Rob Nilsson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rob Nilsson is an American independent film director, writer, and sometimes actor. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California in 1957.^[1]

His first film, Northern Lights (1978), was co-written and co-directed with John Hanson, tells of the struggles of North Dakota farmers in 1915 organizing to resist the effects of bank foreclosures. The film was well-received, winning the Caméra d'Or (best first film) at the Cannes Film Festival.

His next film, On the Edge (1985) starred Bruce Dern and Pam Grier, and was his most "Hollywood" effort to date. Of it, Roger Ebert wrote "It would all be very predictable, I thought, but I was wrong. 'On the Edge' may have a familiar formula, but it is an angry, original, unpredictable movie. And it's not about winning. It's about the reasons that athletes carry in their hearts after all strength and reason have fled."

He writes a column for Res Magazine.

Nilsson co-wrote and co-directed the feature film "Security" with film students at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an artist-in-residence at the Pacific Film Archive. The film details the paranoia and insecurities of college students post-9-11. The film won the Audience Award at GreenCine's DIVX Film Festival, the first internationally juried film festival created for the internet. Many of the film students, such as Brett Simon, Debbie Heimowitz, and David Herrera, have gone on to successful careers in film.

In October 2007, he completed the final film in his nine part feature film series called 9@Night - about the lives of the homeless in San Francisco's tenderloin. The series was started several years ago, and features intertwined plotlines and characters. Each film takes a unique approach to story telling - with the complete package creating a virtual world that wraps itself around the viewer. By the end, viewers will miss their onscreen friends - the nice and the not-so-nice ones.

The 9@Night film series comes from Nilsson's time spent with the Tenderloin Ygroup, a group of homeless people who Rob workshoped with. Many of these individuals appear in his films as lead characters.

He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Silverlake Film Festival, in Hollywood, California. Attendees included Philip Seymour Hoffman and many independent cinema critics.

Nilsson is a pioneer in digital filmmaking being one of the first to use purely digital methods to create his pieces. Editor Chikara Motomura and producer Kevin Winterfield joined Nilsson in the late 90s to promote digital filmmaking as a way to decrease the budget requirements for producing independent films and to create an intimate aesthetic that pre-dates 'reality tv.'

Taking Nilsson's Direct Action Cinema approach, which he developed earlier in his career, Nilsson, Motomura and Winterfield created a method that allows creative storytelling about real people, in real struggles around the globe.

With the completion of the 9@Night Series, Nilsson turns his focus to the subject of love. His upcoming series will look at love in a way only Rob Nilsson can.

To learn more about Rob Nilsson, visit his website at Citizen Cinema.