SUNDAY, April 6

Emily Doe is the Assistant Editor/Producer of Wholphin, the quarterly DVD magazine of rare and unseen short films distributed by McSweeney’s. After squid birth, trap-jaw ants and an illegal game of border volleyball, she is now working on getting footage of a telerobotic teeth-cleaning video at 2000 meters under the sea.

DeeDee Halleck is a filmmaker, media activist, co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego. Her first film, Children Make Movies (1961), was about a filmmaking project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. She has received a variety of recognition, including two Rockefeller Media Fellowships, three lifetime achievement awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been featured at numerous museums and festivals, including the Whitney Museum, the Wexner Center, and the Venice, Woodstock, Vermont and London film festivals. Her book, Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media was published in 2002.

Azazel Jacobs, son of avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, was born in 1972 and raised in New York’s lower Manhattan surrounded by important and innovative artists. He went to undergraduate school at the film department of SUNY Purchase and graduated in 1995. In 1999 he moved to Los Angeles to study in the directing program at the American Film Institute. While getting his Masters he made his first feature-length film, Nobody Needs To Know, which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2003. Two years later he premiered his second feature, The GoodTimesKid, at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles. The super low-budget film was a hit with critics and audiences alike and was recently placed in the Top Ten Films of 2007 by the New York Post. In the August 2007 issue of Filmmaker Magazine, Azazel was listed among the “25 Directors To Watch.” Momma’s Man, Azazel’s third feature, screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, was selected as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center/Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films series, March 26-April 6, 2008, and was acquired by THINKFilm for theatrical release this summer.

Ken and Flo Jacobs are both artists. Flo is a painter and collaborator with Ken, who has been making avant-garde films since the midfifties. Along with Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Peter Kubelka, Ken Jacobs’s films exemplify the provocative and innovative spirit of experimental cinema. He studied painting under Hans Hoffman, was an influential teacher of famed author and artist Art Spiegelman, and in 1969 helped found the cinema department at Binghamton University, from which he retired in 2002 as a Distinguished Professor of Cinema. His films include Blonde Cobra (1959-63), Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969), Star Spangled To Death (1957-59, completed 2003-4), and Razzle Dazzle (2006). Jacobs’s films are shown extensively throughout the world, including multiple times at the New York, Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals as well as the Whitney Museum Biennial, and he has received numerous grants and awards. In December of 2007, Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son was named to the National Film Registry.

Richard Kelly A graduate of Midlothian High School in Chesterfield County, Kelly attended film school at USC, and had a highly successful first-time release with Donnie Darko in 2001, winning numerous awards, a highly respectable box office and settling in as a perennial cult favorite. His Southland Tales had a controversial reception at Cannes in 2006 but was later championed by film critic Amy Taubin and described as working toward a new cinematic structure. Mr. Kelly is currently working on The Box, shooting in Massachusetts and Virginia.

Rob Tregenza A returning guest to the JRFF and the new director of the VCUarts Cinema program, Tregenza is considered by both critics and fellow cinematographers to be one of the very best. Mr. Tregenza has a Ph.D. from UCLA and a distribution company, Cinema Parallel, specializing in foreign titles. His Talking to Strangers was acclaimed by French New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard at Toronto, and Inside/Out was an Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

David Williams A perennial JRFF favorite, David Williams will present his sixth feature, Bad Girls, as a work-in-progress. Fascinated by “the many ways of portraying reality,” Williams began as a painter, then took up still photography and later filmmaking. He directed 15 short films before turning to features. Lillian, his first feature, won a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and was shown at the Chicago, Florida, and Vienna film festivals. Thirteen, Williams’ second feature, won the Berlin International Federation of Film Societies Jury Award in 1997 at the Berlin Film Festival, and was screened at many other festivals including Toronto, San Francisco, London, Virginia, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center/Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films series. In 2003, Mr. Williams was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also an associate professor in VCU’s Photography & Film Department.