Stanford Alumni and Students Featured at SFIFF
The San Francisco International Film Festival is showcasing multiple connections to Stanford's documentary program this year.
Yael Bridge (MFA '13) directed and produced Who Moves America, which follows UPS Teamsters as they build solidarity among 340,000 workers ahead of a strike deadline. The film tracks a new California driver, a veteran organizer from the 1997 strike in New York, and a part-time Kentucky warehouse worker as they navigate the organizing effort. Bridge's previous feature, The Big Scary "S" Word, premiered at Hot Docs 2020 and aired on Hulu in 2022. She also produced the Netflix Emmy-nominated Saving Capitalism.
Elivia Shaw (MFA '18) has two projects at SFIFF: The Oldest Person in the World (dir. Sam Green), on which she served as associate producer, and Breathing Room, her new short documentary as director. In Breathing Room, a team of Mexican doctors fights to provide essential care to a community in California's Central Valley caught between environmental hazards and inhumane immigration policies. Elisa Leiva (MFA '25) edited the film. Shaw's Stanford thesis film The Clinic won the AFI Fest Grand Jury Award for Documentary Short and numerous other festival awards. She is in production on her first feature The Invisible Valley.
Current MFA candidate Maria Luisa Santos has her first-year Fall quarter film highways take me anywhere I want screening in the Shorts 1: Human Flow section. In Santos' new film, against a backdrop of California highways and amidst the traces left behind by migrants, a father and daughter contemplate whether home is Cuba, Costa Rica, or elsewhere.
Annie Marr (MFA '20) produced Joybubbles, a feature documentary about a blind teenager who discovers he can control phones through whistling specific tones—a discovery born from loneliness that becomes foundational to hacking culture and tech history. The film premiered in competition at Sundance. Marr's work has screened at Tribeca, SXSW, IDFA, and on the New York Times Op-Docs channel.
Kim Roberts (MA '96), an ACE-credited editor, edited Cookie Queens, which documents four girls competing to become top-selling "Cookie Queens" during Girl Scout season, exploring the $800 million business where innocence and ambition intersect. Roberts is known for editing Food, Inc., Waiting for Superman, The Hunting Ground, Inequality for All, and Merchants of Doubt.
