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FILM

Art catches out from the slipstream of possibility and enchantment, and seizes the moment of genuine sight, sound, smell, insight, surmise, inspiration and finally, achievement, the work itself.

~ R. Nilsson

FILMOGRAPHY:

SELECTED NILSSON FEATURE FILMS 1967- 2017

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Heat and Sunlight
(1987) a Direct Action Feature Film: Mel Hurley was a photographer during the last days of the Biafran War. Currently shooting a series of erotic pictures of Carmen, his girl friend and a professional dancer, he has become jealous of her dance partner (Russell Murphy, a ranking ballet dancer from the San Francisco and Smuin ballets). His friend Mitch watches an emotional extremist begin to disintegrate before his eyes. The green eyed monster has him in its grip.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Steve Burns, Hildy Burns, Gregory Friedman

Cast: Consuelo Faust, Rob Nilsson, Don Bajema, Ernie Fosselius

Music: David Byrne and Brian Eno from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
GRAND PRIZE WINNER, SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, 1988

 

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Signal 7 (1986) the First Direct Action Feature Film (shot in 3 days): One night in the life of aging cab drivers Marty and Speed, who have not lost the dream of making it as actors. In the driver’s room they tell truths and lies about exploits out on the streets, and vow to move to LA where the action is. Then comes the Signal 7, a call signifying a driver in trouble. A friend and fellow driver is robbed and shot in the head. Dreams and lies don’t mean much in the face of the truth.
An historical film: the first small format video to be blown up to 35mm. for theatrical distribution around the world.  World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, restored by Pacific Film Archive, (2015)

 

Cast: Dan Leegant, Bill Ackridge, Don Bajema

 Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Ben Myron, Don Taylor

Associate Producer: Roy Kissin

Executive Producer: John Stout and New Front Films

Music: Andy Narell, Les McCann

 

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On the Edge
(1986) Dramatic feature: Wes Holman, son of a 30s radical, is banned from running during the 1972 Olympic trials. 12 years later he returns to Mt. Tamalpais to run the Cielo Sea, a grueling cross country race with handicaps based on age and sex. His Olympic trial roommate, responsible for his ban, is now the race director and won’t let him enter the race. But fellow runners don’t like bureaucrats running things. They take action.

 

Featuring: Bruce Dern, John Marley

World Class Runners: Gary Bjorklund, Marty Liquori, Roy Kissin, Tamalpa Runners

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers:  Jeffrey Hayes, Roy Kissin, Rob Nilsson, John Stout

Music: Herb Pilhofer

 

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What Happened Here (2012) Feature Documentary: Nilsson explores the life of Leon Trotsky in Ukraine, Northern Wisconsin, California and Israel. A road movie exploration of revolution and ideological fantasy.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

DP: Mickey Freeman

Producers: Rob Nilsson, David and Carol Richards

 

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The Steppes (
2011) a Direct Action Feature Film: An aging woman whose family starved to death during the (1932-33) Ukrainian Holodomor holds on to a small hotel in the Tenderloin after her husband is shot and killed by an intruder. Her granddaughter’s attempts to help her are rebuffed but finally lead to a long delayed confession.

World Premiere at the Perspectives Competition, Moscow International Film Festival

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: L. Seymour, Irit Levi, Rob Nilsson, Joel Simone

Featuring: Irit Levi

Music: Nikolai Massenkoff, Al Nelson, Ukania, David Hess

 

IN MEMORY OF IRIT LEVI AND DAVID HESS

 

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Presque Isle
(2009) a Direct Action Feature Film:A love affair ends and Danny heads for Northern Wisconsin on his motorcycle.On his family’s ancestral island deep in the forest he nurses his pain as past memories haunt him. The real and unreal parade by.Long dead mother and father, grandparents, himself as a boy, a friend come to give comfort, and his lost lover, (in three different versions), come to teach him who he is and how he got that way.

World Premiere: Mill Valley Film Festival

Accolade Award to Mickey Freeman for Cinematography

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

DP: Mickey Freeman

Producers: Jeremiah Birnbaum, James Savoca, Rob Nilsson, John Music: Cas Lucas

 

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Northern Lights
(1978) Dramatic Feature Film: Ray Sorenson, a North Dakota farmer during the 1916 uprising of the Nonpartisan League, goes farm to farm to support the League’s candidates.They win the election and begin to create institutions which benefit working people. But politics has its price as Ray’s marriage with Inga, daughter of a nearby farmer is postponed.The old guard politicians don’t give up and it seems the job of a grass roots organizer is never done. But Henry Martinson, life long Socialist and narrator of the film doing push ups at age 91, reaffirms his activism.“I’ve got time. I can wait.”

Winner Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (1979)

Directors: Rob Nilsson, John Hanson

Featuring Bob Behling, Joe Spano and Susan Lynch

Producers: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, Sandra Schulberg

 

NILSSON AND HANSON RETAIN US THEATRICAL RIGHTS. ALL REMAINING RIGHTS WITH LAKESHORE WHICH HAS NO USABLE ELEMENTS AND IS NOT ACTIVE IN ITS DISTRIBUTION

 

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The Prairie Trilogy (1977-1981) Prairie Fire, Survivor, and Rebel Earth: three documentary films about the Nonpartisan League which took over the state of North Dakota in 1916.Featuring Henry Martinson, homesteader, Leaguer, early prairie radical, state poet of North Dakota, life long Socialist and labor organizer.

 

Produced and Directed: Rob Nilsson and John Hanson

With early North Dakota footage from Frithjof Holmboe, Nilsson’s grandfather

Music: Ozzie Ahlers, Rob Nilsson, David Schickele

 

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Imbued
(2009) a Direct Action Feature Film: Donatello (played by Stacy Keach) runs an illegal gambling operation in an unfinished high rise. Lydia a call girl looking for someone else shows up. An ironic battle of wits ensues which leads to dancing, bed and a sexual encounter as two people who live in shaky relationships with the truth manage, for one night, to face their worst fears.

World Premiere: Mill Valley Film Festival and Tribute to Stacy Keach

 

Director: Rob Nilsson    

Lead Roles: Stacy Keach, Liz Sklar

Producers: Michelle Anton Allen, Marshall Spight, Rob Nilsson Denny Dey, Robert   Render Harrison,Wayne Pesuit,

Executive Producers: David and Carol Richards

Music: Al Nelson, Stacy Keach, David Hess

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Chalk
(1996) a Direct Action Feature Film: Years ago Watson, Black, 60, was a pool hustler up in the Sacramento Delta but after years of heroin abuse he's left the playing to his sons: Jones, fathered with a peasant woman during the Korean War, and his adopted son, T.C., a pool playing prodigy.Jones hustles and T.C. plays at the Crabtree, Watson’s pool hall.One night Jones brings in Dorian, a sporadically brilliant tournament pro he thinks might crack under pressure. An epic 9 ball match between the two primordial pool archetypes, the hustler and the professional tour player, begins.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Rand Crook, Ethan Sing

Associate Producers: Drew Fellman, Josh Peterson

Original Music Composed by Tim Alexander

Produced by the Tenderloin Action Group working with top world pool pros and hustlers.

 

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Words for the Dying (1990) Feature Documentary: John Cale and Brian Eno travel from the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, to a symphony hall in Perestroika Russia, a Boys Chorus in Wales and a London studio, recording an album of songs written by Cale, with lyrics from Dylan Thomas poetry, produced by Eno. Nilsson travels with them recording the collaboration but Eno doesn’t want to be videoed while working. Nilsson and Eno don’t get along. Trouble ensues.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: David Donoghue, James Morris

Executive Producers: John Cale, Dan Silver

A Windmill Lane Production, Dublin Irelan

 

 

NILSSON’S 9 @ NIGHT FILM CYCLE

“9 dramatic feature films which begin at 9:00 PM telling the stories of 40-50 characters on America’s rough edges.  An inside view of outsiders… the sufferers, the ecstatics, the depressives, the addicts … a portrait of what happened and to whom.  Homeless alcoholics, cops and crooks, sex workers and club owners, dancers, dreamers without answers… strangers seeking to connect or trying to forget.”

 

The films overlap allowing unexpected connections and odd coincidence linking time, circumstance and character.  People zoom forward or disappear in the distance, point of view creates outlook, accident and design collaborate into shape.

 

The 9 @ Night films are cast from the Tenderloin yGroup, a workshop for Tenderloin and inner city residents, working actors and all-comers (2000- 2012) Featured appearances from Robert Viharo and Ron Perlman.

The 9 @ Night Films Cycle won San Francisco Film Critics Circle Marlon Riggs; Award for courage and achievement in the cinema (2008)

 

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Noise
(2002)- a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#1): Ben Malafide gets out of prison after 20 years and arrives in San Francisco by ferryboat. The Information Age assails him like a hive of angry bees. Noises, images, illusory hopes and unkept promises. Time itself seems to run forward and backward as Ben looks for the basics… a meal, a kind word, a bed for the night. But in the midst of chaos a mysterious angel presents Ben with an unlikely source of clarity, an unequivocal gesture in a kaleidoscopic world.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Rob Nilsson

Executive Producer: John Stout

Produced with the Tenderloin yGroup and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

 

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Used
(2007) a Direct Action, 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#2:) Ben Malafide and Johnny Berryhill are homeless. Johnny is sick and Ben decides to ride the rails to Reno to find People T, former prison cell mate and Cherokee healer.Ben’s girl friend, St. Tre, a card player and club owner tries to find him while another gambler, Kenny Salisbury, pursues her. Friendship, love and tragedy in the shadow world of homeless encampments from San Francisco Bay to the Nevada desert.

 

Featuring: Robert Viharo, Johnny Tidwell, Paige Viharo

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Larry Lange, Chikara Motomura, Rob Nilsson

Executive Producers: David and Carol Richards, Marshall Spight, John Stout

Music: Gawain Mathews

Produced with the Tenderloin yGroup and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

 

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Attitude
(2003) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#3): Spoddy is a garage mechanic who knows everything about cars but hates them. He takes the subway. He is brilliant, arrogant, with a particular scorn for people on society's edges... homeless, street people, everyone who reminds him of his worst fears about himself. Spoddy is an impossible small time auto thief who alienates everyone.Then he is diagnosed with AIDS and everything changes.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Terry Forgette, Rob Nilsson, Chikara Motomura, Kevin Michael Winterfield

Executive Producers: David and Carol Richards, John Stout

Music: Daniel Feinsmith

Produced with the Tenderloin yGroup and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

 

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Singing
(2000) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#4): Perry Truman wanted to be a genetic engineer but ended up an accountant. Mandy, his live-in girl friend of 20 years, still dreams of being an opera diva.In a dead-end professionally, their sex life is in no better shape.Mandy tries to entice Perry into a sexual tryst and a violent argument results.Perry, tossed out of the house, is catapulted into a night of erotic games and dangerous intrigues in the night streets of San Francisco.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Bill Corona, Rob Nilsson

Executive Producer: John Stout

Cast: Jim Carpenter, Domenique Lozano, members of the Tenderloin Action Group

Produced with the Tenderloin Action Group and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

 

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Stroke (2000) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#5) from the 9 @ Night Film Cycle: Phil Berkowitz, 55, North Beach poet and survivor of the days of wine and roses, has a stroke. He lies helpless in his flea bag hotel room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin until he is found by his next door neighbor. Johnny, 60, who works part time janitorial in St. Tre and Malafide’s seedy strip club. Breaking hotel rules, he lets Phil stay in his room and tries to help him regain his speech. He also tries to play Cupid, introducing Phil to Svetlana, Polish, 35, a Tenderloin waitress, ex-model and recovering alcoholic. And this is not the only mistake he makes.

 

Featured roles by Ron Perlman and Robert Viharo

Cast: Edwin Johnson, Teddy Weiler and the Tenderloin yGroup Producers: Chikara Motomura, Rob Nilsson, Kevin Michael Winterfield

A Tenderloin yGroup Production- Produced with the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

 

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Scheme C6
(2001) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#6): Bid is a self-styled urban commando determined to live outside the system and the law. A hustler in high end auto parts, he is homeless by choice. All his gear in a storage locker, he plies the city on a motorcycle, counting coup on the cops. Yve is Bid’s girl friend, bi-sexual, ambitious but without direction. Neither wants to compromise… but their friendship is about to go tragic.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Rob Nilsson

Cast: Cory Duval and members of the Tenderloin yGroup

Music: score by Al Nelson

Produced with the Tenderloin yGroup and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

 

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Need
(2005) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#7): Instead of “satin sheets, satin pillows” fatalism it depicts the fragile friendships, the familial struggles, the competition as well as the solidarity between four women who work in the sex business in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. It is also a personal look at four distinct people and the people they love, deceive, endure and seek to know.
World Premiere: Mill Valley Film Festival

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Rob Nilsson, Michelle Anton Allen

Featuring: Brette McCabe, Marianne Heath, Mira Larkin, the Tenderloin yGroup

Produced with the Tenderloin yGroup and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

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Pan
(2006) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#8): Bobby is a latch-key kid, a lonely 9 year old boy who plays at home as his single mother works to support them. Pan, an ex-convict, tries to father a dysfunctional group of street people in a homeless encampment by the railroad. Both seek the family they never had but violent consequences await those who challenge society’s taboos.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Chikara Motomura, Rob Nilsson, Kevin Michael Winterfield

Featuring: Kieron McCartney, Nighttrain Schickele        

Produced with the Tenderloin yGroup and the 9 @ Night Ltd. Partnership

Music: Al Nelson

 

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Go Together
(2007) a Direct Action 9 @ Night Dramatic Feature Film (#9): Denny and Michelle live out a failing marriage in their equally failing art cinema while losing their shirts playing the 9 @ Night Film Cycle. A local madam suggests they up their economic appeal by playing a program of vintage porn. Homeless people arrive with strange requests and artifacts which turn out to be strangely prescient. Porn night is interrupted by a shooting and in the end the very theater walls seem to be trying to tell them something. An homage to the bravery of true cinema artists.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Rob Nilsson, Michelle Anton Allen

Featuring: Denny Dey, Michelle Anton Allen

Music: Sound Design, Mix: Al Nelson

Additional music: David Hess, Mantra Plonsey

Produced by the Tenderloin yGroup

 

 

ADDITIONAL  NILSSON FEATURE FILMS

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Fourth Movement
(2017) a Direct Action Feature Film: Nov. 8, 2016 - a day when U.S. history made an abrupt move to the Right. But nobody knows that yet. The new C Flat jazz club is opening its doors with the Fred Randolph Sextet. Three women who work in the jazz business are taking a fourth out on a tour of jazz clubs where she says she once performed as a young singer. Three other interlocking stories careen to an end in the back room of the C Flat Club with election results everyone feared but no one believed possible.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Rob Nilsson

Executive Producers: Carol Richards, John Stout

Cast: Members of the Citizen Cinema Players Workshop

Music: Fred Randolph

 

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Next Week in Bologna
(2016) a Direct Action Feature Film sponsored by the International Filmmaking Academy, Bologna, Italy: A young and very broke hitchhiking couple is stuck in Bologna. A defrocked priest attempts to enlist them in compromising photography. A renegade film projectionist and part time pick pocket is followed by an intrigued tourist who saw him rob the priest. An adjunct professor from Australia, with students in tow, comes to deliver a semiotic speech at the University. All end up in a cinema watching the film they are in the process of making.

An International Filmmaking Academy feature film conceived, cast and shot in one week.

 

Workshop Director: Rob Nilsson

Segment Directors: Sofia Rovaletti, Ben Andrews, Rachel Sherman

Producers: Owen Shapiro, Christine Shapiro, Marija Krunic, Rob Nilsson

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Permission to Touch
(2015) a Direct Action Feature Film: Mel Hurley, (from Heat and Sunlight played by Nilsson) is now a dissident photographer hired by Funmi ,an installation artist to do nude photography of her for a gallery show.Mel and Funmi are oil and water, fighting over what to shoot and how resulting in two of the most memorable Direct Action sequences ever shot.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Jonathan Marlow, Fandor, John Stout, Rob Nilsson

Cast:  T. Moon, Rob Nilsson, Shannah Laumeister

 

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Love Twice
(2015) a Direct Action Feature Film: Sal, a screenwriter, drinking too much, hurt by a lost love, labors over Love Twice, his chaotic screenplay. Hired by his producer, Lester, (John Cale) to write a modern Conradian story with “genre elements” Sal sets his story on Isla Mujeres, an island in the Caribbean, featuring Luz, a Trinidadian trapeze artist and Ken, a Chinese American businessman having an illicit affair. The screenplay itself appears to him, advocating improvisation over written dialogue. With his characters complaining, his sister on his case, and Lester about to arrive on his yacht, Sal decides to enter his own screenplay as a character, hoping to court Luz for himself and to convince Lester to fund an art film rather than a potboiler. Mix, add water, and stir.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Rob Nilsson, Vicky de May

Cast: John Cale, Carl Lumbly, Deniz Demirer, Jeff Kao, members of the Citizen Cinema Workshop

 

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Devised
(2015) a Direct Action Feature Film: a film company decides to make a feature film about divorce on its green screen studio. Company principals, a network spy, wives and lovers, cast and crew convene to discuss, rehearse, to augment and to interfere. With so many experts assembled in one place the only divorce we see emerging questions sanity, morals, and motives. And emphasizes one in particular… Profit.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Michelle Anton Allen, Marshall Spight

Cast: Members of the Citizen Cinema Workshop

 

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A Bridge to a Border
(2014) a Direct Action Feature Film: A US Border Patrol Officer is railroaded into prison for a crime committed by his superior officer. He is radicalized in prison and plans a terrorist attack on a major San Francisco bridge.

 

Director:  Rob Nilsson

Producers: Michelle Anton Allen, Marshall Spight, Rob Nilsson

DP- Chris Damm

Cast: Citizen Cinema Player’s Workshop

 

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Eshu Chant for David
(2014) Feature documentary: Rob Nilsson and Eric Peterson return to film the sites of Harvard classmate David Richards’ past as he fights terminal ALS. Presented to David in a surprise screening in LA two months before he died.

 

Director & DP: Rob Nilsson

With: Eric Peterson

Producers: Rob Nilsson, Carol Richards

 

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Collapse
(2013) a Direct Action Feature Film: an ex-principal dancer returns to a San Francisco ballet company hoping to stage a new ballet for troubled times. He faces resistance from the head of the company who was once his lover.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Michelle Anton Allen, Rob Nilsson

Cast: Current and past principal dancers from the San Francisco Ballet

Citizen Cinema Players Workshop

 

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A Leap to Take (
2013) a Direct Action Feature Film: A night club owner takes his high maintenance wife on a birthday night on the town with assorted friends and hangers-on. Hilarity and hi- jinks lead to misgivings and recognition of lost hopes.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Celik Kayalar, Rob Nilsson

Cast: Citizen Cinema Players Workshop

 

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The Cycle
  (2013) Direct Action Feature Film, work in progress: An acting teacher takes his class into an exercise where four primary emotions must be demonstrated in sequence. A trusted assistant revolts leading to unexpected epiphanies.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Celik Kayalar

A production of Film Acting Bay Area

 

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Maelstrom
(2012) a Direct Action Feature Film: A French woman and her Portuguese boy friend arrive at a bed and breakfast on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais run by a roué father and his poet son. A day and a night of drinking, role playing and sexual tension leads to the strange reunion of a father and his daughter conceived during the Tokyo Olympic games.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

DP: Adam Wilt

Featuring: Deniz Demirer, Samantha Vandersteen, Ed Ferry

Producers: Michelle Anton Allen, Marshall Spight, Rob Nilsson

Musical Score: Kit Walker, Al Nelson

 

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Sand
( 2010) a Direct Action Feature Film: an aging woman wants to get a face lift. A homeless gay man wants to move to the New Mexico desert. A peculiar relationship leads to a quixotic voyage where both realize character is destiny.

World Premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Michelle Anton Allen, Irit Levi, Rob Nilsson

Featuring: Irit Levi, William Martin and the Citizen Cinema Players Workshop

 

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Frank Dead Souls
(2008) a Direct Action World Cinema Feature (#5): The staff of a Cape Town magazine travels on a bus heading for a team building session at a spa up the coast. The bus breaks down stranding them on a deserted beach. A racially mixed group lives out temporary Robinson Crusoe type encounters with power struggles, affairs beginning and marriages ending and quixotic results quite unlike the corporate ones they set out to achieve.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Design Indaba, Ravi Naidoo, Rob Nilsson

Featuring: members of the Design Indaba Workshop

DP: Chikara Motomura

World Premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival

 

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Opening
(2006) a Direct Action World Cinema Feature (#4): The opening of a new gallery show is the occasion for the arterati to flock together. The usual pleasantries and protocol abound until a hurricane alert is sounded. Down in the dark, damp basement the frightened art patrons suddenly get real. Overhead the violence of the winds make art and psycho babble seem beside the point.

World Premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival and KC Filmmakers Jubilee

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee, Fred Andrews, Rob Nilsson

Featuring: Members of the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee Workshop

 

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Security
(2005) a Direct Action World Cinema Feature (#3) “Taking back 9/11 with a flashy, forceful feature that surveys safety in a time of orange alerts Security begins with an unforeseen death on the streets of Berkeley that provoked dismay in a band of student actors. Activated by this unexpected turn, the actors looked outward, improvising interlaced stories that examine vulnerability in dangerous times. Distilling twenty five hours of bold footage, SECURITY is the miraculous outcome of that challenging experiment. (Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive)

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Sponsored by the Pacific Film Archive and made possible by a grant from the consortium for the Arts @ UC Berkeley

Featuring: members of the Pacific Film Archive Workshop and the Tenderloin yGroup, Laura Deutch, Deniz Demirer

Music: Al Nelson, Rachel

 

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Samt
(2003) feature #2 from the Direct Action World Cinema Series: SAMT is about a Jordanian family and a group of young people who attend a youth conference in Amman, Jordan. Ashtar, a young woman from a traditional family seeks greater personal freedom. Her brother, Jihad, takes a more traditional approach. Even though their father seems the most progressive of the three, Jihad challenges his decision to let Ashtar attend the youth conference where men and women might associate more freely than he thinks proper.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

DP: Chikara Motomura

Producers: Farah Daghistani, ZENID, Rob Nilsson, John Stout

Featuring: members of the ZENID Workshop

 

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Winter Oranges
(2000) Direct Action World Cinema Feature (#1): Ryuki lives on Sagi, a small island off the coast of Hiroshima. Although his wife, Kaori is expecting their first child, Ryuki dreams about going to Tokyo to work in the theatre. One day a group of tourists comes to the island. Ryuki meets Hinako, a journalist from Tokyo who tempts him. Constructed like a dream, WINTER ORANGES is a film about Ryuki’s decision. Should he stay with what he has always known or venture into the world and take his chances? In the end the unanswered question is asked in each viewer’s heart.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Rob Nilsson, Tazz Nishihara, Hideyuki Miyaoka

Music: Al Nelson, the Noise Floor

Featuring: Members of the Studio Malaparte Sagi Workshop

 

OTHER NILSSON PRODUCTIONS

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The Will
(2012) Direct Action short: A film director (Jim Salisbury, played by Rob Nilsson) has died and former wives, lovers, friends and family arrive at his studio for the reading of his will. The lawyer calls in, unable to attend.Only one person, his somewhat retarded daughter, sees Salisbury, still in his room, in affirmation of love with no hope of reward.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producers: Celik Kayalar, Rob Nilsson

Cast: Film Acting Bay Area

 

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394 Whiskey/Juliet
(2012) Direct Action dramatic short: Airline passengers stranded by a storm at San Francisco airport, go to a small landing strip where a private jet will take them across country. But the plane develops mechanical problems over Illinois. The Air traveler’s greatest fear grips everyone. Will they survive?

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Student Co-Directors: Jessiqa Pace, Alan Reitsch, Jonathan Kiefer, Taura Musgrove

Producers: Celik Kayalar, Rob Nilsson

Cast: Film Acting Bay Area

 

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A Town Has Turned to Dust
(1998) Dramatic TV feature film: 2817 AD. Residents of the Asteroid Belt come back down to earth, now a desiccated desert circled by a debris ring. to mine the scrap metal from the former industrial age. Jerry Paul, (Ron Perlman) works the Native American slave crews backed up by Sheriff Harry Denton (Stephen Lang) while Ree (Judy Collins) seeks justice for the tribes. But Tooth, a young and rebellious Sioux worker, a natural leader with lethal skills, has more than justice in mind.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer: Nell Nugent

Cast: Stephen Lang, Ron Perlman, Judy Collins

Dramatic feature produced for the USA Network as a TV Movie

 

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The Street
(1988) first 3 episodes of an MCA/Universal TV series: About what cops actually do on night patrol. Shot on locations in Newark, New Jersey. Nilsson was chosen as director to shoot the first three episodes in his Direct Action method.

 

Featuring Stanley Tucci and Bruce Macvittie.

Director: Rob Nilsson

 

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Bag
(1969) Short- the streets of Boston at night shot by Nilsson while driving cab in Boston registered

 

Registered with the New York Filmmaker’s Cinematheque (may exist

somewhere)

 

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Gotta be Otto
(1970) Short on Otto Preminger- Nilsson selected as one of several filmmakers to shoot Otto Preminger on the set of Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, best film to win $1000. Nilsson wins but Otto never pays.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Music: Rob Nilsson- Gotta be Otto

 

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The Country Mouse
(1968) 1 hr. Dramatic Feature: people are the mice and rats a re-telling of the Country Mouse, City Mouse fable- a countrified guy comes to the city in a Model A Ford and runs afoul of city hipsters.

 

Director/Producer: Rob Nilsson

Featuring: Jack McCaffrey, Jory Squib

 

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The Lesson
(1967) A spoof of neo- colonialism shot in Nigeria. Motorcycle one percenters come out of the surf and head up country in search of mythical ivory. They encounter Tarzan, Kurtz and other iconic types.

 

Director: Rob Nilsson

Producer/Actors: Jack McCaffrey, Tim Hesla, Chan Parker, Rob Nilsson

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