Color Congress (Project Elev8te Doc) Co-Executive Director Sonya Childress (Shara Driver)

Ojai Film Society (Free Summer Series) - Nicholas Weissman & Brady Hahn

Each summer they bring together over 3,000 attendees to watch movies under the stars through their Free Summer Series at Ojai’s iconic Libbey Bowl, making it one of the largest free event series. For nearly four decades, the Ojai Film Society (OFS) has presented Free Summer Series with quality independent, foreign, documentary, and classic films to the Ojai Valley, making us one of the largest free event series in the Ojai Valley. Their audience is a true cross-section of the people who live in this community, with attendees ranging in age from infants to 96+ years of age. We welcome everyone — no matter one's age, race, gender, economic background, political views, or physical capabilities — outdoors, in community, for FREE. About our guest - Ojai Film Society President Nicholas Weissman is an EP and director at Vacationland, a documentary studio that makes uncommon films on common ground. With over 15 years of experience in production, Weissman has led projects for major print and network news outlets. He is passionate about telling stories that help make the world make sense, collaborating with a community of award-winning filmmakers across the globe. He has worked with commercial clients such as Amex, Land Rover, Cadillac, Volvo, British Airways, Ray Ban, Visit California, Nike, Levi's, Microsoft, and Intel; and traveled to more than 20 countries to capture and share diverse perspectives and experiences. His feature, “For Ahkeem, “premiered at Berlinale Film Festival and won a 2018 Cinema Eye Honors Award. Recent films include “We the Power” for Patagonia, “Havana Libre,” “A Wonderful Kingdom,” and Soraya Simi’s “Row of Life”. He is a Sundance Producing Fellow, DOC NYC 40 under 40, and active member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. About our guest - Ojai Film Society Vice President Brady Hahn is an award-winning consultant and Founder of The Noodle Collective. She has over fifteen years of experience advising organizations and individuals on developing and scaling impactful programs, over 150 B2B partnerships, and 800 multi-lateral activations reaching millions of professionals globally. Her client work has contributed to PRWeek and Iris Awards nominations, and a MarCom Award Honorable Mention. Brady's forthcoming book, Women of the Valley: A Biographical History of the Ojai, California, will be published in the summer of 2026. She is also the editor of the Amazon best-selling workbook, “Choose Yourself: A 12-week Journey to Becoming the God of Your Own Heart” and co-author of The Women's Professional Conference Experience & Impact Study. Her research and advocacy work has ensured 1,200 women have spoken at professional conferences and provided over 1,000 event organizers with equity tools. Brady has appeared in Inc.com [http://inc.com/], Convene Magazine, and "Your Network Is Your Net Worth" (Atria Books, 2013) and spoken for The Female Quotient, Create & Cultivate, Social Media Week, Boston University, and University of Southern California.

Color Congress (Project Elev8te Doc) Co-Executive Director Sonya Childress (Shara Driver)

Color Congress is an ecosystem-builder that is committed to organizations led by people of color that serve nonfiction filmmakers, leaders, and audiences of color across the United States and US islands. We are a membership organization that includes film festivals, artist support and narrative change entities, micro cinemas, filmmaker collectives, and public media. We serve this ecosystem by supporting, resourcing, connecting, and championing these organizations to build their collective power. Our vision is to actualize a reimagined documentary landscape toward one that strengthens people of color visibility, voice, and power, laying the groundwork for a future of the field that is a more powerful force for social change. Elev8Docs is a Color Congress learning initiative supporting research for over two dozen nonfiction films by directors of color, all nominated by our member organizations. This initiative exclusively focused on Color Congress member-supported films and sought to address Color Congress members’ concerns about the film distribution crisis. Designed as a series of eight experiments, Elev8Docs focused on distribution barriers that filmmakers of color face, from a lack of cultural competency among mainstream marketing and PR agencies to a lack of data on diverse audience tastes and nonfiction consumption habits. The initiative offered a unique opportunity to advance solutions that help films reach their intended audiences and to lay the foundation for an effective distribution infrastructure in a changing landscape.

The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg - Director Doug Bremner

After the death of her son, Amanda Bellaconda seeks the help of Dr Jack Forteo to understand why teenagers are suddenly taking their own lives after taking a medication for acne. Carinaderm is the goose that keeps laying golden eggs, an acne medication bringing in a billion dollars a year for the Renzon Pharmaceutical Company. When Dr. Forteo sees a potentially lethal side effect of their blockbuster acne pill, Renzon doesn’t hesitate to pull out the stops with personal attacks and accusations of fraud, bringing Forteo’s marriage and career to the brink of destruction. With nothing left to lose, Forteo goes on a journey to revisit a tragedy from his own past. When he unearths painful secrets and deceptions that parallel those he has discovered in the pharmaceutical company, his voyage of self-discovery gives him strength to resume his struggle, leading to the ultimate conclusion. About the filmmaker - Douglas Bremner is professor of psychiatry and a researcher. He did brain imaging research on the effects of an acne medication, isotretinoin (Accutane), on the brain, and as a result became an expert witness in multi-district litigation related to depression and suicide in teenagers who had taken the drug. The research was funded by private donations from affected families. THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGG is a fictionalized story with elements of truth. In reality, the plaintiffs settled with the drug manufacturer and part of the settlement was that they couldn’t talk about the settlement.

Sherman’s March & Remake - Director Ross McElwee

Sherman’s March - Director Ross McElwee - Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ross shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love, and embarks on a sociological chronicle that documents the courting rites and rituals of the New South. Remake - Director Ross McElweeIn Remake, filmmaker Ross McElwee turns his lens on the passage of time and the uneasy space between documenting life and understanding it. The film traces McElwee’s relationship with his son Adrian, and the fragile bond the camera created between them while Adrian was alive, and now that he’s gone. About the filmmaker - Ross McElwee has made eleven feature-length documentaries as well as a number of shorter films. Sherman’s March has won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Sherman’s March was also chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.”Bright Leaves" premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight and was nominated for Best Documentary by both the Director’s Guild of America and the Writer’s Guild of America. McElwee’s In Paraguay premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, and he returned to Venice in 2011 to premiere Photographic Memory. In 2005, complete retrospectives of McElwee’s films were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New Y ork and later in Paris, Brussels, Milan, Lisbon, New Zealand, Seoul, Quito, and Nyon, Switzerland. Four of his films were featured in a selection of western documentaries shown for the first time in Tehran, and in 2015, McElwee presented his films in Changchun, Guangzhou, and Beijing, China.

Mary Oliver, Saved by the Beauty of the World - Director Sasha Waters

If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated bestseller, Pulitzer Prize winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly 50 years in order to open herself – and her readers – to the known and unknowable world. Featuring interviews with her close friends, including John Waters, never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive, and recitations of her work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, and Oprah Winfrey, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World considers the poet’s long lifetime of work in context, capturing the uniqueness of her world and the natural beauty that inspired her. About the filmmaker - Director, Producer, Co-editor Sasha Waters is a moving image artist trained in photography and 16mm cinema. Her films pursue ecstatic, metaphorical realism from the relations and materials of ordinary life. Her 2018 feature Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable won a Special Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival, and her 2024 short Ghost Protists had its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is a 2026-2027 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and a Professor of Film at VCU’s School of the Arts in Richmond, VA. Her other films include; This American Gothic (2008), Chekhov for Children (2010, feature), You Can See the Sun in Late December (2010), An Incomplete History of the Travelogue, 1925 (2012), Our Summer Made Her Light Escape (2012), An Incomplete History of Pornography, 1979 (2013), Burn Out the Day (2014), A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965 (2015), Garden of Stone, (2015), dragons & seraphim (2017).