SINGING - Film #4 in director Rob Nilsson’s 9 @ Night film cycle.
Tuesday February 10, 2026 | 6:30 - 8:30pm
at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Tickets: $10 GA / $6 TLM members | Register via Humanitix
$50 / $35 (TLM members) full series tickets available at this link.
Perry Truman, an accountant from the suburbs, rejects a tryst offered by his live-in girl friend of 20 years. She wants to rekindle their love. He has just quit his job. Wandering the Tenderloin that night he is drawn into a series of dangerous and erotic street encounters. Everyone sings in SINGING, except the real singer. Perry sings the same song twice but with different meanings. At the end he sings like a man who knows he has failed to live passionately.
9 interconnected feature films, spun from the world of the Tenderloin and featuring TL denizens inhabiting their characters and improvising the scripts, are framed by the poetic vision and prolific practice of iconoclast director Rob Nilsson. His ambitious 9 @ Night cycle achieves an deep exploration of the human condition and stands as a rich chronicle of the Tenderloin–the physical place, its people, their existential struggles, sorrows and joys.
Independently produced, the series is an epic feat of cinema in terms of both craft & concept. 9 @ Night is the fruit of Nilsson’s nearly 2-decade collaboration with the Tenderloin yGroup, an acting workshop embedded in the neighborhood and operating with Nilsson’s creative method of “Direct Action,” which he describes as “a cinema of the moment which lives off the land to discover the relationship between what we think we want and what is actually there.” The films and the process that created them (as well as their life after completion) are a tremendous synthesis of art-making, community, and the culture of the Tenderloin both real and imagined.
The Tenderloin Museum is proud to present the 9 @ Night series in its entirety, screened salon-style with Nilsson (and guests) in-person, offering a rare opportunity to see the complete film cycle in “the land” where it was forged. For lovers of San Francisco on-screen, gritty filmic realism, character driven dramas, consider 9 @ Night an essential opus in the canon of Tenderloin-alia!
SINGING is the fourth film in the 9 @ Night cycle. While completists will be rewarded with narrative and visual resonance across the films, each movie can be enjoyed independently. Read more about the series here, and visit RobNilssonArtForms.com to explore the filmmakers full oeuvre.
About SINGING / 9 @ Night:
• Winner: San Francisco Film Critic's Circle Marlon Riggs Award for courage and innovation in the cinema, 2008.
• Praise from Ray Carney and the Academy Foundation:
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/9-night-the-films-of-rob-nilsson-2/
• World Premiere: Mill Valley International Film Festival, 2000.
• The World Premiere marathon screening of all the 9 @ Night Films took place at the Harvard Film Archive in 2007.
"...but the stylistic rawness and the story’s descending arc eloquently pose the question of whether apparently well-ordered, middle-class lives are that far removed from the chaos of the streets."
- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, October 26, 2000
Director:
• Rob Nilsson
Story:
• Rob Nilsson
Improvised by the Cast:
• Jim Carpenter – Perry
• Barbara Jaspersen – Mandy
• Domenique Lozano – Singer
• Devin Qualls – Devon
• Josh Peterson – Bob
• Teddy Weiler – Homeless Man
• Edwin Johnson – Homeless Man
• Tammy Young – Dancer
• John Hunsaker – Chuckles
• Bruce Marovich – Undercover Cop
• Dale Messmer – Undercover Cop
• Selana Allen – Waitress
• David Scott Smith – Cigarette Guy
• Destiny Costa – Street Woman
• Kate Skwire – Street Woman
Cinematography :
• Bill Corona
• Mickey Freeman
• Ethan Sing
Production Manager:
• Mira Larkin
Sound:
• Rand Crook
• Saul Rouda
• T.J. Walkup
Art Director:
• Jennifer Burns
Editor:
• Josh Peterson
Additional Editors:
• Sprague Anderson
• Robert Frey
Sound Editor:
• Al Nelson
Producers:
• Bill Corona
• Rob Nilsson
Dedicated To:David Schickele
Okunrin Meta - David Schickele