When Oakland filmmaker Joslyn Rose first toured the former Holy Names Campus University last fall, she had no sense of what possibilities the 70-year-old site might offer as a film location.
The veteran director, producer and writer has been in the filmmaking industry since 2003. She’s directed music videos for Bay Area hip-hop legends Too $hort and E-40; produced special programs for BET; and directed “Stand,” an Emmy-nominated Showtime documentary about basketball player and activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. The documentary features interviews with Warriors player Steph Curry and Oscar-winning actor from Hayward, Mahershala Ali.
Rose, who has filmed various of her projects in Oakland, got to work on her most recent project, the short film “The Listeners,” at the Oakland Hills Campus for the first time. The short, which she directed, premiered last week at Mills College – Northeastern University as part of the Oakland International Film Festival.
“I was taking photos and I was just starting to brainstorm,” Rose said. “It was an exciting moment to find a place I could just shoot at. There’s a Division II basketball gym. There’s a hospital, a library with books in it. I was hyped.”
The campus, located on Mountain Boulevard next to State Route 13, closed its doors in 2023 after 155 years due to a decline in enrollment and other financial challenges. In 2021, Mills College, facing similar issues, ultimately merged with Northeastern University.
The Holy Names campus was bought in 2023 for $65 million by the commercial real estate firm BH Properties, which initially said it intended to keep the location as an education facility. But the company has not yet attracted a college or university to take over, although there have been bites. Earlier this month, the Oakland HBCU initiative, a task force seeking to bring a historically Black college or university to Oakland, toured the campus.
The 59-acre campus with breathtaking views, includes a chapel, library, classrooms, biology labs, nursing classrooms, a dining hall, a 500-bed dorm and a 450-seat theater, the Valley Center for the Performing Arts.
Luis Guerra, the Holy Names facilities manager kept on by the new owners, told The Oaklandside that when the site was a university, events and other rentals had to be timed around the school schedule. Now that it is empty, he said, there are more possibilities — including for filmmakers.
The Valley Center for the Performing Arts, which didn’t shutter when the university did, has been hosting performances by multiple Oakland arts organizations, including the Oakland Gay Men’s Chorus and the Dimensions Dance Theater.
A new life as a film location
As BH Properties worked on a permanent plan for the campus, the owners brought on Daniel Cardenas as director of campus operations in 2024 to find ways to rent out the facilities.
Cardenas and Guerra met with Heather McLean, a Bay Area-based location scout who has worked on projects such as “Blindspotting,” “I am Virgo,” and “Freaky Tales.”
“Heather and [Bay Area producer] Monica Castro told us to get involved with SFFilm and Make It Bay,” Cardenas said. “So I started emailing them.”
Cardenas said that two of the people who responded to his emails were Sam Bempong and Grace Porras, who — along with Rose — are among the co-founders of Make It Bay, also known as the East Bay Film Collective, which has been instrumental in bringing filmmaking to Oakland and pushing the city to provide filmmakers who bring production here with Oakland tax incentives.
“They’re amazing people who truly love our Oakland community,” Cardenas said. “This was great because they want to bring more films to Oakland. We have this resource that we didn’t know how to market, especially [to] the film community, and they’ve been instrumental in giving us ways, tools and knowledge on how to get the word out there.”
Last summer, the campus was renamed the Oakland Hills Campus, and an initiative was launched to market the campus as a film location. Cardenas, Guerra and the Make It Bay team hosted a mixer in August 2025, featuring music, cocktails and a campus tour, to let filmmakers know that the facilities were open for rentals.
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, District 3 councilmember Carroll Fife, District 4 councilmember Janani Ramachandran, filmmakers W. Kamau Bell and Niema Jordan, Gaby Arvizu of Proximity Media, and producer Seany Heavy were among those who attended the mixer, along with Bempong and Porras.
From left to right: Grace Porras and Sam Bempong of the filmmaking collective Make It Bay with Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee in August 2025 at the unveiling of a film initiative at the former Holy Names University. Credit: Azucena Rasilla/The Oaklandside
“All of a sudden, we thought, if we get 50 people out here, that’s 50 people that didn’t know about us before,” Cardenas said. “At the end of the day, we had close to 300 that showed up and a lot of production companies that also came. At that moment we knew we had some real interest in filming here, and from that event came a lot of film opportunities for us.”
Since launching the film initiative last summer, Cardenas said that close to 50 projects have already filmed on site, ranging from commercials to short films, web series and features.
“It’s kind of taken on a life of its own,” Cardenas said. “It has helped us promote a lot of the areas of the campus that weren’t getting used before.”
The former Holy Names campus has been used as a film location since last summer. Credit: Azucena Rasilla/The Oaklandside
Cardenas said the most sought-out locations have been the chapel and the nursing labs, which resemble spaces in a hospital.
Bay Area-based location scout Frances Reyes-Bolinger has worked on such films as Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters” and on series such as the STARS show “Blindspotting.” She recently booked the campus’s lab classrooms and the dorms’ common area for projects she was working on.
“Getting into school districts becomes tricky because educators are protective of the students,” Reyes-Bolinger said. “So, the opportunity to have access to these spaces without impacting a school is nice. That is one of the great things the Oakland Hills Campus has.” She also appreciates that the campus offers secure parking for expensive film equipment.
Reyes-Bolinger said that the site “invites people to think a little bit out of the box” in how a campus’s grounds can be utilized.
‘It looked like magic in there’
Rose said that after visiting the campus last year, she put the potential location in her back pocket while she worked on other projects.
“I was so excited that day that I started sending the location photos to my crew and some of my actors,” she said. “A lot of times, a location will inspire and inform a concept. Sometimes, as filmmakers, we go see a space, and it might inspire what we want to shoot there, or what we want to write because we know something’s available to us.”
The campus, she said, “gave me some really exciting ideas.”
Not long after, “The Listeners,” a project with Super Bowl champion Vernon Davis, became the perfect opportunity to film at the site in the Oakland hills.
Rose teamed up with Dominique Mouton, another Oakland filmmaker, to work on the script, which tackles mental health issues, a topic on which Davis has been outspoken.
“‘The Listeners’ short film evolved from a combination of seeing the campus in Oakland, knowing what I had available to me, which was a campus hospital and a library,” she said. “And, this idea that I could make something in there about mental health and music, being the theme around how we use it for healing.”
Actor and producer Blair Underwood (left) with actor Vernon Davis on set at the former Holy Names Campus for the filming of the short film “The Listeners” by Oakland filmmaker Joslyn Rose. Credit: courtesy of Giovanni Herrera
Earlier this year, Rose and her crew filmed at the Oakland Hills Campus with an ensemble cast that includes Davis, “L.A. Law” star Blair Underwood, Cindy Herron of the Oakland R&B group En Vogue, and the actors Simone Leanora, of Oakland; Béchir Sylvain; and Taylor Talley.
Rose remembers the first time she saw the church at the campus. “There was this beautiful organ on the upper level, and the stained glass windows on all sides. The architecture was phenomenal,” Rose said. “All this light was coming through the stained glass. It looked like magic in there.”
She worked with, singer, songwriter, and composer Jon Batiste and producer Ernest Dion Wilson, known as No I.D., to create original music for the film.
“There was just a lot of Oakland love, in the cast and crew,” Rose said. “It felt like we were all there for the love of Oakland and the Bay, and seeing filmmaking happen in these spaces.”
“If that campus had not existed, ‘The Listeners’ would not exist. Not in the way it came to be,” she said.
Permits were pulled to turn the campus into housing
Around the same time that Rose and her crew were filming “The Listeners” at the campus, in February of this year, BH Properties filed an application with the city’s planning department to redevelop the entire campus. The application says the plan would be to demolish 14 existing structures and build 165 new housing units while preserving the chapel, belltower, and performing arts center.
“This is a particularly compelling location, and we believe that homes of this type can be delivered in the near term,” Jim Brooks, president of BH Properties, said in a statement to The San Francisco Chronicle in January.
On Aug. 5, BH Properties followed up by filing a Zoning Worksheet, a document to verify that the proposed redevelopment complies with all of the local zoning codes; that document is not yet publicly available.
According to Cardenas, the housing redevelopment is just “one direction” for the site.
“The housing project is one way that BH Properties is reimagining this campus,” he said. “I believe though that if we get the right people in here, BH is always open to new ideas. And while it may have one idea that it’s moving forward with, it’s not to say that if a big filmmaker or company came in here and wanted to turn this into a film studio, I would say all ideas are on the table. Nothing is final until it’s actually final.”
Cardenas said the site has also served as a training facility for several Hayward Police Department specialized teams, as well as for the Oakland Police Department. Neither police department immediately responded to a request for comment.
Cardenas said his and Guerra’s job is to bring in revenue from the site and do right by the community.
“This film initiative hits both ends,” Cardenas said. “I think they love the fact that we are getting these opportunities to bring local filmmakers, art, theater and dance into this campus that are generating some revenue and at the same time, a dent and a positive impact for Oakland culture, too.”
Actors Bechir Sylvain (left) and Vernon Davis with director Joslyn Rose on set at the library of the former Holy Names campus now the Oakland Hills Campus. Credit: courtesy of Giovanni Herrera
Jim Brooks, president of BH Properties told The Oaklandside by email that there is no “timetable set as to when the film initiative would cease to be a strategy.”
“We continue to make progress with filming opportunities and expect to continue that effort for the foreseeable future,” Brooks said. “We have developed very positive momentum through the work of both Daniel and Luis.”
Rose said she’d like to see the site become a permanent film location.
“I would love to see the community and the greater television film industry continue to utilize this space and help it to not only to stay in existence but thrive,” she said, “so that we could also use it as a prototype for what else we could do in Oakland.”
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