Please join us at 518 Valencia for another edition of SF IndieFest’s BAD ART GALLERY. We hang the gallery with paintings carefully curated from Bay Area thrift stores, flea markets and dumpsters and give each one a Proper Catalog Note.
This edition of BAG also serves as a reception in honor of this year’s SF DocFest Non-Fiction Vanguard Award recipient Sean Dunne. Please join us for complimentary beverages, groovy music and bad art! All are welcome.
In its 15th year SF DocFest is proud to honor filmmaker Sean Dunne with its Non-Fiction Vanguard Award. As both a documentary filmmaker and internet phenom, Brooklyn-based Sean Dunne has built a burgeoning reputation for himself with a series of web distributed short and feature films that have demonstrated a strong visual sense and a fascination with everyday people and the extraordinary stories that exist all around us.
With the ongoing documentary renaissance, SF DocFest prides itself on recognizing those unconventional, creative risk-taking filmmakers that are redefining the nonfiction cinematic form and are someone to watch. Sean Dunne the latest filmmaker the festival has recognized. Past honorees include Robert Greene and Melody Gilbert.
This award is a celebration of that attitude and Sean Dunne's films that have their own off-beat approach to documenting the human condition. Filming in a guerrilla-style, his interviews have a strangely intimate style as he delves deep into the lives of his subjects that could be categorized as living on the fringes of society. However, his films don't view his subjects as "fringe" and it is instead his empathy and rapport with them that is evident in the (sometimes shockingly) open manner of his subjects on screen.
In addition to being a visual stylist and thoughtful storyteller, Sean Dunne has also continued to break new ground in the industry by forgoing traditional distribution routes and instead directly distribute via the web. This allows him to not only maintain creative control and ownership, but also embrace the sense of urgency shared in his work that is built for the audience at large, not just film festivals and television, which are often the main forum for documentaries.