The San Francisco Film Society and the Kenneth Rainen Foundation just announced the ten finalists for the third SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant. The grant (up to $190,000) will be awarded to the feature film that best exemplifies a social justice theme with a potentially significant economic or social effect on the Bay Area filmmaking community. Over the next five years SFFS and KRF plan to give out a number of grants that will total $3 million.

The Filmmaking Grants give support to films that, through plots, themes and character work, explore human rights in a thought-provoking and meaningful way, in addition to discussing anti-discrimination, gender, sexual identity and other pertinent social issues. The grants, which run 2009-13, will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year.

Some of the finalists include Rodney Evans‘ Day Dream, about jazz legends Billy Strayhorn and Buddy Bolden; Krisy Gosney’s Manhandled, about being a transgendered man in a lesbian relationship; Miles Montalbano’s A Human Certainty, about a young working-class couple who vow to a suicide pact; and Barry Jenkins‘s Jeremiad about a young black man’s life journey after being released from San Quentin.

More about the finalists can be found here.