Photos courtesy of Julia Hilder with thanks to Carolyn White
The Glen Park neighborhood was home for San Francisco filmmaker Allie Light for close to 60 years. Arbor Street was where her children grew, her career blossomed to star status and life rolled on from years into decades. My mother, Allie Light, passed away September 17th at the age of 90, leaving a legacy as poet, women’s studies trailblazer, and Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker.
Our life in Glen Park started in late 1966 when young and newly widowed Allie Jane Hilder moved with her three children to a white Victorian house just a block from Glen Canyon Park. She said our move from a home in the Outer Mission was in order to heal from the deep grief of losing her husband, our father, Charles Hilder, to cancer. The home she scraped the down payment together to purchase was a dream because it was the only house on the entire block. It felt like we were living on a country hillside and we even had wild critters visit our back door looking for a handout of which my mom would give table scraps.
That would soon drastically change when, not long after we moved there, Glenridge built apartments on both sides of the road and we became urban. Life on Arbor Street included making lots of neighborhood friends, attending public schools and spending our free time playing sports or just hanging out in Glen Canyon Park. My sister and brother were older than me, almost teenagers, but we remember many really good times together in that house and that neighborhood until they moved out when I was a teenager.
My mom had married at 18 and had her first child at 19 but she longed to get her college degree and over time she did, receiving both an undergraduate and a master’s degree from San Francisco State University, where eventually she taught a course in women’s studies. She loved poetry and spent a lot of time writing her own and reading the classics to us. It was a very creative household and we were lucky to have been exposed to it all.
In 1974 she married the man she called her partner in love and the movies, my stepfather, Irving Saraf. A graduate from UCLA in film, he was already making movies for public television and so began the husband-wife collaboration that spanned 40 years and 18 documentaries. One of those films, In the Shadow of the Stars, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1992. Another film Dialogues with Madwomen won the Sundance Freedom of Expression Award and a National Emmy in 1994.
Long after we kids were grown and into our own lives, life on Arbor Street for my parents continued to be productive and filled with laughter. When they weren’t traveling to film festivals around the globe they would spend the day in their home office editing their latest film project. Then they would stop in the late afternoon because it was time to take the dogs for a walk. Austin and Iris loved the walk in the canyon and were always eager to go.
By that time my mom had already changed her last name to one she had invented for herself, Light. It was poetic in nature and she liked the image it presented when said out loud. But many of the neighbors who they met in the park just knew Allie and Irving as “the parents of Austin and Iris.” One of those neighbors who became a friend and later, edited my mom’s last documentary, The Ship That Turned Back (2025), is Anne Flatte.
Anne, who first met Allie and Irving as a student when they gave a talk to her film class at Stanford, said she was fortunate to call my mom a friend and mentor. “She was passionate about film, poetry, writing, love and life. What a life, what a light, what a creative force.”
When my stepfather died in 2012 of ALS at the age of 80, my mom continued to live alone on Arbor Street. But she and Irving had just moved into the new modern house built for them by my brother, Charlie Hilder. The big beautiful blue house was constructed right next door on land that had been part of the Victorian house sale. It was a dream for my mom because she and Irving designed the house and spent many hours talking about what it would be like to live there.
Losing Irving put her into deep sadness and she began to think about the grief and the desire that comes with old age. It was in that time of grief that she wrote four short film scripts dealing with the subject. One of those scripts she made into a narrative called Any Wednesday. It is a film about two people who share a common bond. An elderly woman who suffers from early onset dementia and a homeless war veteran who suffers from PTSD.
My mom asked me to co-produce the film with her and so in 2017 we went to Vancouver to shoot the film with actors and co-director Patrick Stark. Spending all that time with my mom and being able to collaborate with her was a tremendous experience. She masterfully took her written words and turned them into her first and only narrative film. She was already in her 80’s when that film was made but she said she was not finished making films.
Driven to make one last film my mom was determined to create a tribute to Irving, to tell the story of his escape from Poland and the Nazis when he was just seven years old. The Ship That Turned Back, which I was happy to co-produce, was completed just before she turned 90 earlier this year.
A little more than a year ago, my mom left her Arbor Street home to live near my sister, Alexis Seymour, and me in Austin, Texas, but her ties to San Francisco and her filmmaking community remained and her love for her neighborhood of so many years never left her mind or her heart.
How much she loved her view of the park from the upstairs window and watching the fog roll in after a sun filled day. But, especially that magnificent magnolia tree. When Irving first got together with my mom, he bought her a very small magnolia tree that he planted in the front yard and said it was a symbol of his love. In the decades that followed it grew into a giant tree with limbs that span so wide they dominate the yard and the Victorian house hidden behind. The tree’s branches showcase big green leaves and give way to spectacular light pink blooms every year.
My mom’s passing has really hit my siblings and me hard. This past year and a half I have been her caregiver much of the time and I miss her desperately. I know she was 90 but I was hoping for a little more time. I guess that is what we all say for those we love so much.
A celebration of Allie’s life will take place in San Francisco sometime in January.