SF DocFest is an annual festival devoted to documentary cinema. Since 2001, this two week-long event has brought the most weird and wonderful aspects of real life to the big screen.
San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) started in 2001 and takes place in San Francisco, California
The 24th San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) announced the winners with Audience Award for Best Feature going to Rebel With A Clause directed by Brandt Johnson and Jury Prize for Best Feature going to Flamingo Camp directed by Chris Coats.
The 24th San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) will screen 85 new non-fiction films (28 features and 58 shorts.) including 22 films local to the Bay Area from May 29 to June 8, 2025.
The 23rd San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest)which ran from May 30th to June 9th announced the winning documentary films with The Donn of Tiki directed by Alex Lamb, Max Wel winning Audience Award for Best Feature, and Art for Everybody directed by Miranda Yousef winning Jury Prize for Best Feature.
Locked Out, a Detroit-based documentary follows Black women as they battle evictions, predatory lending, and modern-day redlining in what the filmmakers describe as America’s most segregated city.
The 22nd San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) will be held June 1 – 11, 2023; and screen 39 features and 47 shorts. The festival opens with Christine Yoo’s 26.2 To Life and Fantastic Negrito: Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? directed by Yvan Iturriaga, Francisco Nuñez Capriles.
The 20th San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) will June 3 – 20, 2021 with 40 features and 38 shorts across 6 different short programs. The festival opens with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul and close with Jasmine Stodel’s Kid Candidate.
San Francisco Documentary Festival (SF DocFest) is presenting a virtual festival to take place Sept 3-20, 2020. The festival features 46 new documentaries available to watch over a 17 day period, live or pre-recorded Q&As with almost all films plus some fun special events.
On A Knife Edge, from director Jeremy Williams, a documentary film five years in the making, follows Guy Dull Knife and his son, George, as George comes of age on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. The film will world premiere June 10 and June 15 at the 16th annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival.
“On a Knife Edge” is a father-son story about Guy and George Dull Knife that unfolds over the course of George’s coming-of-age journey. Under his father’s guidance, George becomes an activist and organizer, and begins identifying with the role of traditional Lakota warrior, which he views as his family legacy. He commits himself to the fight for social justice, but struggles with adapting the old ways and his father’s expectations to the modern-day realities of growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Told largely through George’s eyes, the film offers a privileged glimpse into the youngest generation of the American Indian Movement, as well as George’s own evolving notions of Native identity, manhood, and duty.
His story is interwoven with animated sequences that depict five generations of family history, narrated by his father and based on paintings he has created to explore the continuum of their fight through the generations.
TANIA LIBRE[/caption]
The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) returns May 31 to June 15, 2017, at the Roxie Theater, Vogue Theater and the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission Theater in San Francisco.
The festival will kick off its Roxie Theater screenings with the California Premiere of Rory Kennedy’s TAKE EVERY WAVE: THE LIFE OF LAIRD HAMILTON on Thursday, June 1st. The film looks at the remarkable life and career of big wave surfer Laird Hamilton.
SF DocFest will launch its Vogue Theater screenings with Lynn Hersman Leeson’s latest film TANIA LIBRE, a look at New York-based psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr. Frank Ochberg and his consultations with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera as he consults with her after she served an eight-month sentence for being critical of the government. The film, narrated by Tilda Swinton, reveals the revolutionary potential for art and how the short-term, spontaneous and transitory nature of performance art represents a means to criticize the Cuban government.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival, SF DocFest will screen THE WORK as its Centerpiece Film on Friday, June 9 at the Roxie Theater. Set in a single room in Folsom Prison, THE WORK follows three men during an intensive four-day group therapy session with convicts in the prison. The result is a rare look past the dehumanizing tropes of prison culture and an intimate portrait of human transformation that transcends what we think of as rehabilitation.
The festival will close on Thursday, June 15th at the Roxie Theater with a sneak preview of local filmmaker Timothy Crandle’s BURIED IN THE MIX. The film explores the lives, losses, and loves of a few of the bands and illustrious characters who contributed to the early San Francisco punk music scene, a scene distinguished by its boisterous energy and unbridled creativity. Featuring The Mutants, The Avengers and rare footage from the infamous Mabuhay, the film assembles a collage of stories that combine to tell a story of the punk movement.
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jamie Meltzer will be the recipient of the 2017 Non-Fiction Vanguard Award. Coming off its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Meltzerʼs latest film, TRUE CONVICTION, takes a look at a new detective agency in Dallas, Texas, started by a group of exonerated men with decades in prison served between them who look to free innocent people behind bars.
SF DocFest will also present a retrospective screening of Meltzerʼs first feature documentary OFF THE CHARTS: THE SONG-POEM STORY (2003) which is a fascinating, at times unsettling, film that exposes the strange underworld of the song-poem industry.
CURIOUS WORLDS: The Art and Imagination of David Deck directed by Olympia Stone is the winner of the Audience Award for Best Feature at 2015 SF Documentary Festival (SF DocFest). CROCODILE GENNADLY (pictured above) directed by Steve Hoover is the winner of Jury Prize for Best Feature.
In ‘CURIOUS WORLDS: The Art and Imagination of David Deck’ the curtain is pulled back on one of America’s (and San Francisco’s) most accomplished and original — yet least-known working artists — David Beck. A master sculptor, carver, painter and miniature architect, Beck works in a fantastical genre all his own, creating intricate worlds, alive with playful and incisive observations of the world we know. With wit and charm Curious Worlds captures the artist at work in his studio, reflecting on his process in an intimate portrait illuminating what it takes to create a masterwork.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1a8AOWPxwU
In ‘CROCODILE GENNADLY’ Ex-Soviet soldier turned self-proclaimed savior and pastor, “Crocodile Gennadiy,” doesn’t feel he needs permission to do good deeds. So he has taken up the fight against child homelessness in Ukraine by kidnapping drug addicted street kids and bringing them to his DIY rehab center for forced treatment. His ongoing efforts and unabashedly tough love approach to his country’s problems has made him a folk hero for some, and a lawless vigilante to others. It’s a beautifully cinematic film that is a testament to the good in all of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fTBwDUAgnU
Other winners include LAST DAY OF FREEDOM for Audience Award for Best Short, and THE MAN BEHIND 55000 DRESSES winning Jury Prize for Best Short. 
Robert Greene’s THE ACTRESS
The 13th San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (SF DocFest) taking place June 5 to 19, 2014, will open on June 5th with Robert Greene’s new film THE ACTRESS, which follows Brandy Burre, an actress who gave up her role in HBO’s “The Wire” to start a family in upstate New York. After playing the role of wife and mother, Burre decided to re-enter the acting business. The film will play as part of a retrospective of Robert Greene’s earlier work.
The festival will also honor filmmaker and writer, Robert Greene, with the 2014′s SF DocFest Non-Fiction Vanguard Award. This is the second time SF DocFest has given this award following the 2008 recipient Melody Gilbert. In addition to premiering his new film, ACTRESS, the festival will present a retrospective of some of Robert Greene’s earlier films including KATI WITH AN I (2010) and FAKE IT SO REAL (2012).
The festival announced a new DocFest Director of Programming Jennifer Morris and a new Associate Programmer Chris Metzler. Jennifer Morris, currently a programmer and consultant for Film23, Jennifer Morris was previously the Festival Director and Director of Programming for Frameline, She also served as the director of the Frameline Completion Fund which provided funding-ranging from $20-$50k annually- for the completion of films that deal with issues of importance to LGBT communities with an emphasis on underrepresented communities. She has also been a DJ and promoter in the Bay Area (under the name DJ Junkyard) for over 20 years. Morris is originally from Southern California where she received her BA in Motion Pictures and Television from UCLA.
Chris Metzler graduated from USC with a degree in business and cinema; Chris Metzler’s film career has taken him from the depths of agency work, to coordinating post-production for movies. His filmmaking work has resulted in him criss-crossing the country with the aid of caffeinated beverages, all the while making his way in the Nashville country and Christian music video industries, before finally forsaking his soul to commercial LA rock n’ roll. These misadventures culminated in him winning a Billboard Magazine Music Video Award. He eventually fled to San Francisco to join the independent documentary film scene and start work on his feature length directorial debut – the offbeat environmental documentary, “Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea”, which was narrated by John Waters. With the success of that feature documentary Metzler went on to make, “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone”, about the legendary rock-ska-funk band Fishbone. The film was narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, screened at SXSW, and aired nationally on PBS. Metzler is now pursuing other sub-cultural documentary subjects, including: rogue economists, lucha libre wrestlers, swamp rat hunters, ganjapreneurs, and evangelical Christian surfers.