Changes at the top of the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival

Two months ago, Sebastopol Center for the Arts wrested control of the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival from the volunteers that had run the festival for years

In mid-November, the volunteer steering committee that had run the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival (SDFF) almost since its inception had a Zoom meeting with SebArts Executive Director Serafina Palandech and the SebArts board.

At stake was the future of the popular film festival, which was founded in 2007 and is scheduled to run this year in April. Like many institutions in Sebastopol, SDFF punches above its weight. In addition to being a hometown favorite, it draws audiences from all over, and it’s an Oscar® qualifying film festival for short-form documentaries.

For years, the festival has been run by a volunteer steering committee, which included, among others, SDFF Festival Producer Cynthi Stefenoni and Lead Programmer Jean McGlothlin.

At the meeting, Palandech and the SebArts board gave the leadership team of SDFF’s Steering Committee three options:

1. The SDFF steering committee and volunteers could become their own non-profit and take full control of the festival, and SebArts would step back from any involvement in the program.

2. Cancel SDFF 2026.

3. SebArts would take over the festival, and SDFF members would act as an advisory committee.

“We were to go back to our group and discuss. We met, conferred and responded in good faith,” McGlothlin said.

The Steering Committee leadership team, consisting of McGlothlin, Stefenoni, Jane Winslow and Diane Sobel, took these proposals back to the larger steering committee. In the end, the steering committee suggested that SebArts cancel SDFF this year—despite the fact that the committee, volunteers, and SebArts staff had already reviewed 600 films and were just days from announcing their chosen selections.

Palandech was stunned. “I think that when they came back and said that they wanted to cancel the event, we, the organization, spent a few days digesting that information and also thinking about the artists and the filmmakers. Like, we were supposed to announce to the filmmakers the next day, then this all happened. I felt that ultimately it was such a huge disservice to cancel the event because of, essentially, a disagreement in how to run the operation. It just felt wrong to us to cancel it—for both the filmmakers and the community. So we decided to move forward and to put on the event.”

Stefenoni said she suggested a fourth option. “I said it’s obvious that we’re all trying to muddle through this together, so why don’t we just give SebArts the marketing and the ticketing and anything that has to do with money, ask them to run that piece, and we’ll take care of the part we’ve just spent all these months on, which is the programming and the production of the weekend. And when I when I pitched that, their knee-jerk response was, ‘We don’t want to work with you.’” (By “you,” Stefenoni said they meant the whole SDFF Steering Committee.)

No one would go on record about what was said after that, but afterward, the leadership board of the SDFF Steering Committee soon received the following message:

Dear Jean, Cynthi, Diane and Jane,

Thank you for your support and dedication to the festival and the film community. We truly appreciate the time and care you’ve given to SDFF.

SebArts is moving in a new direction with the film program and will be restructuring its operations. As part of this transition, SebArts will take the lead from here and will manage all communications regarding SDFF 2026, filmmakers, FilmFreeway, the public, and our partners as we consider the best path forward.

SebArts remains fully committed to the filmmakers, to the film community, and to supporting the arts. This work is bigger than any one of us, and we intend to steward it with clarity and care.

Thank you again for everything you’ve contributed. Please contact me directly if you have any questions.

Serafina

According to McGlothlin, SebArts also immediately cut off the steering committee members’ access to their SDFF email addresses, all the SDFF email lists, the SDFF database, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

Even though they were all volunteers, Stefenoni, McGlothlin and other steering committee members considered all of this to be their intellectual property. Palandech and the SebArts Board disagreed. They felt that SDFF had long belonged to SebArts—it was one of its star programs—even if it was run by volunteers.

Hurt feelings and angry recriminations followed. The Sebastopol Times heard from a few furious, longtime SDFF volunteers. The principals themselves—the members of the SDFF steering committee and the management of SebArts—were remarkably quiet, not wanting their falling out to cast a shadow on the upcoming festival, which is still scheduled for April.

How did this happen?

Stefenoni, who is in her mid-seventies, and McGlothlin, in her early eighties, said that they had told SebArts two years ago that since they were both getting older, they wanted to transfer the management of the film festival over to the art center. As a result, SebArts hired a film program manager, and SebArts staff took a much larger role in producing last year’s Film Festival than they had before.

Palandech said that one of the first things she learned when she became director of SebArts in 2023 was that the steering committee wanted to hand managment of the festival over to the art center.

“The plan in 2023 was take a year off, re-evaluate, get everything in order, get the ship in order, come back in ’24 as a transition year, and then, you know, take it over in 2025. And we were following that plan, right?” Palandech said.

Stefenoni and McGlothlin said the steering committee was under the impression that the year leading up to the 2026 Festival would be the transition year. In their minds, that was the time when the SDFF Steering Committee would basically do a brain dump and work with SebArts staff, showing them the ropes of producing the festival.

Palandech said that wasn’t how she saw it. Over the last two years, SebArts had hired a series of film program managers to work with the steering committee to learn how to produce the festival.

“We have gone through three film festival managers in two years,” Palandech said.

The last one, George Dondero, announced his resignation just before the SDFF committee’s fateful meeting with SebArts in November.

Since this involves personnel issues, neither side was willing to go into detail about what happened in each of those three cases. Neither side would discuss what had gone wrong and why three different film program managers had left. (McGlothlin said the second program manager was moved to another position at SebArts.) The Sebastopol Times reached out to George Dondero to hear about his experience, but he didn’t return our call.

McGlothlin said that because of the complicated, multi-faceted nature of putting on a film festival, she had expected a more formal hand-off process.

“I thought we had an agreement that this would be the training year for staff, and then staff didn’t show up and we didn’t make that happen.” She felt both sides had kind of dropped the ball. “Which is what I said when I met later with executive director and board chair, I said it was her responsibility to take people from SebArts staff and say, “Okay, you pair up with this kind of person, because that’s that skill set. And then spend this year learning what’s involved: how to set up the database, why it’s important, how it feeds the entire program, and how it gets dealt out to do all these various steps along the way—who sets up housing, who sets up travel, who sets up the awards, all these things.” But staff was never assigned and never asked for by us, so both sides failed in that respect.”

In the meantime, McGlothlin said deadlines on the SDFF planning calendar began to slip. “So we just went ahead with what was on the calendar and did what needed to be done, and George came in the middle of that,” she said. “We tried to include him wherever we could,” something Stefenoni confirmed.

Looking back McGlothlin said that she now sees that Dandero was in a hard position, working for the art center and with the SDFF steering committee, which had different ideas about how to proceed with putting on the festival.

Stefenoni and McGlothlin have now each had a couple of private meetings with Palandech and other SebArts board members, trying to figure out exactly what went wrong and how to move forward. They have been trying to draft a joint statement for about a month now.

It’s painful on both sides because these are people who have worked together, sometimes for years—people who thought of each other not just as colleagues but as friends. Palandech described this breach as “very, very upsetting.” McGlothlin called it “brutal.”

“I have relationships with everybody that’s in that room, right?” Stefenoni said, comparing it to a painful family squabble.

McGlothlin described the break as “a collision of misunderstandings, missed communications and hurt feelings on all sides,” which Stefenoni said was “completely accurate.”

McGlothin noted that she’s just speaking for herself and that not everyone on the SDFF Committee or the associated volunteers feels that way. “Some are still angry and justifiably so,” she said.

Stefenoni, while still obviously aggrieved, is philosophical. “Sometimes this is what it takes to affect change,” she said. “It takes some horrible thing like this. Not always—I mean, if you’re all on the same page and you’ve been communicating consistently then you can transition to change, right? But sometimes it takes the machete.”

For her part, Palandech said Sebastopol Center for the Arts is moving ahead with the film festival, which is scheduled for April 9-12. She said she has nothing but respect for Stefenoni and McGlothlin and the other volunteers who’ve sustained the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival all these years.

Although some longtime SDFF volunteers have bowed out this year, others have stepped forward to help staff the festival.

“We all share passion for film,” Palandech said. “We’re all committed to film and to this legacy, and we plan to keep serving the community with this wonderful film festival.”

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