(Credit: Director, Editor)

Home2Headwaters (working title) is a cinematic and educational documentary that follows Nina Gordon-Kirsch, a queer, Jewish water protector who has spent the last decade traveling the globe in efforts to restore water health and water rights. The film traces her 240+ mile water walk from Oakland to the headwaters of the Mokelumne River - the river where East Bay Municipal Utility District sources drinking water for 1.4 million people in the eastern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The film that will be brought into Oakland and Berkeley public schools - as well as local public viewings - to teach people where their drinking water comes from.

Why?
​​💧To help people understand where their water comes from
💧To bridge the gaps between urban residents, farmers in the Sacramento Delta region, plants and animals of the up-river ecology areas, and more
💧To bring awareness and respect to the life giving source that is the Mokelumne River
💧To create a sense of belonging for humans within the larger water cycle, increasing our ability to cope with and solve changing water resource issues due to climate change

(Currently in Production)

Filmmaker / Director
Julia is a Polish-American filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has worked on numerous award-winning film productions including Jennifer Fox's “My Reincarnation” (2010), Nancy Kates's “Regarding Susan Sontag” (2014), “Retracing Jeneba: The Story of a Witness,” (2018), and was an editing assistant on Academy Award nominated director Judith Ehrlich's forthcoming film, “The Mouse that Roared” (in post production). The films she has worked on have been screened in cinemas, on HBO, A&E, PBS, Arté TV France, Amazon Prime, Kanopy and more. Julia has produced dozens of short films that have aired on UpliftTV, Gaia TV, screened at international conferences and festivals, all produced through the media collaborative, Re/Culture Media, which she helped co-found. Julia was born in Poland, she is trilingual, a Master NLP Practitioner, an avid gardener and a mama to a little one.

Producer
Marielle Olentine is multimedia storyteller and producer championing a collaborative and regenerative approach to filmmaking. From covering the Syrian Revolution to following presidential candidates on the campaign trail in 2016, her work has appeared on VICE, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, and HBO and at Toronto Film Festival and SXSW. She worked as an Associate Producer on Erin Lee Carr’s HBO films Thought Crimes and Mommy Dead & Dearest. She also associate-produced narrative feature Bleed For This which premiered at TIFF. As a storyteller she seeks to weave together narratives that honor, celebrate and bridge differences, finding inspiration in the interconnectedness of nature and the devotion of oral story-keepers across the globe. With her film Three Promises she has participated in SFFILM’s Catapult Documentary Fellowship and the Gotham Documentary Lab (formerly IFP Documentary Lab) and was a recipient of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture’s (AFAC) production grant. When she’s not producing films she's managing a non-profit media production organization called Tikkun Olam Productions, that provides subsidized multimedia storytelling to frontline social & environmental justice groups. (https://www.tikkunolamproductions.com/team)

Cinematographers

Mer Al Dao is devoted to living poetically. Born in Argentinian deserts, reborn in Mexican mountains and uplifted in Californian hot springs, she followed her own quest for psychic freedom into the wild. Her art is at once existential, alive, subterranean and pleasurable. With subtle choices, she reveals the profundity of alternative narratives subverting reality. Outside of the margins of capitalistic industrial filmmaking, she stands on a feminine stare, a pulsing heart, and a grounded experience in collaboration, creating original stories that support imagination liberation. Internationally awarded and well rooted in earth loving, among with other 2 sisters, she co-created an intercultural women’s film collective called Republic of Light, made +80 short films and a feature surreal documentary film, all while living nomadically in a school bus through the americas for 4+ years. The creative field generated by living, dreaming and filming together left a visceral imprint in Mer's way of storytelling. She responds to magic. Art is her means of transformation. (www.gualina.com)

Sky Owen RIchards - https://skysrectangle.com/