Alexander Valley Film Society honors former Pixar director Erica Milsom

Richmond filmmaker Erica Milsom will receive the AVFilm’s inaugural Impact Award at the film festival’s awards night and fundraiser Saturday at Rodney Strong Vineyards in Healdsburg.

Milsom, who has visited Sonoma County to teach local students about her craft, has dedicated her career to giving a voice to marginalized groups.

She wrote and directed the groundbreaking eight-minute computer-animated film “Loop,” which tells the story of a relationship emerging between two teens, one of them a nonspeaking autistic girl. The film will be shown during the awards night celebration.

“It’s about two kids trying to connect in a significantly difficult situation,” Milsom said.

Milsom has shown some of her other films at AVFilm’s past annual AVFests in Sonoma County, including “Snow Day,” about senior citizen skiers, and “So Much Yellow,” about a man with Down syndrome, which was filmed in Glen Ellen.

The filmmaker, 52, grew up in a small town in Colorado, where a nursing home also served as an institution for the disabled.

“I was around a lot of people with disabilities,” she recalled. “They probably were the most free-spirited people in my town. What is exciting to me now is that people with disabilities are defining their own stories.”

After two decades as a documentary filmmaker at Pixar Animation Studios, Milsom left in April to launch her own company, Ryzo Animation Studios, with partner Todd Shaiman.

At Pixar, Milsom directed hundreds of behind-the-scenes documentaries on the creative process for the studio’s top films. She co-ran the Emmy-nominated TV series “Inside Pixar.”

Selected works by Milsom, including “Loop,” are available to stream on demand all month long. Viewers can access Milsom’s films by visiting bit.ly/3yMqDQj.

The program will encompass several other awards, including the Heart & Hope Award dedicated to founding AVFilm member Jackie Hoffner, who died in 2017.

This year’s honoree is Wendy Conner, who has collaborated with the local oral history organization Listening for a Change for 12 years to bring the Neighborhood Listening Project into her Cloverdale High School classes. Students in Conner’s classes learn to conduct oral history video interviews with adults in their community.

AVFilm’s student filmmaker award and $1,000 scholarship will go to Amelia Dublin, a high school junior who participated in an after-school future filmmakers camp at Corazón Healdsburg. There, Dublin created her first film, a short documentary titled “SITO,” about her Syrian grandmother. The five-minute film will be shown at the awards event.

Healdsburg Mayor Ozzy Jimenez will receive a special recognition for his accomplishments including the city’s adoption of an LGBTQIA+ flag-raising policy, ensuring city communications and city council meetings have live Spanish translation and building an equity task force with Acosta Learning Partnership.

AVFilm began in 2015 when film lovers in Cloverdale and Healdsburg came together to bring the rural North Bay more access to cinema arts events and education.

The first AVFest featured 24 films over four days on four screens in two cities. Over the past eight years, AVFilm has exhibited more than 500 films and now serves more than 5,000 filmgoers, 1,000 public school students and 600 lifelong learners through year-round educational and cultural programming.

AVFest 2022 was a 10-day celebration featuring more than 100 screenings and events in five cities.

AVFilm hopes to open a three-screen movie theater, to be called the Plaza Cinema Center, in downtown Healdsburg as early as summer 2023. Fundraising efforts are underway.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.