Faculty Filmmakers’ Second Movie Wins Awards at Local Festival

Upper School art teacher Travis Chandler ’93 and Upper School history teacher Dan Greenstone have done it again. After successfully collaborating on their first film Last Believer, a project demonstrating the benefits of persistence, curiosity and collaboration (read more here) to Upper School students in their Creating Historical Documentaries Class, the duo has shared some exciting news.

Their second film, Far Out West: Inside California’s Kerista Commune shares the true story of the Kerista Commune in 1970s Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood in San Francisco. Even now, a quarter century after the commune ended, Kerista members are still debating whether they built utopia with their 25-person group marriage or created a cult in disguise. This summer, the film premiered at The Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival, winning the Audience Award and bestowing Chandler with the Best Editing Award.

The film also earned accolades in the San Francisco Examiner, which called the film “engaging” and said it “succeeds as a reminder of how the brightest and noblest ideas, when put into action, can fall prey to human nature.”