Reena Dutt, Kyle Martin & Kimberly Parker Chosen as SFFS Producer Fellowships Recipients

Shortly after the Sundance Institute named their January Screenwriter’s Lab roster, it’s another West coast entity that is offering some support to the next gen of producers.  The San Francisco Film Society folks have bestowed the Producer Fellowships to Reena Dutt, Kyle Martin (who is know best from producing Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and Lance Edmands’ Bluebird) and Kimberly Parker (who most recently produced Katie Says Goodbye – a title we had pegged for Sundance). Here is the press release.

This round of SFFS Producer Fellowships runs from January to June 2016, kicking off with a 5-day networking trip to the Sundance Film Festival. In addition to this excursion, over the course of the Fellowship each winner will receive:

A $25,000–$40,000 cash grant to be used for living expenses. Individual amounts depend on place of residence and estimated travel costs to participate in Bay Area fellowship components.
Placement in our FilmHouse Residency program and access to all FilmHouse programs and activities.
One-on-one consultation with film industry experts from the Bay Area and beyond regarding casting, financing, budgeting, legal issues, distribution and other key topics.
Access to presentations and networking opportunities with Bay Area narrative filmmakers.
A 3-day networking trip with Filmmaker360 staff from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for meetings with established industry professionals.

Past SFFS Producer Fellows include Jonathan Duffy, Márcia Nunes and Laura Wagner. The next round of SFFS Producer Fellowships will run approximately from November 2016 to May 2017, with recipients announced in the fall. Without further ado, meet the newest crew:

Reena Dutt is a past Producing Fellow with Film Independent’s Project Involve. She is currently in packaging for The Yogi Trademark—a female-driven indie comedy about narcissism meeting mindfulness in the global yoga arena—working alongside Chris Thomas and Dan Damman, a San Francisco writing/directing team that recently completed a year-long residency at San Francisco Film Society’s FilmHouse. Dutt produced the feature film As Good as You, starring Laura Heisler, Bryan Dechart, Raoul Bhaneja, Peter Maloney and Annie Potts, and was a producer on June, Adrift. Her short film credits include El Doctor, which was acquired by PBS; Touch and The First Session, both of which were winners at NBC Universal’s 2015 short film competition for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively; …Or Die and Shameless, which are travelling the festival circuit internationally; and Unfinished, which was acquired by the BET network.

Kyle Martin is a Brooklyn-based independent film Producer. He was named one of Variety’s 2012 “Ten Producers to Watch” and he was awarded the 2010 Sundance Mark Silverman Producing Fellowship and the 2011 IFP/Cannes Marche Du Film Producer’s Network Fellowship. His films have been released worldwide by Criterion Collection, IFC Films, BBC, Oscilloscope Laboratories, Radius, Sundance International, PBS and Factory 25. His films include the 2014 SXSW Best Documentary winner The Great Invisible (Radius), directed by Margaret Brown; the award-winning Bluebird (Factory 25), directed by Lance Edmands; Teenage (Oscilloscope), directed by Matt Wolf; Tiny Furniture (IFC Films), directed by Lena Dunham; and the 2010 SXSW Audience Award winner NY Export: Opus Jazz (PBS, BBC).

Born in Seoul, but adopted and raised in Baltimore, Kimberly Parker is a producer who has been freelancing in film for the past five years. She recently produced Katie Says Goodbye, an IFP Narrative Labs feature starring Olivia Cooke and Christopher Abbott. She co-produced The Adderall Diaries, a Sundance Labs feature starring James Franco, Ed Harris and Amber Heard, which will be released by A24. Parker secretly loves taping receipts and completing wrap binders. Her first feature as a producer, Those People, an IFP Narrative Labs feature, will be in theaters next year. Parler will be attending Berlinale Talents this winter. She graduated with a MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA from Johns Hopkins University.

Jean Denis Le Dinahet was born in Lyon, France in 1981, and studied at Science-po Paris and at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. He is a graduate in film production from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (the Italian National Film School), where he met most of the directors and crewmembers he has been working with. Le Dinahet opened his production company in Rome and in Paris in 2010 together with his partner Sébastien Msika in order to develop projects with young directors mainly from Italy, and to produce their first feature film, Il Sud è Niente, directed by Fabio Mollo. Il Sud è Niente has screened at the Toronto, Rome, Berlinale, San Francisco and Torino film festivals, and Le Dinahet was awarded with the Golden Camera Award as producer of a first feature film at the International Rome Film Festival in 2013. Le Dinahet currently lives in Paris, France.