Filmmaker Robert Beavers joins us for a complete retrospective of his films, including his eighteen-film cycle, My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (1967–2002), plus the seven films he has released since 2007. His meticulously crafted films have a remarkable lyricism and exquisite beauty.
Inspired by BAMPFA’s recent acquisition of three of Jerry Ross Barrish’s films, this series is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the inspiring accomplishments of one of the Bay Area's local treasures.
Visiting Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus presents her films Fire of Wind (2024) and Barbs, Wastelands (2017), along with two works by the ethnopoetic filmmakers Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis in which she found inspiration.
Gunvor Nelson (1931–2025) was an acclaimed Swedish experimental filmmaker who was based in the Bay Area for nearly four decades. Nelson made personal films that explored her own life and experiences. John Sundholm of Stockholm University will speak about Nelson’s life and work, giving context to these special films.
BAMPFA presents a six-film retrospective of the work of the award-winning Cambodian French filmmaker Rithy Panh. This series dives deep into Panh’s oeuvre to showcase his strikingly brilliant essay films, which blend personal history, archival footage, and even dioramas and animation to investigate national history, cultural memory, and the human capacity to both inflict atrocity and survive it.
BAMPFA is pleased to partner with the Mill Valley Film Festival to present selected screenings from MVFF48 in the Barbro Osher Theater.
Brilliant writer, director, and producer Cheryl Dunye’s carte blanche series offers viewers the opportunity to revisit some of her iconic works, as well as a fascinating selection of recent restorations and archival film prints spanning genres and themes, from B movies to biopics to Blaxploitation.
This city symphony series evokes periods of Shanghai’s history, as depicted in archival newsreels, home movies, documentaries, and fiction films made by Chinese and foreign filmmakers. Chinese film expert Paul Fonoroff joins us to introduce three of the films.
“A slapstick Ingmar Bergman” is how the Village Voice described Swedish director Roy Andersson, while the Washington Post name-dropped Jacques Tati, Monty Python, and even Andrei Tarkovsky to sum up an aesthetic that combines formal rigor with anticapitalist critiques, bizarre human caricatures, and sight gags. This series includes all six of his feature films, along with short films and commercials.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
This year, Alternative Visions includes work from across one hundred years of cinema history—from Sergei Eisenstein’s breathtaking agitprop first feature Strike (1925) to Kahlil Joseph’s time-traveling cinematic encyclopedia BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025).
BAMPFA welcomes director Tsai Ming-liang and actor Lee Kang-sheng to discuss seven of their films, including Vive l’amour; The Hole; Goodbye, Dragon Inn; What Time Is It There?; and Stray Dogs.
The second installment in BAMPFA’s ongoing Swedish Cinema Project offers a lineup of classic films synonymous with the white nights of Swedish summers and the country’s rich tradition of auteur directors, including Roy Andersson, Ingmar Bergman, Gustaf Molander, Alf Sjöberg, and Bo Widerberg.
Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman offers a rare opportunity to see many of Naruse’s great films chronicling the lives of ordinary people—from his 1935 international hit Wife! Be Like a Rose! (the first Japanese talkie to screen in the United States) to his magnificent movies of the 1960s.
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) directed an impressive body of work that continues to be celebrated today for its visual power and poetic resonance. There is no better way to experience Tarkovsky’s cinema than theatrically, since scale and sound design are so essential to his films.
Alive with satire, irony, and rhythm, experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner’s collage films have influenced countless artists and captivated viewers. His work constitutes a wry, devastating portrait of America. These two programs of his short films are drawn from the BAMPFA collection.
Presented in collaboration with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Robert Altman at 100 showcases a selection of his work across five decades, including his 1970s classics The Long Goodbye, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, and later work like Vincent & Theo and Gosford Park.
Inspired by Imogen Sara Smith’s 2011 book, In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, this series focuses on film noirs set in suburbia and small towns, on the road, in the desert, and along borderlands. Smith will travel from New York City to introduce the films on the series’ opening weekend, and we will also tap Bay Area film experts David Thomson and Eddie Muller to host additional screenings.
A celebration of one of the most significant cinematic partnerships of the twentieth century, Love Streams, Gena Rowlands & John Cassavetes, focuses on Gena Rowlands’s performances in six groundbreaking independent films written and directed by John Cassavetes, her husband of thirty-five years.
BAMPFA is proud to partner with the SFFILM Festival, an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and a major cultural event in the Bay Area.
Presented in conjunction with the symposium Media and Migration in a Digital Age, and the Mosse Lecture series, these films represent innovative cinematic approaches to depicting the histories, causes, and effects of global migration while serving as creative counterpoints to negative mass media depictions of migrant communities.
From lyrical to epic genres, from the deep social conflicts to the joy of liberty, this program expresses the character of the Ukrainian people, who continue to resist Russian imperialism in the ongoing war.
Todd Haynes will be at BAMPFA to present Safe, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There, and Far From Heaven, launching an extensive retrospective of his films, exceptional explorations of identity in relation to self and society, and the danger and power of resisting or transgressing social norms.
BAMPFA’s ongoing collaboration with the African Film Festival in New York affords the opportunity to screen an array of contemporary and classic films depicting the diverse experiences of Africans on the continent and around the world.
A centennial year celebration of the films of Mai Zetterling (1925–1994), the Swedish-born actor-turned-director, featuring some of her best screen roles and the short films, documentaries, and features that earned her a reputation as a director interested in psychological treatments and sexual candor. With guest presenters Linda Haverty Rugg and Anna Stenport.
BAMPFA’s annual selection of compelling nonfiction films includes the award-winning Palestinian/Israeli documentary No Other Land, as well as films by Dana Claxton, Kevin Jerome Everson, Asmae El Moudir, and Ibrahim Nash’at. With Sergei Loznitsa, Rick Prelinger, Jenni Olson, Elizabeth Ai, Pinar Öğrenci, and Sylvain George in person.
Drawing on a variety of documentary techniques, these four recent films ambitiously reckon with climate change through their multifaceted subjects. Each program includes a post-screening discussion.
We welcome the celebrated Ukrainian director of Belarusian origin Sergei Loznitsa for a ten-day residency, during which time he will speak about his work in documentary, feature filmmaking, and short form.
Butch Dykes, Trans Men, and Gender Nonconforming Heroes in Cinema
January 17–February 23, 2025Last year’s wildly popular Masc film series returns with a fresh new installment, offering an opportunity to experience several rarely seen AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) masc movies from around the world. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye joins us in person for a rare screening of Stranger Inside (2001).
Bookended by John Ford’s The Searchers and Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit (Searchers), the mythic, elemental, and spiritual significance of landscape provides a throughline in this diverse selection of Westerns, including films made by Robert Altman, Charles Burnett, Jane Campion, Kevin Jerome Everson, Sidney Poitier, Kelly Reichardt, Glauber Rocha, and Quentin Tarantino.
BAMPFA’s movie matinees are a wonderful way to introduce young people to the joys of the big-screen cinematic experience—and for all of us to rediscover the pleasures of Saturday afternoon at the movies.
BAMPFA’s movie matinees are a wonderful way to introduce young people to the joys of the big-screen cinematic experience—and for all of us to rediscover the pleasures of Saturday afternoon at the movies.
Born one hundred years ago, Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni appeared in over 170 films, from comedies to Modernist masterpieces. Just how much he meant to the cinema is attested to in these films, where Mastroianni defines the screen actor’s art and our joy in it.
Three programs offer insight into some of the artists whose work is currently on view at BAMPFA. The program includes films about or made by Bruce Conner, Imogen Cunningham, Jay DeFeo, Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, and Chiura Obata.
A selection of the films G. W. Pabst is best known for, made during the Weimar Republic, plus two French productions from the 1930s. Featuring several restored films plus live piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg for all of the silent films.
One of the world’s foremost filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, joins us for a weeklong residency during which he will engage in conversations with leading experts about his distinctive body of work, which reflects sweeping cultural and economic change in China since the late 1990s.
This is a centennial tribute to the legendary Armenian poet-filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, who worked across transnational boundaries and struggled against the Soviet authorities, who banned and censored his films. A one-day symposium on November 2 will bring scholars and experts to Berkeley to speak about Parajanov’s life and work.
Through captivating storytelling, this series celebrates the resilience of independent Cuban cinema and the enduring legacy of trailblazers like Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Explore themes of exile, motherhood, and nationhood in a formally stunning collection of fiction, documentary, and experimental films that reflect on Cuban lives and imaginaries in the island and its diasporas.
Film collector and former television personality Paul Fonoroff returns to BAMPFA with a program that draws from the golden age of Hong Kong cinema from the 1980s and 1990s.
BAMPFA is pleased to partner with the Mill Valley Film Festival to present selected screenings from MVFF47 in the Barbro Osher Theater.
Explicit, beautiful, and visceral, Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy comprises a unique ensemble portrait of queer Los Angeles youth navigating 1990s nihilism amidst the fallout from the Reagan/Bush era, the culture wars, and the mounting death toll from AIDS.
A chance to see works by four pioneering directors of the silent era: Alice Guy-Blaché, Louis Feuillade, Cecil B. DeMille, and Lois Weber. Professor Anne Nesbet will give short lectures for the film programs on September 18 and 25, both of which are presented with live piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg. Also screening is Pamela B. Green’s 2018 documentary on Guy-Blaché, which helps reclaim her place in film history.
Alternative Visions features new restorations of great films by Man Ray and Nicolás Guillén Landrián, classic works on film by Pat O’Neill, and artists in person, including Shu Lea Cheang, Charif Kiwan, Lewis Klahr, Jennifer Reeves, Scott Stark, and Amanda Strong.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
From Chinatown to La La Land to restored independent films, this series considers a diverse selection of works that foreground the history, architecture, and neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Special guests include May HaDuong, Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Los Angeles–based Italian journalist Luca Celeda.
BAMPFA is honored to present a retrospective of Lynne Ramsay's extraordinary films this August.
This is a series of films roiling with unruly energy and feminist fury from Věra Chytilová, “one of the Czech New Wave’s most rebellious, irreverent and boundary-breaking talents” (Sight & Sound).
One of the great directors of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, Hiroshi Shimizu depicts the struggles of people on the margins with a light touch, avoiding melodrama and inflecting even the most serious stories with humor and profound humanity.
BAMPFA celebrates the legacy of composer Ennio Morricone (1928–2020) with a series of films he scored for great Italian directors, including Marco Bellocchio, Liliana Cavani, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Lina Wertmüller.
From The Maltese Falcon (1941) to The Killing (1956), BAMPFA’s series offers viewers a chance to see many archival 35mm prints and digital restorations of film noir masterpieces and revel in the plot twists of these vastly entertaining and suspenseful mysteries, melodramas, and crime thrillers.
All of Hayao Miyazaki’s feature films—environmental allegories, fantasy epics, and intimate family adventures—populated by a bestiary of snarling, grotesque demons and cute, cuddly sprites (appearances can be deceiving) are presented here in their original Japanese versions.
This summer, BAMPFA showcases many of Les Blank’s films in recent digital restorations. We also host filmmakers who collaborated with Blank, as well as several individuals who were subjects in his films.
BAMPFA is an official partner of the 67th San Francisco International Film Festival presented by SFFILM.
A towering figure of world cinema, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) had a long and wonderfully productive career as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. This series provides an opportunity to view many of her major accomplishments. Varda’s short films, showcased here in two programs, are a must-see to gain a full appreciation of her bold and creative approach to filmmaking.
Impressed with the wealth of great Mexican movies in the last decade, we asked filmmaker Nicolás Pereda to select some of his favorites, along with a program of his own short films, to screen at BAMPFA this spring.
Barry Jenkins presents his brilliant adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning magnum opus in person at BAMPFA this March. In this essential reckoning with America’s history of slavery and white supremacy, Jenkins renders Whitehead’s uncanny, antebellum American South with profound sensitivity and exquisite artistry.
We welcome film historian David Thomson back to BAMPFA for this lecture/screening series following the publication of his new book, The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film. Thomson offers a lecture before each film and leads the post-screening discussions.
A centennial tribute featuring new digital restorations and rare 35mm prints in honor of the great filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whose cinema is about Senegal coming into its own as a nation. Rebellious and committed, Sembène paved the way for generations of African filmmakers.
Tell No Lies explores the birth of African cinema through a selection of diverse films on the liberation struggles of the former Portuguese colonies of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, as well as contemporary films that continue to consider the legacy of colonialism.
Replete with new restorations, Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories offers the opportunity to see all seven of the director’s brilliantly constructed, emotionally resonant films—cornerstones of the Taiwanese New Wave with enduring universal appeal.
BAMPFA presents three nights of work by Los Angeles–based Cauleen Smith, including two programs of rarely shown short films and a screening of her seminal, recently restored feature Drylongso.
Our annual series features an international array of recent and historical documentaries and nonfiction films.
BAMPFA presents the Bay Area premiere of the recently completed restoration of Bushman (US, 1971), directed by Bay Area independent filmmaker David Schickele (1937–1999).We will be joined by special guests, including Schickele’s family, who have been instrumental to the preservation of Bushman, as well as original members of the cast and crew and the preservation team.
Bringing together Skip Norman’s work as a cinematographer and a filmmaker, from his collaborations with his DFFB cohort to films made in the United States, Skip Norman Here and There is a rare opportunity to reconsider the work of a groundbreaking Black filmmaker.
Lecture & Screening Series
January 24–February 28, 2024This lecture & screening series focuses on six nonfiction works spanning Werner Herzog’s iconoclastic career. We are delighted to welcome film critic and journalist Michael Fox, who will offer a short lecture before each film and lead the post-screening discussions.
Masc is a cinematic celebration giving recognition and dignity to the courageous queer, gender nonconforming visionaries who have blazed these trails and who continue to show the way forward and inspire us all.
One of Japan's greatest filmmakers, Yasujiro Ozu was born in 1903 and died in 1963. To mark the 120th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death, archives around the world are celebrating his work. BAMPFA presents a selected retrospective spanning the course of the director’s career from the silent era to his six crowning films made in color.
A major retrospective of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, which launched in November 2023, continues through February 2024. Herzog’s great facility for storytelling and his fascination with eccentric characters, whose lives and endeavors he observes, allow him to illuminate the human condition in his narrative and nonfiction films.
Three recent feature films and two historical short films provide in-depth, intimate access to the creative process of painters Peter Bradley and Mike Henderson, sculptor Brian Wall, and traditional Japanese wood-carver Master Seki Koun, as well as a number of his apprentices.
We are delighted to welcome the Hong Kong film scholar Paul Fonoroff back to BAMPFA with a series highlighting Mandarin-language musicals from 1957 to 1963, during the genre’s postwar rebirth.
BAMPFA is pleased to partner with the Mill Valley Film Festival to present selected screenings from MVFF46 in the Barbro Osher Theater.
This year’s edition of the African Film Festival invites audiences to learn from and bear witness to the stories, visions, and histories of people across Africa and the African diaspora, whether through moments of the past that still mark our present day or through the events and struggles that color and define our current lives.
Celebrated Yugoslav filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, who, since the 1960s, has been at the forefront of politically engaged cinema in Europe, joins us in person for two programs of his docu-fiction films.
This series focuses on the especially challenging situation of film preservation in Cambodia, a country whose cultural heritage was ravaged by the Pol Pot regime of genocide and destruction in the 1970s. Thanks to the efforts of filmmaker Rithy Panh, who cofounded the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in 2005, there is a sense of renewal and important work being done by archivists, industry professionals, and young filmmakers documenting Cambodian life today and telling individuals’ stories.
This September BAMPFA is honored to welcome award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter to discuss her work and career and to present her documentaries Gideon’s Army (2013) and The Lady Bird Diaries (2023).
Local filmmaker Jerome Hiler presents two programs of his “formally and visually astonishing” experimental films, along with his two features reflecting his passion for music and medieval stained glass.
BAMPFA welcomes Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi (born 1981 in Tbilisi) for her first visit to the Bay Area with this retrospective of her films, for which she serves as both director and cinematographer. Working in the terrain of nonfiction, she uses film’s creative power as a vehicle for her nuanced social and political critique. Jashi’s films (including Taming the Garden, The Dazzling Light of Sunset, and Bakhmaro) have a beautiful visual quality, distinguished by her striking frame compositions, sense of color, and decision to film on location in different regions of Georgia.
Our annual showcase of historical and current experimental film includes presentations by filmmakers including Peggy Ahwesh, Ernie Gehr, Jacqueline Goss, and Lindsay McIntyre, plus an exciting array of short films and guest-curated programs.
It would not be possible for BAMPFA to showcase many essential films from the history of cinema without the stellar work of Rialto Pictures, a boutique distributor based in New York. This salute features digital restorations of many landmark films, including two by Jean-Luc Godard, Contempt and Alphaville; two French thrillers, Army of Shadows and Le cercle rouge, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville; two Italian classics starring Alberto Sordi, Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik and Dino Risi’s Una vita difficile; Carol Reed’s exceptional The Third Man; a masterpiece from postrevolutionary Iran, The Runner; and Akira Kurosawa’s stunning film adaption of King Lear, the monumental Ran.
We welcome the coauthors of the recently published Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation, Bill Kinder and Bobbie O’Steen, as our guests for this series that showcases an impressive lineup of feature-length animated films. Made since 1999, these films benefit from methodologies of storytelling developed during the digital era. Kinder and O’Steen offer insights into every stage of production on an animated film, from storyboards to virtual cameras and final animation.
Bring a blanket or lawn chair to BAMPFA’s huge outdoor LED screen for three free screenings.
Look again at the hilarious, utterly idiosyncratic films of writer-director Preston Sturges, and discover what makes them classic comedies—and something more than comedies. Author and film critic Stuart Klawans joins us in person for three screenings and a book signing.
Presenting prints from the BAMPFA collection, this series highlights the work of Yuliya Solntseva, as both an actress and a director, including collaborations with her husband, the Ukranian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko.
From the eye slice in his revolutionary collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un chien Andalou, to the explosive finale of his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, this retrospective offers the opportunity to see films from throughout Luis Buñuel’s career.
Take a cinematic tour of Tokyo’s gritty working-class district, Shitamachi, with classic and contemporary films by Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kinuyo Tanaka, and others, including many compelling but lesser-known works.
Coproduced by Cinecittà, Rome, and featuring new restorations, Claudia Cardinale Once Upon a Time focuses on her great performances from the late 1950s through the 1960s in films imbued with an intelligence and depth that surpass the confines of the scripted characters.
This series pays tribute to the breadth of cinematic expression that Tom Luddy—the celebrated film producer, curator, and festival director who led BAMPFA’s film program during its formative years—helped introduce to Bay Area filmgoers, including many of his known favorites and several films that he helped produce.
BAMPFA is proud to partner with the SFFILM Festival, an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and a major cultural event in the Bay Area.
We are honored to collaborate with Ukraine’s Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center on this series celebrating “Odessa’s uncompromising eccentric” (Jane Taubman), with guest curator Stanislav Menzelevskyi introducing three screenings.
We are delighted to welcome Kelly Reichardt, the very first guest in BAMPFA’s long-running Afterimage series in 2009, back to present her most recent film, Showing Up, and to launch a spotlight series of three more films that she has released in the intervening years.
Filmmaker Billy Woodberry presents two nights of his moving-image work and the annual Les Blank Lecture on documentary film.
Filmmakers respond to Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel—for Oriana, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz sets her film in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, while Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames takes place in New York after a “social-democratic war of liberation.” With shorts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Mouth to Mouth) and Vivienne Dick (Staten Island).
Filmmaker Lizzie Borden presents her New York Feminisms Trilogy: Regrouping, Born in Flames, and Working Girls.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul presents several programs and the Townsend Center for the Humanities’s Una’s Lecture during this retrospective of the artist’s haunting, beautiful, and resonant works.
South African artist William Kentridge’s work in animation and live action film is a central element of his interdisciplinary approach. Featured here are many of his short works, including the film cycle Drawings for Projection (1989–2020) and several filmed versions of his staged operas, notably Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose and Alban Berg’s Lulu.
Pioneers of Queer Cinema celebrates the groundbreaking achievements born from visionary queer filmmakers, ranging from landmark to little-known works.
The completion of Parmar’s new documentary, My Name Is Andrea, an essential and timely corrective to the historical record concerning the late writer and activist Andrea Dworkin, provides a welcome opportunity to invite Parmar to share her work at BAMPFA.
“Hong Sangsoo’s films seize the material of everyday life in the service of exploring psychology and metaphysics in elegant, subtly profound ways” (Lincoln Center) as revealed in three double-bills and a recent film.
Our annual series features an international array of recent and historical documentaries and nonfiction films.
This carte blanche series provides the very special opportunity to see eight films selected by Joel Coen, four films of his own making and four films he admires.
Over the course of the six decades since the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), filmmakers have reacted to the history of this revolutionary period with powerful responses and insightful perspectives. This selection of films deal with the backstory and history of the Algerian War of Independence from a variety of perspectives.
Three programs of 16mm ephemeral films from the BAMPFA collection—one of place, one of poetry, and one of play—ask us to pause and listen for quiet rhythms, to look closer at what is in front of us, and to celebrate the moment.
A series of stark, scathing, and playful films from the former socialist republics of Eastern Europe, where absurdity was a fact of life under authoritarian rule—and a source of cinematic creativity.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
To celebrate the publication of William Carroll’s recent book Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, BAMPFA is delighted to participate in a tour, organized by the author, of imported 35mm prints of films spanning several decades of Suzuki’s brilliant and varied career.
Keaton’s ingenious gags and stunts in his silent two-reelers and features confirm his timeless appeal as a commentator on the human condition who was drawn to the dreamlike and the all-too-real.
This small series features new restorations of works by three filmmakers from Lebanon who bear witness to its difficult history: Borhane Alaouié, Jocelyne Saab, and Heiny Srour.
Among the treasured special collections within our film archive are the rare and distinctive holdings of Georgian cinema produced during the Soviet era and since the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This series features works by leading Georgian auteurs.
This retrospective of the influential Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) features 35mm restorations, many done by Cineteca di Bologna in partnership with Cinecittà.
BAMPFA is pleased to partner with the Mill Valley Film Festival to present selected screenings from MVFF45 in the Barbro Osher Theater.
Presented in conjunction with the Townsend Center’s In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics, these films show how three contemporary Chinese filmmakers—Chan Tze Woon, Li Dongmei, and Luo Li—use inventive and subtle techniques to approach themes of family, memory, change, and resistance.
This fall BAMPFA is honored to have Rithy Panh present two of his recent films in person, his haunting and personal investigation into the Cambodian genocide, The Missing Picture, and Irradiated, an exploration of the man made cataclysms and atrocities of the twentieth century.
Highly regarded as a comedian, screenwriter, playwright, and actress, Elaine May had a more tempestuous ride as a film director—often at odds with the Hollywood studio executives. Her films are championed by many for their ironic humor, sense of spontaneity, authenticity, and experimentation with form.
Including historical and contemporary documentaries, essay films, and works of fiction, this series reflects on the inherent racism and inhumanity of the prison industrial complex while celebrating courageous voices and acts of resistance from inside and outside of prison walls.
This year our annual series showcases current and historical experimental films by local filmmakers, as well as works by artists from Brazil, Canada, Iran, Poland, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom.
After two years of pandemic-related cancellations or virtual screenings, we are proud to welcome the African Film Festival back to BAMPFA. This year, open your eyes to new horizons, new heroes, and new narratives.
Bring a blanket or lawn chair to BAMPFA’s huge outdoor LED screen for three free screenings.
Ten essential films from Samuel Fuller’s influential oeuvre confront prejudice and inequity head-on, chronicling the grit, resilience, and soulful struggle of misfits, foot soldiers, petty criminals, detectives, and reporters surviving in the face of moral misgivings or psychological trauma.
Celebrated for her performances in films by iconic directors, Tanaka also made a significant contribution to the golden age of Japanese cinema as a director. This series features new restorations of all six of Tanaka’s films, along with works representative of the scope of her acting career.
A selection of films in which a dance scene crystallizes the experience of the movie, a moment leaving its imprint more than the plotline or even the characters.
This series showcases an impressive range of world cinema that has been preserved thanks to a concerted effort by The Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project over more than thirty years.
“Since my first film I have attempted in a very deliberate and stubborn way to portray women capable of making independent decisions,” wrote acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros, who at age ninety is the subject of this major retrospective featuring new digital restorations of her films.
BAMPFA is proud to partner with the SFFILM Festival, an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and a major cultural event in the Bay Area.
An overdue tribute to one of the giants of world cinema, Malian director Souleymane Cissé, a former projectionist, jailed dissident, and fiercely antiauthoritarian, proudly African filmmaker whose work includes Brightness, The Wind, Baara, and The Young Girl.
From defining Asian American identity on-screen in Chan Is Missing and The Joy Luck Club to adapting the writing of Paul Auster and working with Jennifer Lopez, Wayne Wang is a filmmaking original. This series features new restorations of his work.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
A collection of narrative and documentary works on artists, writers, and ordinary citizens in China, presented in conjunction with the Townsend Center’s In Dialogue with China: Art, Culture, Politics.
Romantic. Elegant. Fantastical. We welcome back to the BAMPFA screen one of the greats, Federico Fellini, a “larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique” (Criterion).
In our first series to explore the breadth of Indigenous media currently being made in the Americas, we place works in relation to one another across geographies and stylistic approaches, with filmmakers from South and North America in conversation.
We are delighted to present eight recent additions to our film collection: new silent 16mm films by local filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, most made during the COVID-19 pandemic, photographed in San Francisco across different seasons.
In this hybrid series, shown in-theater and via BAMPFA’s streaming platform, we interview filmmakers who specialize in animation and ask them to discuss how they develop their stylistic approaches, and how they distill time, gesture, and mood, frame by frame, into the basic unit of animation.
In this hybrid series, shown in-theater and via BAMPFA’s streaming platform, we interview filmmakers who specialize in animation and ask them to discuss how they develop their stylistic approaches, and how they distill time, gesture, and mood, frame by frame, into the basic unit of animation.
Our annual series features an international array of recent and historical documentaries and nonfiction films.
Djibril Diop Mambéty’s debut, Touki Bouki, was “unlike anything in the history of African cinema” (N. Frank Ukadike). Made nearly twenty years later, Hyenas and Le franc likewise showcase “his signature mix of wild narrative style” and “impeccable political commitment,” which, along with The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, championed Senegalese outsiders (Greg Thomas).
Barbara Stanwyck was the screen archetype of the independent woman, with her wits about her, alert, and often on the make. This spotlight showcases many of her best roles and demonstrates her remarkable talent.
This series, featuring the lyrical cinema of one of the most admired and influential directors of the silent era, F. W. Murnau, showcases restored versions of his extant work with live piano accompaniment.
Fifty years after the founding of American Zoetrope, we celebrate the studio and its co-creator, Francis Ford Coppola. Along with Coppola’s works, the series features films by George Lucas, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and more.
Now that we are back in the Barbro Osher Theater, we want to share some highlights from the past year of virtual cinema as an affirmation of the importance of seeing films on the big screen and with an audience.
The celebrated French author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras is the focus of this trio of works, including the Bay Area premiere of Suzanna Andler. Also featured are Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and a new restoration of Le navire Night.
Walter Murch, whose accomplishments have earned him respect and praise as “the film editor’s editor” and “a sound and image guru,” is our guest for Afterimage, sharing his wisdom on editing and sound design in three in-depth conversations.
Dedicated to a pillar of the Bay Area film scene, film critic, curator, and educator Albert Johnson (1925–1998) the films in this series gesture toward the breadth of his interests and provide a welcome opportunity to celebrate his brilliant legacy.
Conceived in dialog with BAMPFA’s major exhibition New Time, The Future Is Feminist brings together a diverse range of works made since 2000 by women filmmakers representing an array of feminist voices and aesthetics, variously observational, confrontational, collaborative, analytical, or poetic.
One of film’s most talented cinematographers, Kazuo Miyagawa worked with many of the great Japanese directors, including Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Kon Ichikawa, and Masahiro Shinoda, all represented in this series, which foregrounds his artistry on the big screen.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
BAMPFA is pleased to partner with the Mill Valley Film Festival to present selected screenings from MVFF44 in the Barbro Osher Theater.
If you would like to watch a film from BAMPFA’s rotating selection of streaming films, you can learn how to get started with these helpful tutorials.
Our annual showcase Alternative Visions continues with 1990s Japanese experimental films by women, with guest curators Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas in conversation. Collage animator Janie Geiser also presents a program of her recent films, created from a haunting array of visual and auditory fragments.
This summer BAMPFA is thrilled to partner with the Downtown Berkeley Association to present three inspiring documentaries on our outdoor screen, welcoming audiences back to the museum to celebrate the vision of artists and activists, from the Bay Area and beyond.
Indian filmmaker and writer Amit Dutta has created his own distinctive cinema through deep explorations of India’s artistic, literary, and cultural traditions. We present the premiere of a portrait of Krishna Baldev Vaid, along with other recent work and the landmark Nainsukh.
Shot on location in various regions of France in the 1990s, when Éric Rohmer was at the height of his powers, this four-film cycle probes the psychological and philosophical mysteries of love—elusive, imagined, or manifest.
Highlighting works from BAMPFA collections, we celebrate the publication of two new books: Serene for the Moment: Sara Kathryn Arledge, edited by Irene Georgia Tsatsos; and Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image, by Steve Seid.
Our tribute to the towering Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who died a year ago, features some of his great work with Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, The Passion of Anna), Jan Troell (The Emigrants), and Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror), among others. Distinguished guest presenters in pre-recorded conversations will include Liv Ullmann, Jan Troell, and UC Berkeley’s very own professor Linda H. Rugg.
In conjunction with Film Quarterly, we present recent films from the flourishing Brazilian cinema scene, highlighting works by Black, Indigenous, and queer filmmakers.
Our annual series highlights recent international documentary films that bring a critical eye and ear, as well as an artistic vision, to questions about history and contemporary life. Conversations with filmmakers complement the programs.
Limited Streaming Engagements
January 1–October 10, 2021Enjoy newly released films and restored classics selected by our curators, now available in your own home.
This streaming retrospective features recent 4K restorations of films by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, works of exquisite beauty, narrative complexity, and sublime emotion.
This installment in our ongoing series of free films for members travels from a struggling cinematheque in Uruguay to the streets of Tbilisi and the steppes of Kyrgyzstan.
German artist Ulrike Ottinger’s cinematic work encompasses ethnography, history, and fantasy. “Watching her films is like traveling through an undiscovered country of marvels” (Village Voice).
Three recent documentaries chronicle the achievements and challenges of exceptional women working in science and technology. Livestreamed talks with women in STEM complement the films.
The fall installment in our members-only free streaming series features three programs by Shirley Clarke, one of American cinema’s true independents.
This fall our ongoing series Documentary Voices returns to BAMPFA’s Barbro Osher Theater with a selection of classic and contemporary nonfiction films that bring history to light in a variety of engaging and inventive ways.
The films in this miniseries reflect on the experiences of people living in transit, from African and Middle Eastern refugees trying to reach Europe to Latin American and Asian immigrants in the United States. Several filmmakers will join us online to discuss their work.
Discover the vital history and vibrant present of experimental filmmaking in Latin America with three programs of short works, introduced by curator and author Jesse Lerner and complemented by livestreamed conversations with filmmakers.
Our annual experimental cinema showcase moves online this year with streaming programs of contemporary and historical avant-garde works and special guest presentations on handmade film, Latin American animation, and more.
A four-film sampler of twenty-first-century Romanian cinema: Cristi Puiu’s slacker thriller Stuff and Dough, Radu Muntean’s chronicle of revolutionary chaos The Paper Will Be Blue, Alexandru Solomon’s sardonic meta-movie The Great Communist Bank Robbery, and Lucian Pintilie’s family tragicomedy Niki and Flo.
Three documentaries by boundary-breaking filmmaker Madeline Anderson—Integration Report 1, A Tribute to Malcolm X, and I Am Somebody—deliver on-the-ground reports from the front lines of the civil rights movement and the labor struggles of the sixties.
In Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button, and The Cordillera of Dreams, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán explores his country’s traumatic history through cinematic meditations on landscape, geography, and time.
We’re grateful to our members for standing with BAMPFA during our temporary closure. To show our appreciation, we’re offering a series of free streaming films just for members.
Now available for streaming, three award-winning, recently restored films by Hungarian master István Szabó: Confidence, Mephisto, and Colonel Redl, parables of life under political oppression and individual morality in the face of momentous events.
In conjunction with a Cal Performances appearance by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, we feature films about, by, and influenced by Bausch, whose work transformed the visual and emotional vocabulary of dance.
Limited Streaming Engagements
April 17–December 31, 2020Enjoy newly released films and restored classics selected by our curators, now available in your own home.
A series of stark, scathing, and playful films from the former socialist republics of Eastern Europe, where absurdity was a fact of life under authoritarian rule—and a source of cinematic creativity.
BAMPFA welcomes filmmakers Pia Borg and Caroline Leaf and hosts a special lecture by Simón Wilches-Castro on Latin American animation, all part of the fifth annual GLAS Animation Festival.
BAMPFA is honored to host one of the giants of African cinema, Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, who presents three of his films and is joined in conversation by Nigerian writer and scholar Akin Adesokan.
In conjunction with the MATRIX exhibition of her photographs, Ulrike Ottinger returns to BAMPFA for a series of her films, which encompass ethnography, history, and fantasy. “Watching her films is like traveling through an undiscovered country of marvels” (Village Voice).
Fifty years after the founding of American Zoetrope, we celebrate the studio and its co-creator, Francis Ford Coppola. Along with Coppola’s works, the series features films by George Lucas, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and more.
This year’s edition of the African Film Festival welcomes new voices and veteran filmmakers from both the African continent and the diaspora, spotlighting stories, communities, and struggles rarely seen in Western cinema.
Our annual series showcases an international array of recent and historical nonfiction films.
Lecture/Screening Series
January 29–April 1, 2020Explore Federico Fellini’s work in depth with this lecture/screening series complementing our Fellini retrospective.
A centennial celebration of one of the greats of international art cinema, a master of memory, dreams, fantasy, and desire.
Lang’s late-period two-part epic is a fantasia of flamboyant set pieces and exotic colors shown off to full effect in this recent restoration.
A retrospective of David Lynch’s big-screen work—a journey into a universe both banal and bizarre, incomparably strange and unsettlingly familiar.
Vive la Varda! We pay tribute to a founding mother of the French New Wave, who died at age ninety in 2019—an inspiring and vital artist to the end.
Film critic and historian J. Hoberman presents two films and offers his insights on the intersection between politics and pop culture in Ronald Reagan’s America.
Thirty years after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, this series samples the best in Romanian cinema from the last three decades.
Encounter uncanny landscapes, enigmatic characters, and other mysteries and wonders in these screenings presented in conjunction with the exhibition Strange.
Lecture/Screening Series
November 6–10, 2019Film archivist Peter Bagrov joins us to share his deep expertise on Soviet cinema with this series of silent classics and rarities from the BAMPFA collection.
Revel in the modernist comedy of Jacques Tati—both his slapstick exploits as Monsieur Hulot and his astonishing talent behind the camera.
BAMPFA is pleased to partner with the Mill Valley Film Festival to present selected screenings from MVFF42 in the Barbro Osher Theater.
Anchored by new restorations from the China Film Archive, this series explores the extraordinary career of Zheng Junli, an actor, director, film theorist, and victim of the Cultural Revolution.
Lecture/Screening Series
October 2–23, 2019Film historian David Thomson expands on our British New Wave retrospective with a series of four illuminating presentations on the writers, directors, and actors of sixties Britain.
Look back at 1950s and ’60s British cinema and rediscover the England of Angry Young Men and working-class heroes, boundary-crossing writing and innovative direction, and electrifying acting by the likes of Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Julie Christie.
In his lucid and provocative video essays, Marlon Riggs grappled with African American culture, representation, and identity. This retrospective presents all of his films, in dialogue with works by other filmmakers.
Drawn from the BAMPFA collection, three programs of films by and about Native Americans explore geographical belonging and dislocation, political and social action, and questions of representation.
The Berkeley Film Foundation is an essential lifeline for East Bay filmmakers. We celebrate BFF’s tenth anniversary with a diverse selection of films—many with makers in person—including two free screenings on BAMPFA’s outdoor screen.
Our annual series of avant-garde and artist-made films returns with a stellar roster of in-person guests, as well as programs of strange and wonderful surrealist works from around the world.
Back by popular demand! Sergei Bondarchuk’s Academy Award–winning adaptation of Tolstoy’s revered novel was hailed by Roger Ebert as “the definitive epic of all time”; it demands to be seen on the big screen.
Lecture/Screening Series
August 28–September 25, 2019Complementing our Abbas Kiarostami retrospective, special guest lecturers offer varied perspectives on the great Iranian director’s work.
Iran’s most influential director, Kiarostami made films that blended fiction and documentary, minimalism and spontaneity, poetic vision and humanist spirit. We present a near-complete retrospective of his work.
A rare chance to see 35mm prints of films by a key figure in mid-twentieth-century Japanese cinema, including his masterwork, the three-part antiwar epic The Human Condition.
Showcasing the artistic visions of female cinematographers around the world, this series asks whether there is such a thing as a “female gaze.”
This series surveys the career of a French New Wave icon, from his youthful roles as François Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel to his embodiment of a dying Louis XIV.
This lineup of Lang’s films made and set in the United States amounts to a noir tour of the psychosocial landscape of twentieth-century America, a land of systemic corruption, thwarted aspiration, and frustrated desire.
Active in the 1970s, the Bay Area–based political film collective Cine Manifest is little known today, but their works still speak to our own troubled times. Former members join us to reminisce and present their works in person.
Three free events on our outdoor screen take the rock 'n' roll music to the streets.
Rock ’n’ roll is the soundtrack to summer at BAMPFA as we celebrate the roots and resonance of rock in cinema. Three free events on our outdoor screen take the music to the streets.
An intriguing new documentary on Welles’s multifaceted creative career is the inspiration for this series revisiting several of his landmark films.
From raucous music-hall comedy to tough urban noir, this selection of digitally restored works showcases the range and artistry of a master craftsman of midcentury Mexican cinema.
Sergei Bondarchuk’s Academy Award–winning adaptation of Tolstoy’s revered novel, following good-hearted Pierre, battle-scarred Andrei, and tempestuous Natasha through the tumult of the Napoleonic Wars, was hailed by Roger Ebert as “the definitive epic of all time”; it demands to be seen on the big screen. Part I moves between ballroom and battlefield, hinging on the disastrous Battle of Austerlitz.
Missed a screening in our recent In Focus series devoted to Kore-eda, or want to revisit a favorite film? Here’s a second chance to explore the acclaimed Japanese director’s work.
Three films from a leading figure in Tibet’s emergent cinema, whose works have received acclaim worldwide and brought both the cultural vibrancy and the social concerns of contemporary Tibet to a global audience.
BAMPFA is proud to partner with the San Francisco International Film Festival, an annual global showcase of cinematic discovery and a major cultural event in the Bay Area.
Two programs from the GLAS Animation Festival showcase short works by Dennis Tupicoff and Jim Trainor, with the artists in person.
A tribute to a founding member of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, whose fiery but loving dissections of postcolonial society helped put the Global South on the cinematic map.
Lecture/Screening Series
March 13–April 24, 2019This lecture/screening series is a chance to explore the stylistically restrained yet psychologically probing work of one of the most acclaimed directors working today.
A tribute to an actress who contributed her profound intelligence, professional expertise, and sublime beauty to some of the most memorable films of the twentieth century, including Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.
This year’s edition of the annual festival highlights the best of both new African cinema and films of the black diaspora, including a two-film tribute to the great Bill Gunn.
Inspired by BAMPFA’s Hans Hofmann retrospective, we screen a selection of exceptional films about painters and painting, from Van Gogh to Basquiat, Giotto to Joan Mitchell.
The German filmmaker joins us for a weeklong residency. From fantastical feminist fictions to ethnographic explorations, her films reflect a keen and wide-ranging eye for the marvelous.
Delve into rarely seen educational, ethnographic, and experimental films from the BAMPFA’s collection with The Black Aesthetic.
The celebrated writer and director best known as half of the Merchant Ivory duo visits BAMPFA with early films that offer perspectives on postcolonial India.
We survey the work of the internationally celebrated director whose films depict China’s relentless socioeconomic transformation and the people it leaves behind.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s profoundly humanist films are keenly attuned to the rhythms of life. The director joins us to present her work along with a selection of films she admires.
Our annual series of nonfiction films showcases inventive approaches to the documentary form.
Delve into BAMPFA’s collection of avant-garde film with screenings of work by Frank Stauffacher, Warren Sonbert, and Nathaniel Dorsky, plus programs guest curated by The Black Aesthetic.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
This series showcases 35mm archival prints from BAMPFA’s outstanding Japanese cinema collection, from Mizoguchi to Miyazaki.
Our tribute to this essential director presents his German films alongside other enthralling works of German Expressionist cinema.
A selection of enchanting stop-motion films by a Czech puppeteer with the heart of a poet.
The final installment in our yearlong celebration of the films of Ingmar Bergman features some of his greatest works, including the full-length TV version of his magnum opus, Fanny and Alexander.
The Romanian filmmaker who has been called “one of our great contemporary observers of the human comedy” (Variety) visits BAMPFA to present and discuss his work.
This series showcases new restorations of all four of Vigo’s playful and poetic films, plus rushes and outtakes that illuminate his innovative technique.
Salon Screenings in Theater 2
October 28–November 30, 2018Presented in the intimate setting of BAMPFA’s Theater 2, three of Ingmar Bergman’s late works for television show his abiding interest in themes of desire, spirituality, and mortality.
Born in Poland, educated in Prague, and active internationally, the illustrious director for film and television joins us to discuss her work.
In conjunction with a new book, this series focuses on the radical cinema that emerged from the political and social upheavals of the late sixties.
German film artist Ute Aurand joins us to present her lyrical works alongside shorts by American underground filmmaker Marie Menken and Scottish film poet Margaret Tait.
Critic, collector, and Chinese film expert Paul Fonoroff is our guest for this series of films featuring some of pre-World War II China’s greatest screen stars.
Choreographer Mark Morris selects a series of films that reflect the irrepressible creativity of the late sixties and inspired his dance work Pepperland.
A retrospective of a key artist of the Italian cinema, who combined the profound humanism of neorealism with the drama, beauty, and epic sweep of opera to create films rich in resonance and throbbing with life.
BAMPFA is honored by a visit from Wiseman, whose incisive, wide-ranging explorations of complex institutions have set a standard for nonfiction filmmaking.
This expansive season of our avant-garde showcase extends from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, with many filmmakers and other luminaries in person.
This series focuses on Iran’s Makhmalbaf family of filmmakers—Mohsen; his wife, Marziyeh Meshkini; and their daughters Samira and Hana—whose works offer thoughtful portraits of life on the margins, whether in Tehran, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, or post-Taliban Afghanistan.
This installment in our yearlong centennial tribute to Ingmar Bergman highlights diverse facets of his remarkable cinematic output, from his documentaries about the island of Fårö to his international productions of the 1970s.
Lecture/Screening Series
August 29–November 28, 2018Explore Ingmar Bergman’s work in depth with this series featuring an expert lecture and discussion at each screening.
A tribute to the revered Russian director whose visionary films infuse images of the world with metaphysical mystery.
Championing dreamers and dropouts, political radicals and disaffected youth, Tanner’s films from the late 1960s to the early 1980s feel just as urgent today.
Salon Screenings in Theater 2
July 20–August 19, 2018Enjoy rarely screened works by Ingmar Bergman in an intimate, salon-style setting.
From hardboiled crime sagas to breezy portraits of postwar Parisian life, the films of this classic French director are ripe for rediscovery.
Pay a visit to Kaurismäki’s unique cinematic universe, where melodrama meets minimalism and bitter reality is tempered with deadpan comedy.
This comprehensive retrospective is a rare chance to explore the full range of an Italian modernist master’s formally dazzling work.
This series of family-friendly dance films on our outdoor LED screen will have you moving and grooving all summer!
Bask in the radiance of one of cinema’s greatest stars with this big-screen celebration of Garbo’s subtle skill and timeless allure.
In conjunction with the Berkeley Festival, this series features live musical performances along with films meant to be heard, not just seen.
Our yearlong celebration of Ingmar Bergman’s cinema continues this summer, showcasing films that launched his international reputation in the 1950s.
Bay Area Premiere of Digital Restoration
May 11–13, 2018Fassbinder’s long-unseen television miniseries is “a brilliantly layered chamber drama about an eccentric family and their economic and cultural environment” (Film Comment).
Presented in Collaboration with the Bay Area Book Festival
April 25–29, 2018BAMPFA partners with the Bay Area Book Festival to present films that celebrate, adapt, or creatively reinterpret the written word and its practitioners.
The Argentine director pays a visit to BAMPFA for this retrospective of her atmospheric, compelling films.
Salon Screenings in Theater 2
March 16–May 6, 2018Screenings in Theater 2 invite you to enjoy Ingmar Bergman’s early works in an intimate, salon-style setting.
This annual festival showcases the best of African cinema and films from the diaspora.
This installment in our yearlong tribute to Ingmar Bergman focuses on his metaphysical investigations, as well as his collaboration with actor Max von Sydow.
Self-Portraits of America at War
February 28–April 29, 2018Powerful and innovative documentaries reveal the impact of the Vietnam War on the way Americans perceived themselves.
This major retrospective celebrates one of cinema’s most pioneering and influential figures, whose theory of montage shaped the way films are made and understood.
We begin a yearlong centennial celebration of the great director Ingmar Bergman with a visit from one of his closest collaborators, actress Liv Ullmann.
This rich array of fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works interrogates film as a medium and asks what cinema’s social and cultural role is or could be.
Lecture/Screening Series
January 17–May 2, 2018Explore the work of celebrated Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the context of his times with screenings and lectures by Eisenstein expert Anne Nesbet.
Our annual documentary series spotlights politically engaged works ranging from Colombia to Portugal to the Canadian North.
A talented actress turned groundbreaking director, Lupino left an indelible impression on cinema from both sides of the camera.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
This survey ranges from the subversive experiments of the Soviet era to the surreal, comic, and lyrical works of Polish animators today.
The artist presents works that explore personal memories and political realities in imaginative and inventive ways.
From Tajikistan to Uruguay, Mali to Vietnam, these films offer perspectives on human experience that are both distinctly local and universal.
Revel in cinema as a visual art with this international lineup of celebrated classics and lesser-known discoveries.
Moving effortlessly between genres and languages, this iconic contemporary actress imbues each of her characters with uncommon wit, strength, and grace.
This series focuses on celebrated photographer Gordon Parks’s groundbreaking and powerful work as a filmmaker.
Filmmakers Peter Mettler, Emiko Omori, and Elliot Davis shed light on the distinctive visual language of cinema in this lecture/screening series.
Mettler joins us to discuss his evocative films, which use the imagistic quality of cinema to express metaphysical concerns.
Everson's films examine formal practices and structures of history while chronicling everyday African American life. Author Michael B. Gillespie joins him in conversation.
Films written by Greene or based on his fiction illustrate his famous axiom: “human nature is not black and white but black and grey.”
Rare films imported from the China Film Archive reveal an exceptionally fertile period in the nation’s cinema history.
We pay tribute to the late filmmaker with a selection of her most autobiographical works, which combine formal rigor with empathy and insight.
BAMPFA's avant-garde showcase is a chance to explore the rich history of experimental cinema.
The local documentary maker presents his films reflecting on the power of music and the creative harmonies of our shared world.
This series explores James Baldwin’s encounter with cinema and his contributions to American intellectual life.
A tribute to Canyon’s fifty-year history of providing access to artist-made films and expanding the idea of what cinema can be.
Examining India’s contemporary artists and classical painters, Dutta’s process-oriented films attest to the ardor of art history.
BAMPFA showcases the indelible roles of an actor who transformed male performance on film, from A Streetcar Named Desire to The Godfather.
We celebrate the release of the British writer-director's latest film, a biography of Emily Dickinson, with a selection of his beautifully nuanced works.
A Free Outdoor Festival of Theater on Film
July 29 & August 19, 2017BAMPFA's outdoor screen comes to life this summer with vibrant film adaptations of noted stage productions.
A Free Outdoor Festival of Theater on Film
July 29 & August 19, 2017BAMPFA's outdoor screen comes to life this summer with vibrant film adaptations of noted stage productions. Bring a lawn chair or blanket and enjoy the show!
A Free Outdoor Festival of Theater on Film
July 29 & August 19, 2017BAMPFA's outdoor screen comes to life this summer with vibrant film adaptations of noted stage productions.
Heartfelt melodrama meets candy-colored camp in the Spanish director's tales of women's struggles and solidarity.
Adaptations of tales by Patricia Highsmith, Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and others reveal the dark side of "women's writing."
In films by Akira Kurosawa and others, Mifune showed astonishing vitality and range. We present a dozen of his iconic roles, plus a new documentary.
This retrospective marks the centennial of the great French director whose American-inspired crime films helped set the New Wave in motion.
This summer showcase spans centuries and continents with films from the BAMPFA collection and beyond.
Films that celebrate, adapt, and reinterpret writing and writers, with a stellar lineup of authors, filmmakers, and others in person.
BAMPFA welcomes two distinguished guests from the international film archive community, Alexander Horwath and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.
A tribute to one of the great American independent filmmakers and to the indelible characters he and his actors created.
BAMPFA is proud to be the East Bay venue for this global showcase of cinematic discovery.
The artist presents her contemplative, collaborative works in addition to films by Jean Eustache and Raymond Depardon.
This annual festival draws on the best of African cinema and films from the African diaspora.
Film scholar Jeffrey Skoller offers insights into three of Bresson's films in this lecture/screening series.
A near-complete restrospective of the French director's austere yet compassionate work.
Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa joins us to present and discuss his work, including the award-winning Maidan and his latest, Austerlitz.
Biographical films of composers Lou Harrison (1917–2003) and Isang Yun (1917–1995).
Films that actively participated in emerging counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, presented in conjunction with the exhibiton Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia.
Four evenings with Paraguayan artist, filmmaker, and humanist Paz Encina, who is the UC Regents’ Lecturer of 2017.
The duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created one of the most uncompromising, yet eternally surprising, filmmaking aesthetics in postwar European cinema. Discover the films that inspired Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa, John Gianvito, and others.
A selection of recent and historical documentaries that extend the nonfiction form in provocative ways.
Lecture/Screening Series
January 18–March 1, 2017A seven-week lecture/screening course with film historian David Thomson focusing on Hollywood directors who were at odds with the studio system. Special admission applies.
Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
David and Janet Peoples, Justin Desmangles, and Daniel Clowes present films that inspire them.
The witty, daring, and lavish films of writer-director-producer duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, including the influential Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and A Matter of Life and Death.
Avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers comes to BAMPFA for a weeklong residency to show his own work alongside films that have inspired him.
Spanning several decades and employing radically different cinematic styles, three films revolving around the daily lives of young black men: Do the Right Thing, Killer of Sheep, Fruitvale Station.
The films of Committed Cinema guest Alanis Obomsawin reveal the effects of colonialist history and destructive government policy on indigenous Canadians and show the power of resistance in First Nations communities.
Peter Carroll introduces The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War in conjunction with other UC Berkeley campus events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.
Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation
October 12–15, 2016Filmmaker Ken Jacobs visits from New York to present a Nervous Magic Lantern performance, which uses pre-cinema technology to create startling, mesmerizing images, and a lecture on his teacher, painter Hans Hofmann.
Three films focusing on Georges Simenon's fictional detective: Duvivier's 1933 La tête d'un homme, Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (1932), and Chabrol's 2009 Inspector Bellamy.
Unparalleled Access
September 30-October 2, 2016Acclaimed documentarian Zhou Hao visits Berkeley to present and discuss his films, which examine the impact of the massive social and economic changes in China.
A series spotlighting Italian actress Anna Magnani, who brought a unique combination of exuberance, empathy, and intelligence to all the parts she played.
Choreographer Mark Morris introduces four films centering on the theme of unrequited love in conjunction with the premiere of his new production of Layla and Majnun at Cal Performances.
Animated films from Hayoun Kwon that explore the border between North and South Korea, as well as the border between historical and personal truth. Plus a program of animated films selected by Kwon.
Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation
September 14-17, 2016Internationally renowned filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha presents two of her films (including her latest, Forgetting Vietnam) and discusses them with Shannon Jackson and Akira Mizuta Lippit.
Composer/vocalist Ken Ueno presents Wim Wenders's poetic documentary Tokyo-Ga.
2016
September 7–November 16, 2016Our annual series dedicated to avant-garde film.
A rare chance to see Leone's groundbreaking "spaghetti" Westerns on the big screen.
La Notte, Ixcanul, Elevator to the Gallows, and Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil
Ozu’s thoughful and poetic postwar films focusing on middle-class life, including the Noriko trilogy starring Setsuko Hara.
Dennis Lim takes us on a five-program exploration of “the Lynchian," the world of abysmal terror, piercing beauty, and convulsive sorrow created by filmmaker David Lynch.
Local luminaries Tiffany Shlain, Vijay Anderson, and Gary Meyer present films that have inspired them.
Films by two iconic directors who changed the way we look at cinema. Inspired by the recent doc Hitchcock/Truffaut, which screens twice in this series.
The influence of Vienna—an essential cockpit of modernism—on cinema. Includes films by Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Max Ophuls, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, and more.
Fiction, nonfiction, and experimental films encourage us to contemplate and debate the role of museums in contemporary society.
Presented in collaboration with the Bay Area Book Festival, this series celebrates the dialogue between film and books and includes many literary luminaries in person.
BAMPFA partners with the Berkeley Festival to celebrate Baroque music with concerts and films.
This traveling showcase is a grab bag of genres spanning six decades of American cinema, from comedy to melodrama to war film to Western.
A retrospective featuring recently restored films by Wim Wenders, "a must-see for cinephiles of all stripes” (Rodrigo Perez, Indiewire).
In films ranging from B-movie potboilers to beguiling metaphysical mysteries, Seijun Suzuki's audaciously experimental approach has gained him a cult following both in Japan and abroad.
See how Mexican directors took the icy cool of the Hollywood noir and turned up the heat in this sampling of films from the 1940s and 1950s in new restorations.
BAMPFA is the exclusive East Bay venue for the San Francisco International Film Festival, an annual showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation.
Isaac Julien, a central figure in British visual culture and queer independent cinema, presents his boundary-pushing work over two evenings.
In this lecture/screening series, experts guide us in an exploration of key works of Japanese cinema.
Three powerful documentaries from Charles Ferguson, including his latest, about climate change.
Discover the complex and subtle films of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, "one of the most important auteurs working today" (NY Times), including his latest, the Palme d'Or recipient Winter Sleep.
Revolutionary cinema from French director Jean Epstein (1897–1953), including his poetic adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher.
Stories told by everyday people about their lives—"films as conversations"—from legendary Brazilian documentarian Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014).
Introduce young people to the joys of the big-screen cinematic experience with Saturday afternoons at the movies.
Join wildly entertaining filmmaker Guy Maddin as he presents his own work, including 2015's The Forbidden Room, plus some of his favorites from film history.
The festival spotlights new work from Africa and the African diaspora, including a new crop of documentaries.
Go behind the scenes with this lecture/screening series featuring presentations by America’s leading film archivists.
A selection of recent and historical films that extend the documentary form in provocative ways. With Alan Berliner as our first Les Blank Lecturer.
Pialat (1925–2003) is considered the greatest French filmmaker of the post–New Wave era. A gifted storyteller, Pialat made films that capture the authenticity of real life.
Opening Week Celebration
February 3–7, 2016Celebrate and remember our storied past as we embark on this exciting new chapter in our institution’s history.
Filmmakers & Critics in Conversation
Filmmaker Nino Kirtadze is known for documentaries that explore contemporary Georgia, Russia, or the relationship between the two. She joins us for short residency to present her work and to discuss them, and the issues they raise, with film critic Michael Guillen.
Spanish director Víctor Erice is revered for his masterpieces of contemplative cinema, reflecting on childhood, cinema, and the passing of time. We are honored that Erice will visit BAM/PFA to present his complete oeuvre of feature films and discuss his work with curator and professor Richard Peña.
A program of recent video art from India, including work from Mumbai, Goa, and New Delhi. Titles include Logic of Birds, Man with Cockerel, Fjaka, Iceboat, Between the Waves, Forerunner, and Night Noon.
Influential Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) "invented a new language, true to the nature of film" (Ingmar Bergman). This complete retrospective extends from Tarkovsky's powerful first film, Ivan's Childhood (1962), to his final, the elegiac The Sacrifice (1986).
If you like Douglas Sirk, you'll love John M. Stahl. Stahl (1886–1950 ), the original Hollywood melodrama master.
Experience a classic of the silent serial genre with the fifteen hair-raising episodes of this adventure tale featuring the Phantom Foe, an elusive and sinister criminal mastermind. “A rediscovered proto-feminist masterpiece of terror and tension!” (Jurij Meden, George Eastman House). With live musical accompaniment.
One of the final series in our current theater honors French film archivist and cinephile Henri Langlois (1914–1977), who inspired the international cinematheque movement and whose approach greatly informed the vision of BAM/PFA. Our tribute includes French silent cinema as well as work by Langlois’s favorite auteurs, Tod Browning, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir, Erich von Stroheim, and others.
Filmmakers & Critics in Conversation
Thomas Allen Harris (E Minha Cara/That’s My Face, VINTAGE: Families of Value) situates stories of his own family within larger contexts to open possibilities of political action and social change. He visits BAM/PFA to present two of his visually striking and insightful essay films and discuss his new groundbreaking documentary on African American photographers with UC Berkeley professor Leigh Raiford, author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle.
Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area
September 17, 2010–April 3, 2011 Located at the edge of the continent, the Bay Area has long been home to utopian projects, cross-disciplinary explorations, edgy experiments, and psychedelic extravaganzas.