Les Blank
The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Always for Pleasure, Sprout Wings and Fly

Les Blank is a multi-award-winning independent filmmaker, best known for a series of poetic films that led Time Magazine critic Jay Cocks to write, “I can’t believe that anyone interested in movies or America . . . could watch Blank’s work without feeling they’d been granted a casual, soft-spoken revelation.” John Rockwell, writing in The New York Times, adds, “Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art.” And Vincent Canby, also in the Times, declared that Blank “is a master of movies about the American idiom . . . one of our most original filmmakers.” In 1990, he received the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for lifetime achievement as an independant filmmaker. He has directed 35 films and collaborated with such great filmmakers as Werner Herzog, Dennis Hopper, and Dusan Makajev. His most recent feature is All in This Tea, which was featured at the 2007 Olympia Film Festival.

Maureen Gosling
Blossoms of Fire

Maureen Gosling, a filmmaker for more than thirty-eight years, directed and produced Blossoms of Fire (2000, HBO Latino/ Spanish TVE/Swedish Television), a feature- length tribute to the Isthmus Zapotec women of southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Among other recognition, the film was awarded Best Documentary by a Non-Latino Director at the Havana International Film Festival.

In 2006, Gosling co-wrote and edited Jed Riffe’s California’s “Lost” Tribes, part one of the four-hour PBS series California and the American Dream. Gosling is best known for her twenty-year collaboration with Bay Area director Les Blank on more than two dozen documentaries. Their best-known film is the British Academy Award-winning feature, Burden of Dreams, about German director Werner Herzog’s perilous filming of his feature Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian Amazon. Many of their films were recently featured in a two-week retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Gosling’s films have been screened at countless film festivals around the world; shown on television in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Latin America, and Asia; and distributed widely to educational institutions. She is currently producing and directing No Mouse Music! The Story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records (working title) with Chris Simon and Bamako Chic: Threads of Power, Color and Culture with Maxine Downs.

Kevin Nolting
Up also hosting an animation workshop at The Mark

Kevin Nolting joined Pixar Animation Studios in June 2000 to work as the second editor on the Academy Award® winning feature Finding Nemo. He continued his work as second editor on Cars, and contributed additional editing to the Oscar® winning WALL•E. Nolting served as lead editor on another Academy Award® winning feature, Up. Nolting is currently working on an upcoming Pixar project.

Prior to coming to Pixar, Nolting worked as an assistant editor on a number of live action feature films including Child’s Play, Diggstown, The Insider, Indecent Proposal, and Over the Top. Between 1986 and 2000, he worked on roughly one live action film per year. Nolting was born and raised in Hawthorne, California, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Aesthetics/Creative Writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He and his wife have two grown daughters and currently reside in the Bay Area.

Brian Yuzna
Society – All Freakin’ Night Opening Movie!

Brian Yuzna is an independent filmmaker who has specialized in the horror and fantasy genres as a producer, writer, and director. His past works include the Re-Animator and The Dentist franchises, as well as Society, Crying Freeman, Return of the Living Dead 3, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Yuzna created and supervised the Fantastic Factory, a production line for the Barcelona- based Filmax company. Under this label, he produced an internationally successful line of thrillers that included the Dimension Films release Darkness. He also developed the Amazing! distribution label that is now a part of Spain’s Vertice 360, and Indonesia’s Komodo Films production line. His most recent directing effort, Amphibious 3D, was shot in Java. Yuzna is presently preparing The Pope.

Dan Halsted
Kung Fu Double Feature

Dan Halsted is the head programmer at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. He is also the organizer of the Grindhouse Film Festival and founder of the 35mm Shaolin Film Archive. In 2009, Dan unearthed the largest collection of 35mm martial arts films in the Western hemisphere from an abandoned Chinese theater in Vancouver, B.C. He has dedicat- ed himself to preserving these films and presenting them to modern audiences.

Kagan McLeod
Kung Fu Double Feature

Kagan McLeod is the artist and writer of the graphic novel Infinite Kung Fu, a comic’s love note to the classic Hong Kong kung fu movies. This comic made a huge splash in Olympia and is the top selling comic in the history of local Danger Room Comics. Kagan will be discussing his love of kung fu cinema and the various hurdles involved in creating his 400+ page opus. He is visiting us from Toronto, Canada, and will be doing a signing at Danger Room Comics (201 4th Avenue West, downtown) on Saturday, November 19.

Bob Milne
Peter Pan

Bob Milne is considered to be the best ragtime/boogie-woogie pianist in the world. He was filmed and documented for future generations in 2004 during three days of interviews at the Library of Congress, and was officially declared a “National Treasure” at the conclusion. Mr. Milne is an active “Musical Ambassador” for the United States Department of State and has performed numerous times in Japan, including the Okinawan Islands and Hokkaido. He has also performed in this capacity for members of the Swiss Parliament at the U.S. Embassy in Berne.

He was recently featured in the episode of NPR’s Radiolab entitled “A Four-Track Mind.” A naturally intuitive musician, he never practices or looks at sheet music, considering it “cheating.”

Drew Ailes
Invincible Force

Drew Ailes was raised in Bloomington, Minnesota, hanging out in various parking lots and strip malls. He spends most of his days feeling angry while working for the government and drinking moderately in the evenings to detach himself from the rest of regular life. He used to suffer from bulimia but does not anymore. As of writing this, he remains in semi- frequent contact with his family and has no girlfriend or pets of his own. Invincible Force is his first feature since 2003’s Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! Drew Ailes no longer considers himself an actor.

William E. Badgley
Kill All Redneck Pricks

William E. Badgley is a producer of film and television who lives and works in New York City. He has been active in art and music throughout his adult lifetime, fronting the Northwest garage band Federation X since 1998. Kill All Redneck Pricks: A Documentary Film about a Band Called KARP is his first film.

Rodrigo Valenzuela
Sound & Vision

Rodrigo Valenzuela (left) was born in a Romani Calo community in Santiago, Chile, during the regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. He brings an accomplished, award- winning background as a visual artist to the documentary focus of We Are Shouting. Rodrigo’s many personal video works are brief descriptions of a moment or an action that address intrinsic behavior or beliefs. He takes great inspiration from filmmakers such as Bela Tarr, Terrence Malick, and Aki Kaurismaki, and visual artists such as Edward Hopper, Gerhardt Richter, Philip-Lorca diCorcias, and Jeff Wall.

Eric Becker
Sound & Vision

Eric Becker (right above) is a Seattle-based filmmaker. His company, We Are Shouting, specializes in producing documentary and commercial video for a range of organizations and brands in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Eric received his Masters in Public Health from Yale University in 2006 and since then has worked on projects as diverse as the 2007 HBO Comedy special Assume the Position and the 2011 Sierra Leone documentary Fambul Tok. From August to December 2009, he worked as the in-house filmmaker for the international philanthropic foundation Social Ventures, producing a series of storytelling pieces. Sound and Vision is his first feature length film as director. His work seeks to reaffirm that there are tangible solutions to issues of justice, health, peace, and the environment.

Alex Ross Perry
The Color Wheel

Alex Ross Perry was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1984. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and worked at Kim’s Video in Manhattan. The Color Wheel is his second film, after 2009’s Impolex. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Dan S
Invincible Force

Dan S is a writer/director/producer/ editor and recent recipient of the McKnight Fellowship for Filmmaking, whose credits include dozens of short films and the award- winning feature Seeking Wellness. Dan currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he works in building maintenance and low voltage electricity. His work has been called “uncomfortable to watch” (Urban Cinefile), “sublime yet terrifying” (Filmstock), “stunningly depraved” (Melbourne Underground Film Festival), “disturbing” (Directors Notes), and “the kind of thinky/sadistic exercise that even the dark prince of psychological horror Michael Haneke might find difficult to watch” (Minneapolis City Pages). Dan is excited to motivate and inspire Olympia with his new feature, Invisible Force.