20 Facts About Rob Nilsson

Rob Nilsson was born on October 29,1939 and is a filmmaker, poet and painter, best known for his feature film Northern Lights, co-directed with John Hanson and winner of the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Rob Nilsson is known for directing and playing the lead role in Heat and Sunlight, produced by Steve and Hildy Burns, featuring Consuelo Faust, Don Bajema and Ernie Fosseliius.

Rob Nilsson is a painter and a poet whose book of poetry From a Refugee of Tristan Da Cunha is a collection of his life's work.

Rob Nilsson's family moved to California in 1954, where Nilsson was president of the 1957 graduating class at Tamalpais High School, Mill Valley.

Rob Nilsson ran track and cross country, and was first chair trumpet in the school band.

Rob Nilsson then spent a year writing and painting on an island off the coast of Cameroon, then called Fernando Po, now called Malabo.

Rob Nilsson had a show of his paintings at the Ayuntamiento in Santa Isabel, the capital of the former Spanish Equatorial Guinea.

In 1969 he returned to San Francisco and changed his name to Nilsson to avoid being confused with filmmaker Robert Nelson.

Rob Nilsson helped found the San Francisco film collective Cine Manifest, active throughout the 1970s, where his first dramatic feature film, Northern Lights, detailed the struggles of North Dakota farmers in 1915 who fought the domination of the Eastern banks, railroads and the grain business.

In 1992, Rob Nilsson moved into a transient hotel south of Market Street in San Francisco, motivated by a search for his missing brother.

In collaboration with Studio Malaparte in Japan, Rob Nilsson completed the first film in the collection, Winter Oranges, shot off the coast of Hiroshima on Sagi Island.

In September 2000, Rob Nilsson shot Samt in Jordan, working with a cast of young people assembled by ZENID, a Jordanian institute striving for social development.

In 1988, Rob Nilsson made Words For The Dying, a documentary feature film produced by David Donoghue and Ireland's Windmill Lane.

Rob Nilsson has appeared as minor roles in numerous television shows, starting in 1986 as the character Wango Mack in the Miami Vice series 3 episode Better Living Through Chemistry.

Later in 1988, Rob Nilsson directed the first three episodes of The Street a cinema verite style police drama about cops on the Newark graveyard shift.

Rob Nilsson directed and adapted Rod Serling's script A Town Has Turned to Dust into a feature film for the USA Network.

Presque Isle is a narrative feature written and directed by Rob Nilsson, edited by Milena Grozeva Levy, and shot on location in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Northern Wisconsin by Mickey Freeman.

The Steppes, featuring Irit Levi and produced by Levi, Joel Simone and Rob Nilsson, was included in the Perspectives Competition of the Moscow International Film Festival, which honored Rob Nilsson with a 2011 Retrospective.

The film received its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where Rob Nilsson received the festival's Lifetime Award, and was screened at the Syracuse International Film Festival, where it won three awards for acting and directing and Rob Nilsson received the Sophia Lifetime Achievement Award.

Rob Nilsson completed three features in 2016, including Love Twice, featuring Deniz Demirer as a frustrated screenwriter plagued by his fictional characters who refuse to accept the roles he assigns them with editing by Daniel Kremer.