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katykavanaugh
IMDb member since April 2009
Katy Kavanaugh, officially began her involvement with the international children’s market in 1993. With a Turkmeni film, two American classics and a Dr. Seuss retrospective, she produced her first program, FILMS FOR PEOPLE 4 AND UP, at the Mill Valley Film Festival. She went on to coordinate America’s most established festival of its kind, The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. In 1995, she established the CHILDREN’S FILMFEST at the Mill Valley Film Festival with more international films from the Berlin Film Festival, film arts workshops, and panel discussions. Ms. Kavanaugh returned to the Berlinale Kinderfilmfest after a five-year hiatus, as a journalist, to research the foreign industry perspective of the children’s film market in America. She discovered that most considered that market to be cornered by one company. She also recognized that American representation at the world-renowned festival could be counted on two hands. She officially established Catapult Productions to devote efforts to increasing awareness of the benefits of diversifying children’s programming with international cinema, as well as to challenge the aesthetic of the genre with her own filmmaking. Along with an international group of advisers, she launched the bi-annual touring exhibition Screen 360: Films for Children of the World, showing in San Francisco, Portland and rural Oregon. Screen 360’s annual Bay Area Progeny program was the sole American youth voice at The Olympia Festival for Children and Youth in Greece since 2003.
In addition to ten years on the production staff of the San Francisco International Film Festival, she chaired selection juries in the children and youth programming categories for the SFIFF’s Golden Gate Awards, The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, and the National Educational Film and Video Festival. She served as president for the international juries of the 41st International Film Festival for Children and Youth in Zlin , Czech Republic, the Berlinale Kinderfilmfest, the Olympia Festival Greece, and Ale Kino Festival Poznan, Poland.
Before getting behind the camera, Kavanaugh’s work in film festivals supported ten years of Dance Theater performance and choreography. She was an original delegate to the Berlin Talent Campus in 2003 and produced WHAT DOES YOUR FILM TASTE LIKE? with the Campus in 2004. Her film FLIEGEN screened in the US, Germany and Kenya. The 2007 doc SYNERGY continues to delight with the wisdom of Buckminster Fuller and nine year-olds. She is a 2010 graduate of Stanford School of Education’s Learning, Design and Technology program as well as its Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). In 2010 she received a Stanford fellowship in coordination with the Berlin Film Festival’s Generation section to examine the effects of foreign films on childhood memory (FINDING FELIX). She has coached Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Potsdam and continues to support design teams for innovation in Industry, Education and Research. Kavanaugh is one of six children, raised by two educators with a front-door open to the cultural revolution in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.
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Reviews
Oklahoma Mon Amour (2021)
An Indelible memory
15 February 2022 - 2 out of 2 users found this review helpful.
A camera pan across tight façades on a narrow street of a Mexican city, a child on a balcony, telephone wires framing clouds - such striking images of place stay with me. Carolina Rueda's deft camera constructs the backdrop of a compelling story of two children who grew up in the wake of revolutionary parents' clandestine decisions. The intentional use of two languages both spoken and in text as an assertive aesthetic is both an innovation and a pleasure.
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