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↓I heard people say out here on the street we’re free. I think the street is more like prison.
THE NINE is an intimate and unflinching portrait of a ravaged community living on Modesto's South Ninth Street—“The Nine”—a barren, forgotten street in California’s Great Central Valley (the setting for The Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother). The film focuses on Kiki, an effervescent and childlike drifter, whose only means of escape is through her imagination, and whose precarious sense of self-worth hinges on the making of the film. THE NINE never sensationalizes—rather, it is a quiet elegy to Kiki and others living on The Nine, each of whom clings to the possibility of an alternate life. Through Kiki’s brave vulnerability, keen observations of lost childhood, and the fundamental need for connection, the distance between ourselves and the “the other” is erased.
This is the land of the fallen, the unloved. God tried to warn me so many times, but I kept walking right into the fire.
- Kiki
- Robert
- Tony
- Wanda
- Ginger & Chastity
I wanna be 8 years old again, so I can make a whole new plan for myself.

I don’t want it to be that familiar story of blight and heroism or blight and pity. It’s like going into purgatory and trying to find something shining, almost holy.
Katy Grannan, originally from Arlington, MA, discovered a passion for photography early in life, after her grandmother gave her a Kodak Instamatic 124. She never aspired to be an artist until she discovered Robert Frank and his indelible photographs in The Americans. This work changed her life.
Grannan was first recognized for an intimate series of portraits depicting strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Since moving to California in 2006, Grannan has explored the relationship between aspiration and delusion—where our shared desire to be of worth confronts the uneasy prospect of anonymity. Together, Boulevard and The Ninety Nine unfold as a danse macabre of society’s liminal and ignored—the “anonymous”.

THE NINE, Grannan’s first feature film, is an intimate, at times disturbing, view into an America most would rather ignore. Raw, poetic, direct, and unnerving, the film is less a window into a foreign world than a distorted mirror reflecting our own shared existence.
Grannan’s photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. She’s also a long time contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other important publications. Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. There are five monographs of her work: Model American, The Westerns, Boulevard, The Nine, and The Ninety Nine.
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Hannah HughesAssistant Director
Hannah Hughes has worked alongside Katy Grannan for the duration of THE NINE production. She graduated with a BFA in photography from Bard College in 2011, studying under the likes of Steven Shore, An-My Lê, and Tim Davis. After graduating, she moved to the Bay Area and began work with Katy as her photography assistant, and then immediately joined her to film THE NINE. Hannah often travels with Katy on shoots and was an integral creative partner throughout the making of the film. Though Hannah’s official title on THE NINE is assistant director, she has worked on nearly every aspect of the film, including second camera, assistant editor, associate producer, and post-production supervisor. She is also a photographer in her own right.
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John McNeilExecutive Producer
Throughout his career in advertising and brand communications, John McNeil has worked in just about every role afforded a modern creative person. As an agency CCO, creative director, writer, and art director, John has solved strategic brand problems and created multiple award-winning campaigns for clients such as IBM, Kodak, Microsoft, Xbox, HP, Motorola, and American Express, among others. As a photographer, his work has been featured in global ad campaigns for IBM, Microsoft, DuPont, Kodak, and Nortel, and in publications such as The New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine. Finally, as a Commercial Director, he has created campaigns and films for Microsoft, Nortel, and DuPont, to name a few.
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Nils PeyronExecutive Producer
Nils Peyron is an accomplished senior executive with diverse agency management, strategic marketing, and global brand-building experience. He is expert at leading creative teams and producing original content to drive unique brand storytelling. From running McCann-Erickson San Francisco to producing the Academy Award–winning animated film Rango, Nils understands every facet of today’s unbundled communications space. Prior to joining John McNeil Studio in 2014, he was CMO of TOMS Shoes and spent time at Translation, McCann Erickson, Bath & Body Works, Ogilvy NY and Air France. He has also partnered with Gore Verbinski to launch an innovative trans-media production company, Blindwink, specializing in the development and production of original IP in films, videogames, TV shows, and digital.
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Marc SmolowitzProducer
Marc Smolowitz is a multi-award-winning director, producer, and executive producer with 20+ years of experience across all aspects of the entertainment and media business. Marc's career focus has been on powerful social issue filmmaking across all genres. His credits include films that screened at top-tier festivals—including Sundance, Berlinale, AFI Docs, IDFA, Tokyo, Melbourne, among others—and released worldwide theatrically, across all forms of television, and on VOD/Digital. Select titles include: Heaven Adores You (Producer, 2014), The Power Of Two (Director/Producer, 2011), Academy-Award® nominated The Weather Underground (Producer, 2003), and Trembling Before G‑d (Producer, 2001).
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Stephen BergerEditor
Stephen Berger has edited award-winning commercials, music videos, and short films, including work that has been recognized by the Cannes Lion, AICP, and D&AD awards. Stephen's clients include Xbox, Activision, Logitech, among others. Notably, he edited two of the four short films that opened the 2010 Sundance Festival—Spike Jonze’s I’m Here and Logorama. He garnered significant attention for Logorama, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. He has also worked with such directors as David Fincher, Spike Lee, and Joe Carnahan.
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Steven EmersonComposer
A sought-after composer and jazz-influenced singer/songwriter, Steven has a long history of musical experience and accomplishment. Early in his career, Steven joined the band True West and opened for R.E.M. on national tour. He spent six years in New York City collaborating with up-and-coming acclaimed artists, and won an ASCAP songwriting award for a duo album with cellist Peter Lewy. Steven also wrote and directed Second Person, which was selected for the San Francisco International Film Festival. He has since released several solo albums and composed music for documentaries, online games, television productions, and commercials.
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Barry ColeMusic Supervisor
Barry Cole is a Grammy-nominated music supervisor who specializes in music supervision, clearance, and managing publishing rights for filmmakers and musicians. His consultation company, Spot Music, has more than 80 film credits, including Sling Blade, American Psycho, Alive Inside, 50 Shades Of Black, and Notorious. Barry was nominated for a Grammy in 2013 in the field of Best Compilation for Visual Media for his work on the documentary Marley. In 2014, he founded multisfalcon.com, the digital music and licensing portal.
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Gus KovenSound Designer & Supervising Sound Editor
Originally from Green Village, NJ, Gus Koven moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where his interest in electronic music led him to sound design. He has worked on a broad range of projects, ranging from art installations to devices to film sound design. Gus has extensive experience working as a sound designer in branding and advertising, working on campaigns for adidas, Apple, Coke, Dewars, Heineken, Levis, Nike, Old Spice, Samsung, Audi, BMW, Dodge, Fiat, Nissan, Lexus and Mercedes, among many others. His work has garnered D&AD, London International, Clio and AICP awards. He has worked with Daft Punk as a sound designer on their feature film Electroma, as well as on their Grammy award–winning album Random Access Memories. He lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife, Stephanie, and their three children.
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Jason DottsSound Re-Recording Mixer
Jason is a sound editor, re-recording mixer, and creative enthusiast. Originally from New Orleans, he began his career as a tracking engineer for local pianist David Torkanowsky and platinum-selling producer/engineer Craig “KLC” Lawson. Jason eventually found his calling working in film and television, and hasn't looked back in the decade since. Recent television clients include Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Syfy, Showtime, IFC, FX, and ABC. Some of Jason's film highlights are Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; Brothers Bloom; Pawn Shop Chronicles; and Straight Outta Compton.
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Eli OlsonAdditional Editor
Eli Olson is an Emmy Award-winning film editor. Her extensive experience reaches into narrative features, documentary, non-fiction broadcast, and commercial spots. Eli won an Emmy for her work on My Flesh and Blood for HBO Films, which also won the Audience Award and Best Director Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. In 2014, she co-directed the documentary Stories from Tohoku for PBS, which won the Jury Prize at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Her editing credits include 3 Still Standing (2014), Heaven Adores You (2014), And Then Came Lola (2009), American Masters: Sam Cooke Crossing Over (2008), Mrs. Menendez (2008), The Hunt For The Boston Strangler (2007), and Finding Amelia Earhart (2007), among others.
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Pranay NichaniAssistant Editor
Pranay Nichani is a member of an Indian generation that grew up consuming Western media. From a young age, he was fascinated with the power of filmmaking, and always experimenting with the SLR his uncle gave him as a child. Since then, Pranay has received several degrees, including a Master of Fine Arts in producing and directing from the California Academy of Art. He has worked on a wide range of student projects and has won several awards, including First Prize at the Rotaract Short Film Festival in Mumbai and the Inspirational Leadership Award for Crisis Management from L.S. Raheja College of Arts & Commerce.
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Rivkah Beth MedowAssociate Producer
Rivkah Beth Medow is a regional Emmy Award–winning filmmaker who has produced, directed, and managed documentary, television, commercial, and non-profit productions for the past 12 years. Millions have seen her projects on PBS, Food Network, BBC, and in film festivals worldwide. Rivkah has a strong social and environmental focus that can be seen in her credits, including two episodes of PBS Marine Fisheries & Aquaculture Series: Empty Oceans, Empty Nets and Farming the Seas (associate producer, 2005); The Next Frontier: Engineering the Golden Age of Green (associate producer, 2010), and We’ve Got the Power (Co-Producer, 2013). Sons of a Gun (director, producer, 2008), her directorial debut, premiered at South By Southwest and was broadcast on PBS.
rivkahbethmedow.com
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10.11.2016American Photo Magazine—When Photographers Become Filmmakers: Katy Grannan on Making 'The Nine'
Photographer Katy Grannan recently completed "The Nine," a feature-length film in which she continues to document the people she covered in her 2012 –2013 black-and-white eponymous photo series. The “Nine” refers to a few city blocks on Modesto’s South Ninth Street, where Grannan’s subjects live on the margins of society and life… -
10.11.2016The Playlist—DOC NYC Exclusive: The Streets Are Prison In Clip From 'The Nine'
Those living on society’s margins don’t often get their voices heard, but Katy Grannan turns her camera on those struggling with the day-to-day in her documentary “The Nine.” And slated to screen soon at DOC NYC, we’ve got an exclusive look at her observant picture. -
09.29.2016Mercury News—Mill Valley Film Festival packed with Bay Area offerings
Berkeley’s Katy Grannan immerses us in the downtrodden existence of people clinging to the fringes along the titular section of South Nine Street in Modesto. Through staggering images that poetically express harsh realities with more clarity than words often can, Grannan has created a stark, unshakable portrait of desperate people and places. A must-see… -
08.30.2016Photo District News—Katy Grannan on Making Her First Feature Film, The Nine
Prostitution isn’t mentioned until 20 minutes into fine-art photographer Katy Grannan’s first feature film, The Nine. Tony, a soft-spoken man living on the street, says that he worries about the safety of the women he knows. The topic of… -
07.25.2016Filmmaker Magazine—25 New Faces of Independent Film, 2016
Katy Grannan took the exit. It was 2009, and the photographer was driving down California’s Highway 99. “I was making photographs throughout the Central Valley,” Grannan says, “and I’d take these off ramps and see who I’d meet.” Turning one day onto “the Nine,” a hard-bitten stretch of Modesto’s South Ninth Street… -
05.13.2016Financial Times—View From the Edge
For the past five years, Katy Grannan has been driving 100 miles south almost every week from her home in Berkeley on the edge of San Francisco Bay to Modesto in California’s Central Valley. Like other cities along State Route 99 – Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield – Modesto is one of those places that tourists driving… -
04.06.2016KQED—Katy Grannan’s First Film Documents Hope and Regret in Modesto
Berkeley-based photographer Katy Grannan’s first foray into filmmaking focuses on Kiki, a charming but deeply troubled drifter who lives in the ravaged community of Modesto’s South Ninth Street. Five years in the making, THE NINE builds on Grannan’s photographic series Boulevard, The Nine, and The Ninety Nine, quiet elegies to… -
02.08.2016Kaleidoscope—Katy Grannan; Interview by Charlie White
In a society that values notoriety and celebrity, acknowledging suffering is an act of disruption. In her photographic series and a new feature film, American artist Katy Grannan immersed herself in a part of America that operates beneath poverty and put struggling human beings in front of her lens, highlighting the complex relationship… -
11.13.2015The New Yorker—Katy Grannan’s Modesto on the Edge
In the final seconds of the trailer for Katy Grannan’s first feature film, “The Nine,” an oneiric portrait of life on the margins in California’s Central Valley, two young men are seen riding bikes at night in the flooded parking lot of a motel, their tires trailing glittering churn. Off screen, a woman… -
04.28.2015Burnaway—Art Review: Katy Grannan at Sherrick & Paul in Nashville by Joe Nolan
The recent exhibition “The Ninety Nine and The Nine” at Sherrick & Paul featured 14 images from two series by photographer Katy Grannan. “The Ninety Nine” includes color portraits of people from California towns like Modesto, Fresno, and Bakersfield. The Nine features black-and-white portraits that show… -
03.12.2015American Suburb X—You’ve Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley—Katy Grannan’s “The Ninety Nine and The Nine” by Owen Campbell
California’s Central Valley is both some of the most fertile, productive land in the world and a bleak, dusty, drought-wracked, difficult place to live. Katy Grannan’s The Ninety-Nine and the The Nine is an exploration of this long valley, the hundred-degrees in the shade, dustbowl California John Steinbeck’s… -
02.2015Issue Magazine—Katy Grannan, Interview by Tabitha Soren
Tabitha Soren: Do you remember the first portrait you ever took, or maybe the first time you attempted to take a serious picture, an art picture? Katy Grannan: I honestly never gave it a thought about whether it was art or not. I never aspired to be an artist. It was just that I always made photographs. Since I was… -
08.01.2014The Great Leap Sideways—The Discipline of Modern Economic Life: Katy Grannan’s The Ninety-Nine and The Nine
The cover of The Ninety-Nine is a smooth, unblemished pearly white surface, out of which the number 99 has been excised like portholes in the slipcase, to reveal the anguished gaze of an anonymous woman in Fresno, California, in 2011. She is olive-skinned, her hair wet and beautifully disheveled…

Loria Center
190 York St
New Haven, CT 06511

Sala Pocitos
Alejandro Chucarro 1036
Montevideo, Uruguay
Cinamateca 18
Av. 18 de Julio 1280
Montevideo, Uruguay
Tickets available for purchase at the venue

Cleveland, OH
Tower City Center
230 W Huron Rd #7256
Cleveland, OH 44113
Tower City Center
230 W Huron Rd #7256
Cleveland, OH 44113

Palm Springs, CA
Camelot Theatres - Auditorium #1
2300 E Baristo Road
Palm Springs, CA 92262

Atlanta, GA
Plaza Theater
1049 Ponce de Leon Ave NE
Atlanta, GA 30306

Fargo, ND
The Fargo Theatre
314 Broadway N
Fargo, ND 58102
Tickets available at the box office

International Women's Film Festival of Créteil
Créteil, France
MAC Grande salle
1 Place Salvador Allende
94000 Créteil, France
MAC Grande salle
1 Place Salvador Allende
94000 Créteil, France

State Theater
Modesto, CA
Doors: 6:00pm, Film: 7:00pm
1307 J St, Modesto, CA 95354
Doors: 6:00pm, Film: 7:00pm
1307 J St, Modesto, CA 95354
SOLD OUT

UCLA | Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, CA
Billy Wilder Theater
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Free and open to the public

Harvard University | Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Cambridge, MA
Level 0, Lecture Hall
24 Quincy Street
Free and open to the public

New York City, NY
MoMA NY Theater 2
MoMA NY Mezzanine/Theater 3

DocNYC
New York City, NY
Cinépolis Chelsea 5
260 W 23rd St
Filmmaker in person
Cinépolis Chelsea 5
260 W 23rd St
Filmmaker in person

St. Louis, MO
.ZACK
3224 Locust Ave. St. Louis
Filmmaker in person

Denver, CO
United Artists Denver Pavillions
500 16th St., Denver CO 80202
Filmmaker in person
United Artists Denver Pavillions
500 16th St., Denver CO 80202
Filmmaker in person
United Artists Denver Pavillions
500 16th St., Denver CO 80202

Vienna, Austria
Metro Kinokulturhaus
Johannesgasse 4
1010 Wien, Austria
Stadtkino Wien
Akademiestr. 13
1010 Wien, Austria

Flyway Film Festival
Pepin & Alma, WI
Big River Theater
121 S Main St, Alma
Filmmaker in person
Villa Bellezza
1420 3rd St, Pepin, WI 54759
Filmmaker in person

Mexico City, Mexico
Cine Tonalá
Tonalá 261, Cuauhtémoc, Roma Sur
Tickets available for purchase at the venue
Jaima Ciudad Universitaria
Free and open to the public
Domo Parque México
Avenida México s/n, Cuauhtémoc, Colonia Hipódromo
Free and open to the public

New Orleans, Louisiana
Contemporary Arts Center
900 Camp St.
Filmmaker in person
Contemporary Arts Center
900 Camp St.

Mill Valley, California
The Cinearts Sequoia
25 Throckmorton Avenue, Mill Valley
Filmmaker in person
Lark Theater
549 Magnolia Avenue, Larkspur
Filmmaker in person

Valdivia International Film Festival
Valdivia, Chile
Lord Cochrane
Independencia 455
Lord Cochrane
Independencia 455
Tickets available for purchase at the venue

Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival
Hot Springs, Arkansas
Arlington Hotel
Mountain Valley Spring Water Cinema 2
239 Central Ave
Filmmaker in person

Speed Art Museum / Hite Art Institute
Louisville, KY
Speed Cinema
2035 South Third Street
Filmmaker in person

Columbus College of Art & Design: Beeler Gallery
Columbus, Ohio
Canzani Center Screening Room
60 Cleveland Avenue
Filmmaker in person
Free and open to the public

Cincinnati Art Museum
Cincinnati, Ohio
Fath Auditorium
935 Eden Park Drive
Filmmaker in person
Free and open to the public
Bergen, Norway
Cinmateket i Bergen
Georgernes verft 12
Kunsthall, Norway
Sølvberget, Stavanger kulturhus
Sølvberggata 2
Documentary Film Competition
Krakow, Poland
ARS Reduta Cinema
Sw. Tomasza 11 Street
Małopolski Ogród Sztuki Culture Center
MOS2, Rajska 12 Street

Artist Talk
Katy Grannan and Phillip Prodger In Conversation
Somerset House, Strand
Sneak Preview
The Nine + Q&A
National Portrait Gallery
Ondaatje Wing Theatre
Visions du Réel International Film Festival
Regard Neuf Competition, First Feature Films
Nyon, Switzerland
Capitole Leone
Rue Neuve 5, 1260 Nyon, Switzerland
Théâtre de Marens
Route du Stand 5, 1260 Nyon, Switzerland