• Cast Bios
• Filmmakers Bios
• Crew List

• Download Press Kit! (English)
• Download Press Kit! (Spanish)
• Get Notices

Filmmakers Bios

Lise Swenson, Director/Co-Producer, has been deeply involved with media arts in the Bay Area since the early 1980s. The success of her work on Love Between a Boy and Girl (1995), an experimental documentary about AIDS made by Latino teens in the Mission District, led her to co-found TILT (Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools), a nonprofit that works within school programs and community organizations to teach the fundamentals of moviemaking. In 2002, she produced Kracked, by and about the lives of gay street-youth in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. She has received numerous awards and grants for her work, including a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award for outstanding achievement in film and video in 1999. She was recently the recipient of a Creative Work Fund grant, which helped to seed the creation of Mission Movie, her first collaborative feature narrative.

Adriana Montenegro, Assistant Director, is co-director of Mission Movie’s Spanish-language scenes. She has been a member of the arts community in her hometown, La Paz, Bolivia, for years, working with different artists, galleries, and groups in successful community-outreach art projects. In the last two years, she has gotten increasingly involved in video and film projects, including work as an assistant of both production and art direction on Copacabana, a feature-length Brazilian film that was partially shot in La Paz. She currently lives in San Francisco, where her work on Mission Movie marks her entrance into the video and filmmaking community in the Bay Area.

Rene Canham, Executive Producer, has been working in various capacities of accounting and financial analysis since receiving her MBA in Finance in 1989. She has been active in the video-arts community for many years, and has been associated with Mission Movie director Lise Swenson for the past 23 years. She served as treasurer of TILT, and is on the board of directors of the nonprofit Arts Benicia in Benicia, California, where she lives. She is currently director of quality control for Capistrano Group, Inc., a recovery-auditing firm.

Kris Atkins, Producer, has been producing media projects for the past nine years, and has been involved in the San Francisco film and video community since 1987. Her projects have included narratives, documentaries, and educational and interactive media. From 1990 to 1994, she was executive director of Artists’ Television Access, a nonprofit media arts access and education facility. In 1994, she co-founded Wired Youth, a youth film and video festival. She is currently co-owner of Ethos Editorial, a local AVID post-production facility.

Eric Ladenburg, Editor/Post-Production Supervisor, has over 10 years of experience as an editor and has worked on an array of documentaries, broadcast spots, corporate videos, and web sites. He edited the documentary film Pins and Noodles (1997), a 56-minute odyssey through Paul Kwan’s rediscovery of traditional Chinese medicine and food after experiencing a near fatal stroke, which aired nationally on PBS. Ladenburg has had other projects air on PBS, as well as the Learning Channel, and various other TV networks.

Leonard Levy, Co-Director of Photography, has been involved in film and video production for over 30 years. In the 1970s he worked as an experimental filmmaker and was a groundbreaking film instructor as a California Educational Theatre Association artist-in-residence, often working in the Mission District. He has been working as a film and video director of photography since 1980. His documentary, feature, and commercial work has been seen on network TV (Oprah, More Than Entertainment), PBS (Wok in Progress, Pins and Noodles, Great Drives, The Newshour, Rising Waters, Stories of Lupus), the Discovery Channel (The Search for Jesse James), and VH1 (Behind the Music), as well as MTV, Fox, and others. His feature film work has ranged from 35mm to video and includes titles such as Kamikaze Lovers, Soul Mates, Kill Squad, and The Premature Burial.

George Spies, Co-Director of Photography, has over a decade of professional experience in the film and video industry. Besides being a filmmaker himself, he has a wide range of shooting credits for documentary and narrative projects, as well as commercial clients. Most recently, he shot Play Date, a short narrative set in San Francisco that is now playing at film festivals across the country. He has contributed camerawork to documentaries on Silicon Valley start-ups, a guitar festival in Mexico, the Burning Man festival, the San Francisco Mayor's race, and a piece on Jewish spirituality.

Ben Leon, Art Director, has been working in film, video and photography for many years. His past works include Save It for Later (2003), which premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and Vanilla, a short film that is currently in post-production. He has a background in photography that began early in junior high school at the yearbook and continues to this day. He has a strong passion for low-budget filmmaking and intends to continue his work as an art director, photographer, and multimedia artist.

Harjant Gill, Writing team/Casting Director, moved from India to the U.S. at 15. A budding filmmaker, Harjant has a host of film credits to his name. One of his most recent films, Some Reasons for Living: An Ethnographic Look into the Lives of Transgender Women, explores our societies unacceptence towards transgender folks and how these women work to overcome that intolerance. Also in 2002, he made an individual short narrative film called Everything, which screened at numerous film festivals, including the 2003 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Now 22, he is studying Cultural Anthropology and Human Sexuality at SF State University, and hopes to keep promoting greater public awareness of complex gender and sexuality issues through his work as a filmmaker. Back to Filmmakers

Matthew Perifano, Writing team/Location Manager, has a background in theater and songwriting, and over 30 years of experience in community-based arts and education in the Bay Area. He holds a Masters degree in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts from the late Inter Arts Center of San Francisco State University. As well as being an instructor at TILT, he teaches an interdisciplinary arts curriculum at International High School and at the French-American International School of San Francisco. He also co-founded the San Francisco Shakespeare Lab, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary approaches to Shakespeare in performance and education.

Leroy Bermudez, Location Scout/Community Outreach, is a visual artist, muralist, actor, and event promoter. He was born and raised in the Mission District and has worked for almost a decade to maintain and illuminate the cultural presence of Latinos/Chicanos in the neighborhood. In 1993 he co-founded an organization called Latinismo, and in 1996 he won the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship Award. He also worked on the very first TILT youth movie production in 1995. He has promoted some of the largest events in San Francisco, including the Cinco de Mayo Festival, Carnival, and the Latino Summer Fiesta.