Special Guests

More than 16 filmmakers and artists and one complete funk band will be joining us in Yosemite Valley during ROLFF 2014 to present and discuss their work and (in the case of the funk band) to entertain us and make us jump.

Photographer and filmmaker GLEN DENNY (El Capitan: The Movie) was one of the denizens of Camp 4 in the sixties. He scaled the big walls of Yosemite Valley with many of the climbing icons of the 1960s, including Warren Harding, Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, Yvon Chouinard, Chuck Pratt, and Layton Kor. Camera in hand, Glen captured both the gritty reality and the sunny optimism of those years on film. His award-winning book, Yosemite in the Sixties, gives an insider’s view of the classic ascents and colorful characters of this important era through images, stories, and anecdotes.

As a writer, editor, photo editor, and film director with nearly 15 years of editorial experience — including nine years at National Parks Magazine — AMY MARQUIS (The Way Home, Love in the Tetons) is uniquely poised to access and produce the most compelling stories about the national parks today. In 2013, she began directing the 10-part film series, National Park Experience, which creates an invitation to every American, regardless of age, race, religion, or economic status, to embrace and become part of “America’s Best Idea.” She is the founder and editor of The Digital Naturalist, a blog and consulting company dedicated to improving the quality of advocacy video storytelling. Her award-winning Yosemite film, The Way Home, toured with Banff, Mountainfilm, and Wild & Scenic.

DANA ROMANOFF (Love in the Tetons) is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker whose stories and images are featured on the pages of National Geographic, National Parks, GEO, New York Times, as well as in galleries, exhibits and festivals around the globe. Her short documentary, No Man’s Land: The Women of Mexico, toured internationally as the recipient of the Anthropographía Multimedia & Human Rights Award. Dana is the Director of Photography for Water Sisters, a documentary short about sisters and their daily walk for water in a small village in Ethiopia (in production). Along with Amy Marquis, Dana is the co-creator of the National Parks Experience, a project of 10 short films about diverse human relationships with our national parks.

JON ELSE (Yosemite: Fate of Heaven) was a MacArthur Fellow from 1988 to 1993, and has won four National Emmys® (for writing, producing, directing, and cinematography), several Columbia-DuPonts, Polk Awards, and Peabody Awards as well as several Academy Award® nominations, and the Prix Italia.

Munch

CHRISTOPHER MUNCH (Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day) is an American writer-director whose most recent feature film, the 2011 wilderness drama Letters From the Big Man, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.  His other features have included The Sleepy Time Gal and The Hours and Times.  He is a past Guggenheim fellow, recipient of jury prizes at Sundance and Berlin, an Independent Spirit Award winner, and has been featured in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions.

IAN RUHTER (Silver & Light, Death Do Us Part) is a self-taught tintype photographer who uses the wet plate collodion process and has turned his truck into a pinhole camera. He will be joined at ROLFF 2014 by co-filmmakers WILL EICHELBERGER and LANE POWER.

Anderson-Moore

Growing up, filmmaker OAKLEY ANDERSON-MOORE got hints of her father’s mysterious past as a dirtbag climber from his stories and wandering gaze toward distant peaks. Over the last five years, she’s captured the stories and archives of climbers from the 1950s to the 1970s to profile the movement of American rock climbing. At ROLFF 2014 she will present the first look into that work with a short film titled Wild New Brave. Brave New Wild, the feature form of the project, was one of 10 projects accepted into the IFP Independent Documentary Lab, and marks Oakley’s documentary debut.

RIC SERENA, JEN SERENA, DURAND TRENCH AND JASON FITZPATRICK (Mile Mile & a Half) Based on mutual admiration for each other’s artistic prowess and their shared love of natural beauty and wilderness, these friends and colleagues formed The Muir Project. As working professionals in the film and television industry, their goal is to mix their passion for craft with their passion for life and adventure, in the hopes of inspiring others to do the same. One of their fans summed it up best when he said “I like how you take your work very seriously, but never yourselves.”

Kelly & Yamamoto

Husband-and-wife team NANCY KELLY and KENJI YAMAMOTO (Rebels With a Cause) have been making award-winning independent fiction and non-fiction films for more than twenty-five years.

Tom Bopp (Vintage Songs of Yosemite) has made his living as an entertainer since 1982, performing a wide range of piano and vocal music. In spring of 1983, Tom signed on at the historic Wawona Hotel in Yosemite National Park, and continues to perform there nightly in the hotel’s piano parlor.

An interpretive ranger for the National Park Service since 1987, SHELTON JOHNSON (The Way Home, Yosemite through the Eyes of a Buffalo Soldier, Yosemite: A Gathering of Spirit) has served in Great Basin National Park and Yellowstone National Park and is now an interpretive ranger in Yosemite. Johnson accepted a resolution passed in 2003 by the California Legislative Black Caucus honoring the contributions made to Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks by the Buffalo Soldiers. In 2006, the governor of Kentucky presented Shelton with a commission as a Kentucky Colonel for his work searching for descendants of the Buffalo Soldiers in the state. He was featured extensively in the Ken Burns documentary, National Parks: America’s Best Idea, and was selected as a member of the National Park Service delegation to China in 2000. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he received an MFA in poetry.

JEREMY COLLINS (The Wolf & the Medallion, Border Country) is official Festival Artist for ROLFF 2014. His work has been featured in Rock and Ice, Alpinist Magazine, National Geographic Magazine and the Patagonia catalog. As a film-maker, with his studio mates at ThreeHouse, he combines illustration with animation and live-action footage to create soulful adventure+life short films that have brought him numerous awards. His film/stage production “The Wolf & The Medallion” won the Banff Center’s Creative Excellence Award, and 5 Point Film Festival’s Best of The Fest.