San Francisco Film Society

This Hewlett Foundation grant to the San Francisco Film Society will support the dissemination of the award-winning Mexican documentary Presumed Guilty, to audiences that are usually overlooked by conventional documentary distribution. Targeted screenings will reach out to law students, law professors and deans nation-wide; groups of prisoners and their families, and vulnerable youth. Hewlett Foundation provided the seed funding for the film, which became an incredible vehicle for disseminating some of the research that our program have supported for many years about the urgent need for justice reform in Mexico. The research findings are highlighted in the film and are a plea for greater transparency and accountability in Mexico's justice system, and for the implementation of the Constitutional Reform that requires the adoption of an adversarial type of criminal procedures all over the country.

Each year, San Francisco Film Society engages more than 74,000 people through its flagship San Francisco International Film Festival, specialty film festivals, year-round screening programs, and media education programs for students and teachers. It also annually provides more than $1 million in financial and service support to filmmakers at all stages of their careers through its Filmmaker360 program.

The San Francisco Film Society (SFFILM) is a year-round nonprofit organization delivering screenings and events to more than 100,000 film lovers and providing media education programs to more than 10,000 students and teachers annually. SFFILM is supporting "Saving the City," a 13-part national television series that tells stories through the eyes of people who use the city. This series highlights successful and unsuccessful examples of urban development throughout the United States and Canada.