The Urban Landscape - screening series

Nostalgia

The Royal Road (Jenni Olson, 2015, 64m) is a meditation on urban change and the role of myth in shaping identity, Olson’s film is a cinematic essay “in defense of remembering.” Combining personal stories with the history of the Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican-American War, this film presents distinctively Californian brands of unrequited romance. Narrated in a strikingly dispassionate tone, Olson explores her own compulsion for nostalgic attachments to landscape. This nostalgia is entangled with Olson’s love of classic Hollywood films as much as with her longing for San Francisco as the queer mecca it used to be.

Jenni Olson is an experimental documentary filmmaker whose urban landscape films have been shown at film festivals around the world, earning critical acclaim for their unique style of storytelling, fusing 16mm urban landscapes with lyrical essayistic storytelling. Her most recent film The Royal Road premiered at Sundance in 2015 and won the jury award for Best LGBTQ Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. A longtime champion of LGBT cinema, Jenni is a former co-director of Frameline (the SF Int’l LGBTQ Film Festival) and has served as advisor and production consultant to dozens of filmmakers. Jenni is also one of the world’s leading experts on LGBT film history and is well known as a queer media historian, activist, author and online pioneer. She is currently VP of e-commerce and marketing at Wolfe Video and sits on the advisory boards of the OutFest/UCLA Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation and Canyon Cinema and serves on the board of the Jewish Film Institute. 

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