575 Castro St.

⊕ Official Selection: 2026 Berlinale ⊕
⊕ Official Selection: 2009 Berlinale ⊕
⊕ Official Selection: 2009 Sundance Film Festival ⊕
a film by Jenni Olson
(2008) USA 7 mins. HD

In addition to being part of the 40th Anniversary TEDDY 40 program at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival (February 12-22), 575 Castro St. is available to watch now via Kanopy, Vimeo, and YouTube.

A powerful elegy from acclaimed queer filmmaker Jenni Olson, 575 Castro St. reveals the play of light and shadow upon the walls of the Castro Camera Store set for Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award-winning film Milk as we hear excerpts from the audio-cassette that Harvey Milk recorded to be played, “in the event of my death by assassination.”

The film features Milk’s now legendary line, “Ya gotta give ‘em hope,” and his eloquent, timely, and timeless denouncement of right-wing anti-LGBTQ hate (calling out Anita Bryant and California State Senator John Briggs). The tape was made in November 1977 (after Milk’s election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which made him one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States). Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by SF Supervisor Dan White one year later, in November 1978.

Commissioned by Focus Features to be showcased online in conjunction with the theatrical release of Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award-winning feature film Milk, 575 Castro St. premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and 2009 Berlinale, and has played at festivals and museums across the globe.

For Film Festival and Educational Screenings:
575 Castro St. is available for festival and educational bookings through Frameline Distribution and here's the Kanopy link as well.

About the Filmmaker:
Jenni Olson (she/her/TBD) is a queer film historian, writer, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and, like her many short films, have screened internationally to awards and acclaim. When she was honored with a retrospective on the Criterion Channel in 2021, Filmmaker Magazine described Olson as “a director who understands the restorative power of nostalgia and reflection better than any other.” Her films have been supported by Field of Vision, Catapult, Chicken & Egg Films, Frameline, SF Arts Commission, SFFILM, MacDowell, Kodak, and others. Her work as a filmmaker and her expansive collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia are part of the Harvard Film Archive (in Harvard's Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection).

Among Jenni’s many achievements in the independent cinema world, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival for her decades of work as a filmmaker and as a champion of LGBTQ film and filmmakers (as a curator, advisor, producer, film critic, film historian, archivist and archival producer, and more). She was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list in 2020, and in 2021 was also honored with a retrospective of her films on the Criterion Channel. In her work championing LGBTQ cinema she has served on dozens of films as consulting producer, archival producer, advisor and more.

In her actual day job, Jenni is a noted figure in the field of tech accountability, leading the Social Media Safety program at GLAAD (the national LGBTQ media advocacy organization that was co-founded in 1985 by her friend and mentor Vito Russo).

Jenni’s recent consulting producer credits include: Barbara Forever (2026, director Brydie O’Connor); The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (2026, director Paul Rice); Sally! (2024, co-directors Deborah Craig and Ondine Rarey); Beyond the Aggressives (2023, director Daniel Peddle); and Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (2020, director Sam Feder). Notable narrative feature consulting producer credits include Chris Mason Johnson’s Test (a 2014 Spirit Award nominee, and winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at Outfest) and Silas Howard and Harry Dodge’s groundbreaking 2001 butch/trans buddy movie, By Hook or By Crook. As well as the upcoming San Francisco gay drama, Buddies (in development from writer-director Dani Guzman).

Jenni is a former co-director of Frameline (the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival), the oldest and largest queer film festival on the planet, and served as director of marketing at LGBTQ film distributor Wolfe Video for more than a decade where she also created the global LGBTQ streaming VOD platform WolfeOnDemand.com. She co-founded the pioneering LGBTQ online platform, PlanetOut.com as well as the legendary Queer Brunch at Sundance. Her work as a film historian and archivist includes her Lambda Award nominated The Queer Movie Poster Book> (Chronicle Books, 2005); her many vintage movie trailer presentations (Homo Promo, Afro Promo, etc.), and her epic overview on the last 30 years of LGBT film history in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2021). Since 2018, as co-director of The Bressan Project, she has worked to restore and re-release the films of pioneering gay filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.

Jenni is now in production on her third feature-length essay film, Tell Me Everything Will Be Okay, and an essayistic memoir of the same name. She is also the proud proprietor of Butch.org — where you can read a zillion other things about her that can’t fit into this bio.

Cast & Crew:

Voiceover Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. He was assassinated in 1978 and has since been described (by gay writer Andrew Epstein) as, "our Kennedy, our King, our Malcolm X. Our bullet." The audio recording featured in 575 Castro St. is an edited down version of Milk’s original 13-minute audio cassette recorded in his camera shop on the evening of Friday, November 18, 1977 (a few weeks after his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors). Labeled simply: “In-Case” the tape was to be played, “in the event of my death by assassination.”

Cinematographer Sophie Constantinou's work has earned international acclaim for tackling difficult topics with artistry and sensitivity. She has produced, directed and photographed several award-winning documentaries, including Divided Loyalties, an intensely personal, feature-length exploration of the conflict in Cyprus (Golden Gate Award, 1999); Between the Lines, about women and self-injury (Golden Gate Award, 1998); and Impact Zone (Best Experimental Film, NY Underground Film Festival, 1997). Specializing in alluring, formally dramatic lighting design as well as improvised observational camerawork, Sophie has been shooting high-profile documentary films for over a decade. Her cinematography credits include HBO’s Unchained Memories, PBS’ Presumed Guilty, and KQED’S Emmy Award winning Home Front. She received her BA in Film Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s from San Francisco State University. She teaches cinematography and directing at the City College of San Francisco and has been mentoring at-risk youth in filmmaking and cinematography for much of the past decade. Sophie also shot Jenni Olson’s previous film, The Joy of Life. Find out more about Sophie at her Citizen Film website.

Editor Marc Henrich is a Bay Area-based filmmaker, film teacher, freelance editor and photographer. He has taught editing and film history at UC Berkeley Extension, the Academy of Art, and Film Arts Foundation. His films (The Visit, In the Shadow of Fear, and Unsettled) have been shown at festivals around the world. Marc also edited Jenni Olson’s previous film, The Joy of Life.

Sound Jim Lively is a San Francisco-based audio engineer who has worked with dozens of filmmakers on sound design, recording, re-recording, dialogue editing and more. Jim is also an accomplished musician and composer (his favorite music credit claim to fame: the cult hit series, Happy Tree Friends).

Associate Producer Julie Dorf has been doing fundraising in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1989 when she founded the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. She has also worked as a fundraiser for the Vanguard Foundation, Horizons Foundation and as a consultant for the Open Society Institute. She is now Senior Advisor at the Council for Global Equality. In 1990 she co-directed the first documentary about gay life in the former Soviet Union, Outcasts in Moscow and St. Petersburg.




Director’s Statement:
I have been programming, researching, collecting, and writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) film since 1985 when I founded the Minneapolis/St. Paul LGBT Film Festival. My efforts to promote LGBT film and to help other filmmakers get their work seen have ultimately fed my own desire to make movies. Three primary interests drive my creative work and career: LGBT issues, formal experimentation, and historical documentation. These interests come together in 575 Castro St. which presents an intimate historical portrait of Harvey Milk in his own words, while at the same time capturing for posterity a tremendously significant artifact of LGBT film history: the Castro Camera Store set of Gus Van Sant’s Milk.

The San Francisco Gay Film Festival came into existence in February 1977 when a self-described “ragtag bunch of hippie fag” filmmakers got together and projected their Super8 short films on a bed sheet at San Francisco’s old Gay Community Center. For its first few years the festival showcased the modest Super8 imaginings of such prolific but obscure gay filmmakers as Jim Baker, Bern Boyle, Stephen Iadereste, Ric Mears, Allen McClain, Billy Miggins, T.K. Perkins, Wayne Smolen, David Waggoner, Ken Ward and Christine Wynne as well as festival founders Marc Huestis and Dan Nicoletta and Names Project founder Cleve Jones. Many of these films explored gay themes, but a good percentage of the work (like many other experimental films of the era) focused on simple light and motion studies.
The visuals of 575 Castro St. (the play of light and shadow upon the walls of the Castro Camera set for Gus Van Sant’s Milk) hearken back to those gay short films of the ‘70s: The films that passed through Harvey Milk’s hands to be processed and developed. The films that inaugurated an event that would grow to become the largest LGBT film festival on the planet, Frameline: The San Francisco LGBT Film Festival.

One of the first films I got to see when I attended my first Frameline festival in 1989 (looking for films to curate for my queer film series in Minneapolis) was Warren Sonbert’s Friendly Witness. That same year I also got to see my first queer experimental works by filmmakers like Su Friedrich, Abigail Child, Barbara Hammer and Ulrike Ottinger.

These are the cinematic visions that have shaped and sparked my own vision — first as a curator, and then as a filmmaker myself. It is fitting that the style of 575 Castro St. should match the style of the pioneering gay films that Harvey Milk helped to develop (in all the meanings of that word).

Perceptually and spiritually, my work challenges viewers to slow down and pay attention to the moment and to the world around them, drawing attention to the beauty of what might–at first glance–appear mundane, but is in fact a rich tapestry of architecture, light and shadow, and ephemeral history. For me, the joy of my films is found in the poetry of the static image — in the experience of time passing on film, undistracted by plot, actors, dialogue and other narrative conventions. An internal drama is evoked in the sensitivities of each viewer who is open to the subtleties of these mundane shots that are almost bereft of movement and sound. So quiet, so still. All the better to showcase the range of emotions evoked by Harvey Milk’s words.

Interview with Filmmaker Jenni Olson
Watch an informative on-stage video Q&A about 575 Castro St. with director Jenni Olson and cinematographer Sophie Constantinou from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.