I have been to more than a few film festivals in my life, but something felt different as I walked into the Bayanihan Community Center in San Francisco on a breezy Friday evening a few months ago. I was in town for the SF Urban Film Fest, which had begun a couple days before. I already knew a bit about the festival (or ‘SFUFF,’ as it is popularly known) after asking around about it; I knew that SFUFF, though still young, had attracted a passionate local following by highlighting the sociopolitical issues that many San Franciscans face daily—a homelessness crisis, a dearth of affordable housing, and lack of affordable healthcare for many of its citizens, among many others—and that organizations like LISC were created to solve.
Yet I was drawn to the festival for another, more selfish reason: I wanted to see if and how a film festival could help to solve these problems. As a storyteller at LISC, I certainly believe in the power of art—I’m an artist myself—but I also constantly ask myself how art, specifically storytelling, can positively impact the lives of the people we serve. Stories can generate empathy, of course, but I’d recently been wondering if they could do anything more within a community development context. Are storytellers simply meant to document what is happening, to spread the word to others? I’d had the pleasure of meeting Fay Darmawi, the founder of the festival, a few weeks before at a creative placemaking conference, and as she described the festival and its innovative outreach efforts I found myself asking her an almost uninterrupted stream of questions. Eventually she held up a hand and laughed. “Why don’t you just come and check it out,” she said.
I arrived at the Bayanihan Community Center at about 7pm, just a few minutes before the start of the program. The lights went down and the first in a series of short films began to play. They were vibrant and visceral, about topics ranging from gentrification to a story about community development in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, to an animated tale about a couple trying to buy a house in San Francisco’s notoriously expensive real estate market. There was only one film in the program I had seen before, about Emory Douglas, who had served as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. Among the shorts was also a film called A Place on 6th and Mission about the Bayanihan Community Center, the building in which we were sitting. The audience, already appreciative of the films we’d been watching, became almost boisterous as familiar spaces and people appeared on the screen. It was only then I realized that each of the films I’d seen were firmly grounded in place. All of them took place somewhere in California—a few in Los Angeles, and the rest in the Bay Area. It occurred to me that this feature of the festival alone distinguished it from the many other festivals I’d attended. These films were simultaneously a celebration of the medium of film—its power to entertain and enthrall—and of the communities in which the films took place. I also realized then that many of the people featured in the films were in the room with me. They had spent a significant amount of time in the hallways of power and in the streets of their communities, working as hard as they could to enact change, and now they were seeing themselves on screen, and their friends and families had joined them to celebrate their victories and mourn their losses.
After the last film ended the lights came up and four people from the audience moved to the front of the room to discuss the films. Fay Darmawi, the Founder and Executive Director of the festival, was serving as moderator. She began by announcing that Emory Douglas was in the room with us. We all turned and twisted until we saw him in the back, smiling bashfully, waving heartily. The program proceeded as I expected; Fay asked the panelists questions about the films, and the panelists answered, but there was an unexpected aspect of their conversation as well, at least for me. The panelists were all activists who were based in the communities featured in the films, and they discussed how they intended to advance the causes that we had learned about a few minutes before, and how we could help. I realized that in this context, the typically staid post-film conversation had been transformed into something else; somehow this had become an organizing meeting. The panelists made pronouncements and echoes of call and response ricocheted around the room. And then it was over. We folded up the folding chairs and folks began to leave. I went to find Fay.
*
“I started the SF Urban Film Festival because of my affordable housing background,” Fay tells me during a later conversation. “I felt like we lost our sense of why we do what we do, and we became an industrial complex, and we were making too much money. We were becoming like investment bankers, and we weren’t responding to the needs in our communities. We were just moving too slow, and the needs were getting bigger and bigger.”
Darmawi devised the SF Urban Film Festival at a crossroads in her life. She had spent a few years trying her hand as a screenwriter after a successful career in housing finance. She was searching for the next challenge, and she was also searching for a way to harness the power of film to tell stories about the people and circumstances she had encountered her entire career—stories that were missing from everyday jargon-filled conversations about affordable housing. A few incidents eventually convinced her that a film festival was the best method of communicating these stories to the public. Namely, Darmawi was disappointed by the lack of public debate around then-Governor Jerry Brown’s decision to dissolve roughly 400 redevelopment agencies—which provided robust funding for cities and counties to combat blight—in California in 2012. She was also impressed by the scope and reach of the San Francisco Green Festival, which screens films about climate change and environmental activism, and has been a mainstay of the San Francisco cultural calendar since 2010. Darmawi saw an opening to establish a similar festival that focused on affordable housing issues. She asked a few friends to assist her, watched countless films about affordable housing, and searched the Bay Area for suitable venues to screen these films. In 2014, just a few months after she had first envisioned such a festival, The SF Urban Film Fest was born.
The festival has steadily grown since then, and the 2020 edition featured 24 films, 40 panelists, and 880 audience members, a healthy increase from the 11 films, 16 panelists, and 140 audience members from the first SFUFF in 2014. Each year Darmawi and her team have tweaked certain aspects of the festival; for example, this year they focused on increasing the number of filmmakers of color who were featured in the festival. They were successful—63% of the filmmakers were people of color, and 44% of the filmmakers were women of color. In addition, Darmawi and her team now offer SFUFF programs throughout the year.
Yet one staple of the program has been present since the beginning, and it intrigued me enough that I flew across the country, all the way from Washington DC. Darmawi and her team have been holding storytelling workshops for urban planners since the first edition of the festival. I wanted to see how this workshop worked, and how it had impacted the perspectives of the planners who had participated.
*
“Before the first film festival, I thought to myself ‘If I could be taught screenwriting, then everyone could be taught screenwriting.’” Darmawi tells me. “And I became a much more effective worker because of my screenwriting. I’m able to describe things much better. More vivid, more approachable, less abstract, Even though I’m thinking conceptually, I’m not talking conceptually. I’m better at communicating, I’m better at conceptualizing. I’m better at thinking ‘big picture,’ and also thinking about how people receive what I say. So I thought ‘if I think that screenwriting helped me become a better planner, then maybe I can teach storytelling to other planners, and they would be better planners. And therefore the community engagement part of planning would improve.’”
On a Sunday morning I walk into the SPUR Urban Center in midtown San Francisco, climb up a flight of stairs and sit in the back of a classroom. Keith Battle, who will be leading the session, is hovering near the front. Darmawi is here as well, standing near the back, directing traffic. I’m surrounded by twentysomething young folks—they’re milling about, catching up with each other, and for a moment I almost feel like I’m back in grad school. At the top of the hour we all sit and look toward the front, and Keith starts the lesson. He’s a smiling, energetic presence, and he begins by telling us about his love for Dungeons and Dragons, and how that game represents the best of collaborative storytelling, the kind of storytelling that urban planners must use to maximize their effectiveness. Then he introduces a storytelling framework called SAMS—Story, Audience, Message, and Style. As he explains each component of the framework everyone around me is nodding and studiously taking notes, and I can’t help but wonder how much relevance this information will have to the work that the planners do each day. Later, when I ask Darmawi this question, she lights up.
“I always felt like—and planners know this—that the way planners engage the community is always just like dots on a map. And that’s not community engagement. It’s not. And they know this, and yet that’s all they have. The tools are very limited. Surveys, dots on a map, maybe some interviews…yeah, basically planners are flying blind.”
I can’t say I know much about how the planners in this room engage their communities, but as the session continues I begin to understand how this training might be useful not only to planners but to everyone who works in a public interest role. Battle begins a crash course on production values and messaging, but I am brought up short when he mentions the importance of storytellers doing their “empathy homework” before they engage with communities. That simple phrase describes what every storyteller must do before they begin the work of creating a story, and, as I think about it, the kind of practice that policymakers and community developers would be wise to incorporate into their toolkits. I can’t help but notice that each exercise Battle asks us to do is centered on this crucial idea, and how, as the day progresses, all of us become more attuned to potential needs and desires of the communities—fictional and otherwise—that he describes.
Battle leads us through a series of storytelling exercises that culminates in a group activity—he asks us to separate into teams of four to improve a commercial about a congestion pricing policy that the San Francisco County Transportation Authority is considering. Each team will be guided by a local professional filmmaker who will help them to write a short script and create a storyboard that they will present to the full group. I wander around the room as each group works and eavesdrop on the conversations. After half an hour the presentations begin. I’m impressed by each one, and throughout the exercise I keep thinking of something that Battle said earlier—that each of us has read, watched and participated in countless stories. We have lived in far-flung countries and walked in many shoes that are not our own. That the power to create stories resides in all of us, that we are all storytellers.
I leave my hotel the following morning with something I had not anticipated—not necessarily a strategy, though I learned many things during my stay that I will incorporate into my work. My trip has provided me with an opportunity to think beyond the transactional aspects of my day to day life at LISC—how to gauge the impact of a film we screen or a story I write—to consider the broader idea of how storytelling is connected to community development. It occurs to me that each of us who work in this industry must be willing to do our “empathy homework” if we hope to have any chance of being successful. Indeed, the act of community development, if done effectively, is nothing more than an extended exercise in empathy. For how else can we seek to help those who require assistance—to offer loans and grants, to teach skills and build suitable housing—if we do not work each day to shed the trappings of our offices and degrees to understand our fellow human beings in need? I also think about something Darmawi told me: that our most important objective as community developers is to center community voices, experiences, needs, and strategies. To keep their stories—their lives, their passions, their humanity—at the front of our minds.
An unspoken but urgent corollary of Darmawi’s message is that, in the end, the main objective of community development must be to return the power of storytelling to the people we serve. We will know we have been successful when their lives are no longer shaped into stories to attract sympathy or capital, or to generate derision and hatred. We will know we have been successful when the people we serve possess the power to project their stories into the world whenever and however they desire.
But how do we get there? How do I start? What are the next steps?
On the plane, I glance out the window, at the lights of San Francisco that are winking out of view. Then I pull out my notepad and begin to write.
The SF Urban Film Fest will be virtual this year, and will take place from Feb 14-21, 2021. For more information (and to see some of the films that were shown last year) please visit https://sfurbanfilmfest.com/.
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Fay Darmawi: In Her Own Words