Topanga Film Festival veteran and local filmmaker Tom Miller shares his experience at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, which he recently completed.

This Topanga Film Festival winner is the tale of a selfless voodoo doll. An animation tour de force by Joaquin Baldwin.

It’s the winner of numerous awards including Student Academy Awards 2009 (CA) – Silver Medaland Festival de Cannes – Short Film Corner – Winner, NFB Online Competition

Topanga Film Insti­tute is gear­ing up for a year of spe­cial events lead­ing up to and fol­low­ing this 2010 Topanga Film Fes­ti­val. The insti­tute was formed to inspire, inform and inter­con­nect a gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers to pio­neer a fer­tile new era of global, trans-format con­tent creation.

A tra­di­tional hotbed of counter-culture, the region has long beck­oned artists, seek­ers and thinkers drawn to the region’s wild beauty, authen­tic­ity and sense of com­mu­nity. A stone’s throw from Hol­ly­wood yet worlds removed, Topanga is his­tor­i­cally, geo­graph­i­cally and philo­soph­i­cally per­fectly sit­u­ated to gather today’s most forward-thinking indi­vid­u­als in main­stream and alter­na­tive media with the sin­gu­lar pur­pose of illu­mi­nat­ing the intri­ca­cies of a bour­geon­ing global media paradigm.

With the advent and accep­tance of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies in con­tent cre­ation and dis­tri­b­u­tion, the play­ing field for sto­ry­tellers has lev­eled. TFI is com­mit­ted to stay­ing ahead of the curve so that its mem­bers and sym­pa­thiz­ers are con­tin­u­ally availed to infor­ma­tion on new ideas and result­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for expression.

The insti­tute has secured var­i­ous loca­tions through­out the Canyon from which the a ssociation’s mem­bers are com­mit­ted to shar­ing human and intel­lec­tual resources through fre­quent salons, pan­els, sem­i­nars, screen­ings, men­tor­ship pro­grams, net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties cul­mi­nat­ing in the annual Topanga Film Fes­ti­val, held every August.

We are cur­rently pulling together some of the world’s top film­mak­ers and con­tent vision­ar­ies to co-navigate this cre­ative adven­ture.

“Beautiful Eyes,” a Topanga Film Festival animation by Will Kim, uses watercolor to interpret the German romantic novel ‘The Sandman’ by E.T.A Hoffman. Original score by Kirin Kapin.