Reach Film Fellowship

Academy Award® Nominee Francisco Bello studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, and has worked on the post-production of films by Kevin Smith, Michael Moore, and George Butler, among others. His recent editorial work includes Summer Sun Winter Moon (ITVS), Neither Memory Nor Magic (MoMA Documentary Fortnight), Betty La Flaca (HBO), and Julieta y Ramon (Showtime). Francisco launched Ropa Vieja Films LLC in 2007 with Salim Baba, which has screened in over 75 festivals worldwide including Sundance, Telluride, IDFA, Woodstock and Tribeca. In 2008, Salim Baba was Nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Short Documentary, followed by a News & Documentary Emmy Nomination in 2009. Most recently, Francisco produced and edited War Don Don which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival, and for which he was awarded the first Karen Schmeer Award for Excellence in Documentary Editing. He also recently completed his directorial debut commissioned by HBO Documentary Films, El Espíritu de la Salsa (The Spirit of Salsa) which premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.

Karin Chien is an independent film producer based in New York City, and the 2010 recipient of the Independent Spirit Producers Award. Karin has produced eight feature-length films, including Circumstance (2011), The Exploding Girl (2009), and the The Motel (2005), which have won over 75 festival awards, premiered at Sundance and Berlin, and received international distribution. Most recently, Circumstance won the Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Karin is in post-production on two features, P. Benoit’s Stones in the Sun, about exile from Haiti, and Bradley Rust Gray’s Jack & Diane starring Juno Temple. Karin is the president and founder of dGenerate Films, the leading distributor of independent and uncensored Chinese cinema. Karin is also the director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) Fellowship and the curator of the Chinatown Film Project, an inaugural film exhibition for the Museum of Chinese in America.

Marshall Curry is the Director, Producer, Editor and Writer of the documentary If a Tree Falls, which won the Documentary Editing Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Marshall was also the DP and Editor behind the feature documentary, Racing Dreams, which won numerous awards including Best Documentary at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. Prior to this Marshall directed, shot, produced and edited the Academy Award® and Emmy-nominated Street Fight. The film won the Audience Award at Tribeca Film Festival, SilverDocs, and Hot Docs, where it received the Jury Prize for Best International Documentary. It was also nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) Award. In 2005 Marshall was selected by Filmmaker Magazine as one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” and was awarded the International Documentary Association (IDA) Jacqueline Donnet Filmmaker Award. In 2007 he received the International Trailblazer Award at MIPDOC in Cannes. Marshall has served on juries for the International Documentary Association, Hot Docs and Full Frame. Before Street Fight, Marshall worked for a number of years at Icon Nicholson, an NY-based multimedia design firm, where he produced and directed interactive documentaries and websites for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others. Prior to filmmaking, Marshall taught English in Guanajuato, Mexico, worked in public radio, and taught government in Washington DC.

Past mentors of the program have included: Marilyn Agrelo (Anthony Morrison, RFF 2010) director of Mad Hot Ballroom; Savannah-based writer and producer Renee Bishop (Danielle Russell, RFF 2009) who was the VP/Executive Producer of the PBS series Farmers’ Almanac TV; Laurie Collyer (Gabriel Long, RFF 2010) the writer and director behind Sherrybaby and Nuyorican Dream; director of the award-winning film Trembling Before G-d and producer of A Jihad for Love, Sandi DuBowski (Pia Zaragoza, RFF 2008); Rachel Grady (Annie Waldman, RFF 2008), the award-winning director of Jesus Camp and Boys of Baraka; Nicole Kassell (Jules Monteyne, RFF 2009), director of the award-winning film The Woodsman; renowned documentarian Albert Maysles (Nicholas Bruckman, RFF 2008); 2008 Nicholl Fellowship finalist Afia Nathaniel (Suel Kim, RFF 2008), the director of Neither the Veil, Nor the Four Walls; Annie Sundberg (Nadia Hallgren, RFF 2010) co-director of The Devil Came on Horseback and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work; Jeremy Kipp Walker (Courtney Hope RFF 2010, Dena Greenbaum RFF 2009) producer of It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Sugar, and Half Nelson; and So Yong Kim (Brendon McQueen, RFF 2009) who directed the award-winning films, In Between Days and Treeless Mountain.