Tiffany Shlain Stays Connected

One year ago, Mill Valley resident and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain delivered the commencement address at UC Berkeley in front of more than 11,000 people, urging graduates to take risks and tackle challenges in their lives with moxie. Since then, the speech has garnered more than 200,000 views on YouTube.

An earlier Shlain address – delivered with youthful exuberance in 1984 as class president at in front of her classmates – is harder to find, lost to the dustbins of history.

The technological transition to a world where anything and everything is available at our fingertips – quite literally with smart phones – has created a seemingly “always on” connection to people in our lives. That change was the starting point for Shlain’s latest film, Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology, which continues to draw rave reviews and screens at the massive music fest Bonnaroo and the Maui Film Festival in June.

Connected will have a limited national theatrical release in the fall, and Shlain has come up with number of innovative distribution strategies, including mobile phone and iPad apps and a DVD replete with eco-friendly, recycled packaging and an accompanying booklet about the film.

It’s already been quite a year for the 40-year-old Shlain, the creator of the Webby Awards and co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

In January, she brought Connected, which is narrated by , to the Sundance Film Festival, where it screened six times and received a standing ovation at the premiere. While at Sundance, Shlain was honored with the Women in Film Award and National Geographic All Roads Film Grant.

“It was an absolute dream come true,” Shlain said of Sundance.

The film also garnered rave reviews from likes of Al Gore (“With humor and with a creativity all her own, Tiffany illuminates the issues that affect us all in a way that is both freeing and inspiring”) and the Salt Lake City Tribune (“Brain food beautifully disguised as eye candy.” Sundance’s Caroline Libresco called Connected “utterly original and enormously satisfying.”

During the four-year filmmaking process, the arc of the film changed when her father, fellow Mill Valley resident Dr. Leonard Shlain, succumbed to brain cancer. The elder Shlain, a surgeon and best-selling author, had collaborated with his daughter on the writing of the film.

But after he passed away and as she grieved, Tiffany Shlain decided change the trajectory of the film to interweave much more emotional connectedness as a pivotal part of the film. A film that had been largely observational became quite personal, as Shlain incorporated her own life into the overall theme of interconnectedness.

The result is a richer, more human experience and includes deep wisdom imparted by her father.

“For centuries, we’ve been declaring independence, and perhaps it’s finally time to declare our interdependence,” Shlain says in the film’s trailer. 

Despite a busy screening and speaking schedule, Shlain says she manages to stay grounded here in Mill Valley, far from the industry into which she’s carved herself a niche over the years.

Shlain says she receives tremendous support from the local community. She and her husband, UC Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, created The Moxie Institute, an organization that makes films, discussion programs, theater experiences and internet experiments around social issues.

But the couple also makes time to walk together to pick up their daughter Odessa at Park School or to take their daughter Electra to a pottery class.

"I so appreciate how the people in Mill Valley approach life here," she says. “I never ever wanted to make Hollywood movies."