Our name, Stylo Films (Stē’-lō), reflects the French director Alexandre Astruc’s idea of a film essay written with a “camera-pen” (caméra-stylo) without regard to the conventions of storytelling.  We are drawn to elliptical filmmaking, without a standard narrative arc, aspiring to a little poetry and humor.   

KRISTINE SAMUELSON
has been an independent filmmaker for over 25 years.  She was nominated for an Academy Award for Arthur and Lillie and has received Artist's Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.  She was a faculty member in the Documentary Film and Video M.F.A. Program at Stanford University for 32 years and is the Edward Clark Crossett Emerita Professor of Humanistic Studies in the Department of Art and Art History.  From 1999-2006, Samuelson served on the Board of the Independent Television Service.  She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

JOHN HAPTAS
is a documentary filmmaker and editor.  Among his editing credits are Soundtrack to a Riot for Frontline World (Emmy Nomination), Hunting the Hidden Dimension, a program on fractal geometry for PBS Nova ("Pierre-Gilles de Gennes" Science Film Prize), Inside Guantanamo Bay, a two-hour National Geographic Explorer special (editor/co-writer; Emmy nominations for Best Documentary and for Writing), and Regarding Susan Sontag (Tribeca Film Festival, Special Jury Award; HBO broadcast). He is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson’s award-winning documentary essays have been screened at festivals throughout the world, from Sundance and San Francisco to London, Rio, Belgrade, India, Germany, and South Korea.  They have appeared on PBS and cable television and at museums including New York MOMA. Empire of the Moon was made possible by a Cité Des Arts International Studio Residency in Paris, and Tokyo Waka, which screened at Film Forum in New York City, was supported by a Japan-U.S. Creative Artists Fellowship. Kristine and John have also been Artists in Residence at the Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and taught master classes at the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema in Vietnam. Their most recent film, Life Overtakes Me, a NETFLIX Original Documentary, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, won Audience Awards at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the Chicago Critics Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award.

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