Prize money at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival will amount to more than $100,000 this year,organisers said as they announced the documentary and new directors competition entries for the April 23-May 7 event.

Winning documentaries will be eligible for $60,000 in awards, with
$25,000 going to best investigative feature, $20,000 to best
documentary and $15,000 to best Bay Area entry. The winner of the New
Directors Prize will receive $15,000.

The Golden Gate Awards will include competitors in seven further
categories to be announced at the opening press conference on March
31. The jury's selection of winners will be announced at the Golden
Gate Awards on May 6.

Documentary competition entries include the world premieres of two US
pictures: Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's New Muslim Cool about a former
Puerto Rican gang member turned devout muslim, and Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider's Speaking In Tongues, which explores the debate over bilingual education.

There is a North American premiere for Avi Mograbi's Israeli entry
Z32, in which an Israeli soldier anonymously speaks about his role in
a revenge operation, and US premieres for Yun Suh's City Of Borders
(US-Israel-Palestine), about the plight of Israeli and Palestinian
gays, and Franny Armstrong's English cautionary tale The Age Of Stupid
about climate change.

In the new directors category there are North American premieres for
Esther Rots' Dutch domestic violence drama Can Go Through Skin and Ivy Ho's office romance drama Claustrophobia from Hong Kong. Gabriel Medina's comedy of errors from Argentina, The Paranoids, will have its US premiere.

For the complete list of documentary and new director entries visit
the official website at www.sffs.org.

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