has also been long immersed in the world of short films and short film programming. Her first film, I Got Sweet, screened at various short film festivals across Canada, and won several awards. Since she began her employment at TIFFG, she has been programming short films in over 200 markets, travelling as far north as Dawson City, Yukon to view short films at film festivals across the country. She also served on the programming committee of Canadian Short Film Showcase, a TIFFG initiative, for the past two years.

Roberta is former Sundance shorts programmer (2002-2006, 5 years), author of the book How Not To Make A Short Film: Secrets From A Sundance Programmer, Senior Consultant at RMM Film Consulting, and an award winning director of 2 shorts: Dani & Alice and Happy Birthday. Roberta provides script and film analysis and festival strategy advice. She has been named one of the top 10 New Exciting Voices in Black Cinema by IndieWire. She lives in Los Angeles with her rescued Min-Pin, Marcello. The best way to reach Roberta is through her website http://www.robertamunroe.com.
]]> http://kcfilmfest.org/2010/visiting-artists/roberta-munroe/feed/ 0 http://kcfilmfest.org/2010/visiting-artists/robert-rosen/ http://kcfilmfest.org/2010/visiting-artists/robert-rosen/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:08:30 +0000 KC Jubilee http://kcfilmfest.org/?p=1327

Educator, critic, preservationist and former dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Robert Rosen has spoken at scholarly, public, and professional meetings in more than twenty nations on subjects related to film criticism, media history, and curatorship.

He has published widely in the field of media preservation and has guided the growth of the UCLA Film & Television Archive from a small study collection to the world’s largest university-based holding of original film and television materials. As a preservationist and historian, he has occupied many positions of leadership in the field. These include: Founding Director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives, member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, and Board Member of the Stanford Theater Foundation and the Geffen Playhouse. With Martin Scorsese he was the organizer of the Film foundation on which he currently serves as the founding Chair of the Archivists Council.

Rosen was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of Arts and Letters and was awarded the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation. For ten years he was the film critic for KCRW National Public Radio and he is an active member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He stepped down as dean of the School in July, 2009.

17 year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her 
father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared.  If 
she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods of 
Southern Missouri. 


To find him, Ree confronts the dangerous world of the Dolly family.  With 
the reluctant help of her hard-bitten uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) and her 
best friend Gail, Ree defies her outlaw clan’s code of silence, hacking 
her way through their lies, evasions, and threats to piece together the 
truth.

Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, WINTER’S BONE is directed by Debra 
Granik (DOWN TO THE BONE) and adapted for the screen by Granik and Anne 
Rosellini.  The film stars Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Sheryl Lee and Tate Taylor.

WINTER’S BONE recently won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.