Frances Reid has been producing, directing, and shooting documentary films for over 30 years. Her most recent production, with Deborah Hoffmann, was “Long Night’s Journey Into Day: South Africa’s Search for Truth & Reconciliation.” It won the Grand Jury Award for best Documentary at Sundance 2000, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001, and DGA award and Emmy Award in 2002, and has been exhibited at festivals worldwide, including the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2000 where it won the “In the Spirit of Freedom” award.

In 1995 she produced and directed “Skin Deep,” a film exploring race relations on college campuses, it was broadcast nationally on PBS and is now in use by nearly 2,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. In 1994, she received an Academy Award nomination for her documentary short “Straight From The Heart.” Additional producing and directing credits include such films as the groundbreaking documentary on Lesbian mothers and child custody, “In the Best Interests of the Children,” a Blue Ribbon Winner at the American Film Festival.

Her film “The Faces of AIDS” (1992) won a First Place at the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. Her cinematography credits include “The Times of Harvey Milk,” “Visions of the Spirit,” “The Ride to Wounded Knee,” “Reno’s Kids,” and scores of other award-winning documentaries. She was also the cinematographer for Deborah Hoffmann’s “Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.” Frances is one of the original members of Iris Films, founded in 1975. She has traveled widely to speak and lecture with her films and on filmmaking and cinematography. Most recently she served on the Grand Jury for the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. She is also the recipient of the James Phelan Art Award in Video.

Deborah Hoffmann has worked for over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area as a film and video editor, editing numerous internationally acclaimed documentaries on a wide range of sensitive and challenging topics. For editing “The Times of Harvey Milk” she received a National Emmy and the film received an Academy Award. Marlon Riggs' video Color Adjustment, which she edited, received a Peabody and an International Documentary Association Award. She also edited Marlon Riggs’ “Ethnic Notions” and the Frontline program “Men Who Molest,” which both received National Emmys, “Straight From the Heart” which was an Academy Award nominee, and was an editor of” Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” another Academy Award winner. Deborah also edited “Mulholland’s Dream,” the opening show of the PBS series, “Cadillac Desert,” and Jon Else’s “Sing Faster,” winner of the Filmmakers Trophy Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

In 1994 Deborah chronicled her caregiving experiences with her mother’s worsening Alzheimer’s Disease. The resulting film, “Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter,” received over 30 international awards, including an Academy Award nomination, an Emmy Award, a Peabody, and a duPont-Columbia Award. Complaints... aired nationally on PBS in June 1995, and received rave reviews from virtually every major paper in the country.

In 2000 Deborah and her partner Frances Reid completed the Academy Award nominated feature documentary “Long Nights Journey into Day: South Africa’s Search for Truth and Reconciliation.”

Deborah is a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Journalism School. She has served on juries for the Sundance, San Francisco and Mill Valley Film Festivals and on the Independent Spirit, and Gotham Awards. She is on the board of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

www.irisfilms.org