Press
“The Creative High”…”The Artistry And The Lives We Live – This Is A Revolutionary Act!
September 5, 2023 | Listen to the full podcast episode.
Dianne Griffin and Adriana Marchione are interviewed on the SriPonya’s “One Breath” Podcast about their film The Creative High, an award-winning documentary that looks at the lives of nine artists in recovery.
Spotlight on ‘The Creative High’ in Performing Recovery Magazine
June-August 2023 | Read the full article.
Alex Mazonowicz speaks to Dianne Griffin and Adriana Marchione about their film The Creative High, an award-winning documentary that looks at the lives of nine artists in recovery.
Press Release: ‘The Creative High’ Screening by Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon
April 14, 2023 | Read the full article.
“The Creative High” will be screening at the San Francisco Main Public Library at 100 Larkin St. in the Koret Auditorium on May 24, from 6-7:30 p.m.”
The Redemptive Nature of Creativity by John Lavitt for Treatment Magazine
October 27, 2022 | Read the full article.
“The misguided notion that intoxication is tied to making art is deconstructed in the documentary The Creative High”
Ep 77 – The Creative High. Learn How Nine Artists Reclaim Their Creativity In Recovery.
October 23, 2022 | Listen & read the podcast notes.
Ep 78 – What Resources Might My Loved One Who Is A Creative With An Addiction Need?
October 30, 2022 | Listen & read the podcast notes.
Women & Environments Review by Helen Lynn page 48 Painted Nails is a film about one woman’s journey towards enlightenment and empowerment based on her experience of working in her own nail salon business.
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7 X 7 Article-2016 If you walk into New York Nail, on Mission Street near the corner of Cortland Avenue, at any time on any day of the week, you’re likely to find owner Van Hoang hard at work in her bustling salon, caring for a diverse group of women who come not just for the wild nail art, but also for the familial environment.
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KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco- Your Call, we’ll have a conversation with filmmakers Erica Jordan and Dianne Griffin, as well as Janet Nudelman from the Breast Cancer Fund. They join us for a conversation on Erica and Dianne’s new documentary Painted Nails and the cosmetic industry.
View Full Article – Radio Show
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Examiner–Ed Moy 2016 The filmmakers take audiences inside the rich culture of Vietnamese-American Van Hoang’s bustling nail salon in the Mission District of San Francisco where Van caters to a diverse clientele, women of African American, European, Latino, and Asian ethnicities, who come not only for the acrylic nails with original designs—but also for the caring environment.
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frontrunnermagazine.com-By Edward Symes 2016 Painted Nails, a feature-length documentary film by Dianne Griffin and Erica Jordan, is equal parts immigrant and activist story. Following the daily life of Van Hoang, a Vietnamese immigrant and nail salon owner in San Francisco, the film captures first-hand the fear and isolation felt by nail salon workers exposed to the dangerous chemicals in polishes each day.
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Danger, ongles toxiques by Iris Gagnon-Paradis La Presse
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Sonoma Gazette 2016-In “Painted Nails” we witness the American dream crumble when Van, a Vietnamese nail salon worker, discovers her health problems, including two miscarriages, are the result of toxic chemicals in the products used in her salon. Van courageously becomes the first worker to testify against the cosmetic industry in over 30 years.
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Viet Film Fest Interview-Eric Wong 2016 Co-producers Dianne and Erica were initially fascinated by the proliferation of San Francisco nail salons, the Vietnamese women who work in them, and this affordable luxury so many women desired. When they entered the nail salons with translator and Associate Producer Nhung Pham, they realized the story was much deeper. The three women united to tell Van Nguyen’s story, as a labor of love and personal commitment to spread awareness about worker’s rights. Each of them had a personal connection to this story.
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Dianne Griffin and Erica Jordan film both sides of the manicure table in Painted Nails – 2013
Griffin and Jordan Getting Nails Done
Michael Fox May 12, 2013 Today’s fun fact: San Francisco has more nail salons per capita than any city in the country. Perhaps that won’t come as a surprise to the ladies in the crowd, who pay a tad more attention to fashion and grooming than your trusty correspondent. Then again, filmmakers Dianne Griffin and Erica Jordan were caught a bit unawares themselves.
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Stanford Teaching Guide – White Hotel – 2012
FLM 16- Camera As Witness: Women Around the World From Victims to Leaders
This course offers a unique chance to become familiar with global women’s issues, understand the aesthetic capacities of documentary filmmaking.
UNAFF,
‘White Hotel’
When two women with a video camera follow an American HIV research team to Eritrea, Africa, they are seduced by a land of joy and repression, of sensuality and sexual mutilation. White Hotel is the tourist residence where Griffin and Solvang begin their journey but their journalistic objectivity is shattered by the circumstances they encounter turning their documentary into an intimate investigation of their own capacities to love, suffer and forgive.
Slant Magazine,
‘The White Hotel’
The journey that documentary filmmakers Dianne Griffin and Tobi Solvang make through a once war-torn Eritrea exposes how tradition, lack of education and financial instability is inextricably bound to Africa’s, AIDS crisis. In 1993, Griffin and Solvang arrived in Eritrea, unfamiliar with the country’s burgeoning freedom after 30 years of Ethiopian rule. While staying at the White Hotel, the women encounter resistance from uncooperative health officials. As a consequence, White Hotel becomes less a documentary on the African AIDS crisis than it does a “making of” treatise that blurs the lines of journalistic objectivity.
-Ed Gonzalez
Cue Magazine,
‘A Journey to the White Hotel’
It’s like the fiction of Paul Bowles only it’s not fiction at all, and Eritrea takes on a quality of being a landscape of the mind.
-Julia Terr
SF Gate.com,
‘Documentaries in the Limelight / Famine human rights refugees among themes at Stanford Film Festival’
When the Midpeninsula Chapter of the United Nations Association and the Stanford Film Society staged a campus film festival made up of documentaries last year organizers were bowled over by audience response.
Featured documentaries include “White Hotel” Tobi Solvang and Dianne Griffin’s film about AIDS in East Africa.
-Peter Stack Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 24, 2012An examination of the tragedy of AIDS in Africa as experienced in Eritrea, a small, poor republic which has been devastated by the disease. The culprits are easily identified–inefficient health care facilities and funding, lack of awareness education, traditional female circumcision rituals which leave young women highly susceptible to infection–and the victims face a long and painful death sentence due to an unfocused and underfinanced effort to offer the barest basics of quality treatment.
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Panel for Stanford University – DREAM ACT
Wednesday October 24 at 7:15 pm
San Francisco, Variety Theatre, 582 Market Street
Panelists: Nadia Arid, Legal Assistant for Legal Services for Children
Dianne Griffin, Filmmaker, Sara Masetti, Director/Producer, Undocumented Dreams
Theo Rigby, Director, Sin País
FILM REVIEWS
About.com: World/Independent Film
SF 360 Griffin and Jordan Getting Nails Done
United Nations Association Film Festival
White Hotel Used as Stanford Teaching Guide
