The Team

Y van Iturriaga is an Oakland-based writer/director who spent his childhood border crossing through Latin America, living in the extended Chilean exile community. Constantly moving in the undefined space between exile and return, Yvan grew up surrounded by people with silenced, clandestine stories. His desire to make those stories known and remembered inspired him to become a filmmaker.

His documentary work includes production of The Storm That Swept Mexico and episode six of the PBS series titled Latino Americans; and co-directing A Photographer’s Journey for the PBS American Masters series. Yvan also wrote and directed the narrative shorts Sui Generis and Beep playing in over thirty festivals worldwide. Most recently, Yvan directed seasons one and two (fourteen episodes) of the original web series The North Pole. His feature screenplay American Babylon won a 2018 SFFILM Rainin Screenwriting Grant and 2019 SFFILM FilmHouse residency. Yvan continues to be a fellow at SFFilm in 2021, now developing a feature documentary titled Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?

C laudia Martin began a lifelong career as a freelance film critic when she was removed, screaming, from her hometown theater during the climactic tic-toc crocodile scene in Disney’s original Peter Pan. A few years later, she initiated a boycott of Disney films involving any depiction of wildlife after realizing she could walk out of Bambi by herself. Zoom forward to her short list of favorite 21^st Century flicks topped by the works of maestro Alejandro González Iñárritu. Ms Martin wishes she could name a woman director of a recent feature film that delivers the complexity and streetwise zeitgeist of its moment with the force of Amores Perros, the globe-spinning desperation of Babel, or the dystopian anguish of Biutiful. She’s optimistic that more and more women are taking over the cameras to break rules, strike stereotypes and shoot big picture stories from new angles. Claudia is also an astute bilingual wordsmith who sometimes annoys audiences by applauding an especially creative subtitle or pifiando a ridiculous mistranslation.

A dolfo M. González believes that, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, true filmmakers are guided by great feelings of love. One of the main dramas faced by a director, as he sees it, is the need to be passionate and cool headed at the same time, and make tough decisions with no retakes. González himself has been the romanticized protagonist (uncredited) of numerous feature films and documentaries, with roles as diverse as young motorcycle adventurer, jungle physician, guerrilla fighter, central banker, socialist bureaucrat and international outlaw. His main role, however, is working behind the scenes to reassure true filmmakers that making money doesn’t matter. What really matters is humanizing the story—telling it like it was, showing how it could be—by any means necessary.