Searchlight Films was founded in 1977 by Kathryn Golden and
Ashley James as a full service motion picture and videotape
production company specializing in the making of documentary
films. Our clients have included National PBS; CBS television;
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; the BBC and many other
broadcast companies. We offer companion services -- most notably
cinematography and editing -- that have garnered awards and
showings around the world. The filmmakers and producers we
have worked with have been nominated and received the highest
awards in the television and film worlds.

Although our own productions run the gamut of documentary
topics, since its inception Searchlight has been dedicated
to the proposition that well-made documentaries will find the
highest visibility in broadcast and film exhibition if they
are both educational and entertaining. Starting with our first
ethnographic series in 1981 --Tchuba...Means Rain, a group of
films on the Cape Verdean-American population of New
England -- Searchlight has focused on making films that
illuminate the many faces and aspects of American vast and
diverse communities.

We received our first National Endowment For The Arts
production grant in 1983 for a film on the great Cape
Verdean-American folk artist Joaquim Miguel Almeida, called
American Treasure. Our film, Season of Hope, has been
called one of the most successful and relevant films about
young mothers recovering from drugs in distribution in America.
Our series, San Francisco Arts Are All Over the Map, has
been chosen by the city of San Francisco to represent and
promote major institutions in San Francisco: the S.F.
Ballet, S.F. Symphony and Opera, and many other cultural
and artistic institutions. Searchlight Films production
of And Still We Dance was one of three programs chosen to
represent the best of all National Endowment for the Arts
projects in 1989. It was the premiere program for Public
Broadcasting System's nationally broadcast series, "From
San Francisco." We Love You Like A Rock, our
critically-acclaimed film profile of the seminal American
gospel-singing group, the Dixie Hummingbirds, has shown to
sold-out audiences in the United States at such prestigious
institutions as the American Film Institute in Los Angeles,
and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Our film, Bomba-Dancing the Drum, is an award-winning PBS
nationally-televised program about Puerto Rico’s celebrated Cepeda
family who preserved that island’s traditional dance and music
and has been shown around the world. Across Time and Space
chronicles the life and death struggle of the Bondy family, who
survived Nazi Germany only to confront racial segregation when
they came to the United States to preserve their pioneering
educational philosophy.

Searchlight Films has garnered support for our productions
from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation;
the American Film Institute; the Pew Charitable Trust, the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Polaroid Foundation and many other
public and private funding organizations. Our goal has always
been tomake films that are accessible to a broad range of audiences
so that people see that history and culture don’t develop in a vacuum.
We strive to make our films small but expressive chapters in the
life of this planetin the 21st century.