Hill Resident Stephen Lewis Creates Feature-Length Documentary 

San Bruno Avenue resident Stephen Berkeley Lewis is a dreamer. After seeing Star Wars at age nine, he decided to become a filmmaker, creating movies in middle and high school, as well as a University of Southern California student. A short documentary he made screened at Sundance in 1992. 

However, after a promising start, he decided that he didn’t want to make films after all, at least not in Los Angeles.  

“I didn’t have the temperament to survive in the film industry down there. I was too thin-skinned,” he said. 

In 1992, he shifted his artistic pursuits to the game industry in San Francisco where he moved with his then-girlfriend, now wife, Barbara Pollak-Lewis. He worked as an animator, designer, and programmer for many years until that, too, stopped feeling satisfying.

“I was getting a little burned out on the entertainment software industry,” he said. “I wanted to apply that dreamy, creative side of me toward a project that could potentially help people. Maybe use my video game skills to create a VR app or some kind of visual therapeutic experience.” 

A Google search led to a hypnosis course in San Rafael. After experiencing the intervention’s transformative and healing effects, Lewis became a certified hypnotherapist and opened a private practice, Arc Hypnosis, on Carolina Street in 2017. 

A part of him, however, felt like a frustrated filmmaker. 

“I still really wanted to continue making movies, but I didn’t know how to make that happen,” he said. “I had a lot of little false starts.” 

That changed when he met surrealist photographer Arthur Tress on a ferry to Mare Island. The two started chatting about cameras; Tress had his Hassleblad slung around his neck. Lewis thought he’d heard of Tress. It turned out that Pollak-Lewis was fascinated by Tress’ work and it influenced her own photography while attending art school in Rhode Island in the 1980s. She owned several of Tress’ photography books. 

Beyond that connection, Tress and Lewis clicked because of the dreamy quality Lewis brings to his therapy work. 

“Arthur was interested in what I do with hypnosis because he describes the state when he’s taking photos as a kind of flow state,” Lewis said. “He’s really focused, the world becomes magical, and he has a heightened sense of reality that helps him capture that magic in his photos. His work state is quite similar to how I would describe a hypnotic trance. Some people have the perception that a trance is being out of it or not being in touch with anything but it’s not, at least not in the therapeutic context. It enables access to deeper layers of consciousness and that’s what I aim for in my work as a hypnotherapist.” 

That crossover in interests and a mutual fascination with each other led Lewis to make a short film about Tress. 

“He said it was a good idea, but only if I finished it,” Lewis said. “It was a revelation because I realized he was right. It became a mantra that propelled me through what became a 4.5-year-long filmmaking adventure with him.” 

The multi-year project was initially intended to be significantly shorter; Lewis planned to make a 10-minute film. 

“It was really fun to go with Arthur on these photography outings all over the City and Mare Island,” Lewis said. “I thought it would be a few weekends of filming and a couple of weeks of editing. I soon put together a short sequence and he really liked it because he said I had accurately captured the way he worked. That was when he started to open up his life to my camera and the film evolved to become a much more intimate portrayal.” 

The short film morphed into a feature-length documentary, Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge, that covers how Tress works as well as his relationships, legacy, the aging process, and his loneliness as a gay octogenarian living in San Francisco. Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge premiered at the Getty Center in Los Angeles last winter. It’s now on the festival circuit and will be screened on November 14th in San Francisco at the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts, coinciding with a Tress gallery exhibition there, curated by Pollak-Lewis.

Lewis is contemplating a documentary on hypnotism as well as dramatizing the story of his mother’s life as a young child growing up in the Philippines during the World War II Japanese and U.S. occupations. 

“But I’m still very much an outsider to the film industry so who knows?” Lewis said.   

For more information about the film, visit www.arthurtressmovie.com.