FILM BIO: Gabriella Bregman
I am a Writer-Documentary Filmmaker-Producer at Bregman Films, currently in Post-Production of a Feature Documentary on US Immigration’s LGBTQ Exclusion-Policy Discrimination ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented’ (2016.)
I am also the Founder of Facebook Group: ‘Queer Women Filmmakers and Writers - Los Angeles’ (2016), a Professional and Social Networking Group for Los Angeles-based Queer Female Filmmakers focusing on Film Projects promoting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Awareness, and Intersectional Feminism and LGBTQ Rights, (including a Database/Mailing List of Film Professionals.)
I wrote ‘The 2016 Valentine’s Day Filmmakers Manifesto,’ and various freelance articles on LGBTQ immigration discrimination/exclusion policy history, including ‘Immigration Law Explained: The Irony of a Simultaneously Capped (temporary work visas) and Uncapped (family law marriage) Visa Immigration System,’ ‘A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBT Immigrants’ and ‘The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries,’ published on medium.com/@gabriellabregman.
The manuscript ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented’ (2015,) consisting of My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (2015) and Becoming Undocumented: Getting My Status and Identity Back After DOMA’s Demise (2015,) towards my Feature Documentary had begun in earnest, on the heels of a heartbreak, in early 2013, and was finished by late 2015, and is a complete, approximately 50-page narrative, or treatment.
A newer version was published on commission for CUNY Journalism graduate Rachel Glickhouse’s thesis project MyTimeinLine on medium.com/@MyTimeinLine.
In late 2015 I also also did a video interview on undocumented immigration for Pulitzer price winning ex-Washington Post journalist and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas’ company EmergingUS at The Los Angeles Times.
A completed Narrative Feature, (started in 2007) chronicling many similar events in the Documentary Treatment ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ also exists, but ends much earlier in both US immigration law and LGBTQ history; namely with the upholding of Proposition 8 in California in 2008, and so does not reflect its’ latest historical changes like federal same-sex marriage after the DOMA got struck down in 2015, as well president Obama’s promise of executive action in 2014 for DACA and DAPA-eligible undocumented immigrants.
I am the sole writer and owner of these two manuscripts, as well as a 2004 novelette ‘Scenes,’ based on my experiences being queer and undocumented in the US.
“I read with great pleasure the treatment and long version of ‘Scenes.’ Your characters and storyline are deep and engaging. I like it.”
Film Producer Fred Caruso (Midnight Cowboy, Network, Once Upon A Time In America, Husbands)
I have invested my own money into my Feature Documentary, buying all of my film equipment, (Canon Vixia and DSLR, GoPro 4, MacBooks, iPads, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, lavalier and Sennheiser mics, Tascam and Zoom Recorders, tripods, etc.,) two production cars, and renting a film production office, including business license and insurance in Hollywood.
My small crew has been compensated and I will be in Post-Production in the Spring of 2017.
I am currently also in the process, with an immigration lawyer, to become a US citizen and qualify under the Violence Against Women Act.
I have volunteered, interned and worked within the film industry in entry-level positions in Development, Acquisitions, Exhibition and Film Programming and Special Events, (The Laemmle Theatres, Film Independent, LA Film Festival, Independent Spirit Awards, IFC’s Next Wave Films, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Miramax Films,) and am a longtime member of non-profit film organizations Outfest and Film Independent.
I worked at The Laemmle Theatres in Santa Monica from 1993 through 2001.
In 2001 I also produced a John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective,’ including Cast and Crew Q&A’s with Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, Lelia Goldoni, and cameraman Michael Ferris and composer Bo Harwood, and the West Coast premiere of Charles Kiselyak’s ‘A Constant Forge: The Life and Art of John Cassavetes,’ (part of the Criterion Collection John Cassavetes 5 Films Box Set,) at The Laemmle Theatres.
The Retrospective was officially sponsored by The Laemmle Theatres, Film Independent (IFP/West) and Venice Magazine. Gena Rowlands was interviewed by Gary Oldman for Venice Magazine and by Chuck Wilson for The LA Weekly. Cameraman Michael Ferris (A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie) was interviewed by Mike Plante for Cinemad Magazine.
I attended the Film Program at Los Angeles City College from 1992 through 1994.
Gabriella Bregman
Writer-Documentary Filmmaker-Producer
The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented
Bregman Films
In the past I’ve struggled with my own inter-sectioning identities, (including that of being an artist/filmmaker even, besides being a gender-nonconforming lesbian, an undocumented immigrant or “overstay,” and bi-racial, Dutch and Indonesian-Dutch,) and moreover the lack of knowledge, and so self-knowledge, around them.
Ultimately I realized I was not living my authentic identity openly and freely and felt severely disconnected to both the LGBTQ community and the film industry, due to my undocumented status.
On July 9, 2015 I came out publicly as “Queer and Undocumented,” after not qualifying for 2014 DACA, (missing the childhood arrival entry age of 16, and under, by 3 years,) and having immigrated legally 24 years ago, at age 19 in 1992, on a 5-Year International Student Visa, through enrollment in Film School in Los Angeles.
I grew up in a small town, and from a working class background, in the Netherlands, where professions were very gendered, according to an uninformed, hetero-normative society, and I was shunned throughout my high school days for looking and being androgynous or butch, growing up in the 1980s during an international AIDS crisis.
As an aspiring writer and “repressed” lesbian, (my whole life I looked and acted like a heterosexual guy basically,) looking up to James Dean, Jim Morrison, the Beat poets and just a handful of others, as renaissance artists, capable of transcending genders somehow, I saw film school in Hollywood as my only way out.
In the Netherlands during the 80s I grew up on primarily American movies, (besides Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave,) particularly influenced by 70s filmmakers John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick and Sidney Lumet, and the start of the 1990s independent film movement and New Queer Cinema specifically, (and later on working and paying my taxes in Santa Monica at the Laemmle family-owned Los Angeles movie theater art-house chain The Laemmle Theatres, where Kimberly Peirce’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ in 1999 became paramount to my realization of my trans-masculine gender identity.)
Before the New Queer Cinema of the 90s I had only caught glimpses of my sexual orientation and gender identity portrayed in the plays of Tennessee Williams and films like ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn,’ ‘Silkwood’ and ‘The Conformist’ and the literature of Virginia Woolf, of Oscar Wilde, Anais Nin, Rimbaud, Pasolini, Genet, Allen Ginsberg, my only LGBTQ education available.
In 1992, at age 19, I moved to Los Angeles alone and legally on a 5-year Student Visa to study film at the Los Angeles City College Film Department, with hopes to get an MFA from a 4-year university on a Student Visa extension, in a pre-internet and digital video era when the big idea for aspiring filmmakers was to shoot a 16mm film and get into the Sundance Film Festival.
I finished a little over 2 of my 3 years Film Program as an international student only, due to my 1992 immigration marriage to an opposite-sex US citizen and premature divorce in 1994, and a lot of Sundance premieres had their subsequent Los Angeles movie theater premieres at The Laemmle Theatres where I worked the box office for 9 years, from 1993 through 2001, and I firsthand witnessed what was to become known as the independent film movement of the 90s.
In 2001 I produced a John Cassavetes Film Retrospective, officially sponsored by The Laemmle Theatres, Film Independent and Venice Magazine.
Throughout my 24 years in the US I have immersed myself in writing, from literary novel and play- and screenwriting to essay- and journal writing, focussing particularly on “personal drama” as “creative nonfiction,” and all disciplines have ultimately eased it for me to make a switch from narrative feature screenwriting to documentary filmmaking.
In 2018 I am publishing my story and essays in a book, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays.” (2018)
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Click Here for a Summary of The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (2015)
For Parts 1 and 2 of the Backstory, Click the Links Below:
My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 1.) (2015)
My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (part 2.) (2015)
For Parts 1 Through 5 of this 5-Part Story, Click the Links Below:
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 1.) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 2.) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 3.) (2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 4.)(2017)
From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented (part 5.) (2017)
If you enjoyed this Article, please recommend it by pushing the Clap Button at the bottom of the page, or share in your Social Media, or both.
And please check out my other articles at medium.com/@gabriellabregmanon mainly LGBTQ- and Immigration Issues, and the State of Women and LGBTQ People in Film, and on Lesbian/Queer Film and Intersectional Feminism as well as Queer Female Sexuality and Gender Identity.
Here are a few titles:
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBT Immigrants (2014)
The DOMA Victims Act for Legal Entries (2016)
Gender-Binary System notes (2016)
My Life in The Netherlands Before Immigrating to The US in 1992 (2015)
Becoming Undocumented: Getting My Status and Identity Back After DOMA’s Demise (2015)
The 2016 Valentine’s Day Filmmakers Manifesto (2016)
A Note on the State of Women in Film (2016)
A Few Notes on LGBTQ Filmmaking (2017)
Click for Complete List of Articles (2016)
My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Hollywood-based Writer, Filmmaker and Producer, currently in post-production of a Feature Documentary about LGBTQ US Immigration Exclusion-Policy History, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ through my film production company Bregman Films.
I also am the Founder of a Nonprofit Film Organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles - A Media Site & LA Film Mixers.
In 2018 I am publishing my story and essays in a book, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays.”
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, “non-op” Trans-Masculine, and Bi-Racial, from the Netherlands, Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
