Limited Engagements & Special Screenings

Ongoing

Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.

Read full description

  • Ash Is Purest White

  • Shiraz: A Romance of India

  • Amazing Grace

  • Fire and Ashes: Making the Ballet RAkU

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Upcoming Films

  • CineSpin: The Unholy Three

    Tod Browning
    United States, 1925

    Free Admission!

    • Friday, November 22 9:30 PM
    Live music by student musicians and DJs

    Join the BAMPFA Student Committee for the 2019 edition of CineSpin, a freewheeling free screening with local student musicians and DJs playing live accompaniment to a demented silent about sideshow performers (Lon Chaney among them) who turn to a life of crime.

    View Details

  • Ash Is Purest White

    Jia Zhangke
    China/France/Japan, 2018

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    • Tuesday, November 12 6:30 PM
    • Saturday, November 23 7:30 PM

    A gangster’s wife stands on her own in Jia’s expansive narrative of empowerment and survival, inspired by Hong Kong gangster films and set against the tumultuous changes in contemporary China. “Fierce, gripping, emotionally generous, and surprisingly funny” (Los Angeles Times).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Jim Allison: Breakthrough

    Bill Haney
    United States, 2019

    Jim Allison: Breakthrough also screens November 15 with a panel discussion featuring scientists Greg Barton, Rachel Humphrey, Steve Isaacs, David Raulet, and Julia Schaletzky.

    • Sunday, November 17 4:30 PM
    • Saturday, November 23 3 PM
    • Friday, November 29 6:30 PM

    This documentary tells the remarkable story of a Nobel Prize–winning Bay Area biologist who found a cure for cancer through his trailblazing immunotherapy research.

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Shiraz: A Romance of India

    Franz Osten
    UK, Germany, India, 1928

    East Bay Premiere of Digital Restoration!

    • Saturday, September 21 8 PM
    • Friday, October 18 4 PM
    • Sunday, November 17 2 PM
    • Friday, November 29 4 PM

    This ravishing silent epic tells the romantic tale behind the creation of the Taj Mahal. We present a recent restoration featuring a stunning new score from sitar master Anoushka Shankar.

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Amazing Grace

    Alan Elliott, Sydney Pollack
    US, 2018
    • Sunday, December 1 7 PM
    • Friday, December 20 4 PM
    • Friday, December 27 5 PM

    Aretha Franklin’s thrilling 1972 performance of Amazing Grace at a Watts church comes alive in this concert film, unreleased until 2018. “It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle—just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God” (Rolling Stone).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Mr. Klein

    Joseph Losey
    France, 1976

    Digital Restoration

    • Wednesday, December 4 7 PM
    • Saturday, December 14 8:15 PM
    • Wednesday, December 18 7 PM

    An art dealer (Alain Delon) in WWII-era France benefits from the Nazi regime, until they begin to suspect him of being Jewish, in Joseph Losey’s chilling thriller. “A historical reconstruction with a modernist tone, evoking both Kafka and Borges” (J. Hoberman).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Fire and Ashes: Making the Ballet RAkU

    Shirley Sun
    United States, 2017

    East Bay Premiere!

    Fire and Ashes: Making the Ballet RAkU also screens Friday, December 13, and Sunday, December 29 (without Shirley Sun in person).

    • Thursday, December 5 7 PM
    Shirley Sun in Person

    Bay Area filmmaker Shirley Sun’s engaging dance film goes behind the scenes with composer Shinji Eshima and San Francisco Ballet choreographer Yuri Possokhov as they recount their collaboration on the ballet RAkU, set in historic Japan.

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

    Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
    United States, 2019

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    • Friday, December 6 4 PM
    • Sunday, January 19 1:30 PM

    Pulitzer- and Nobel Peace Prize–winning author Toni Morrison recalls her life, challenges, and successes in this “eloquent nonfiction biopic” (Variety), featuring archival footage and interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Hilton Als, and others.

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

    Stanley Nelson
    United States, United Kingdom, 2019
    • Saturday, December 7 8:15 PM
    • Saturday, December 28 7 PM

    From the director of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, this profile of the great Miles Davis is “a tantalizing portrait: rich, probing, mournful, romantic, triumphant, tragic, exhilarating, and blisteringly honest” (Variety).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Film Composing in Real Time: A Workshop with Donald Sosin


    Free Admission for UC Berkeley Students!

    • Sunday, December 8 1:30 PM

    Explore the arts of film scoring and accompaniment with musician and composer Donald Sosin, who has scored thousands of films for live performance and recording. Bring your imagination and your instrument—no musical experience required!

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Fire and Ashes: Making the Ballet RAkU

    Shirley Sun
    United States, 2017

    East Bay Premiere!

    Fire and Ashes: Making the Ballet RAkU also screens Thursday, December 5, with director Shirley Sun in person.

    • Friday, December 13 4 PM
    • Sunday, December 29 2:30 PM

    Bay Area filmmaker Shirley Sun’s engaging dance film goes behind the scenes with composer Shinji Eshima and San Francisco Ballet choreographer Yuri Possokhov as they recount their collaboration on the ballet RAkU, set in historic Japan.

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Christ Stopped at Eboli

    Francesco Rosi
    Italy, 1979

    Full-Length Digital Restoration, Back by Popular Demand!

    • Saturday, December 14 1 PM
    • Sunday, December 22 1 PM

    Gian Maria Volonté portrays leftist writer Carlo Levi, banished by the Italian fascist government to a profoundly isolated mountain village. “An absorbing and sometimes stunningly beautiful movie with an impressive sense of historical detail and social insight” (Christian Science Monitor).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Out of the Vault: The Brink

    ruth weiss
    United States, 1961

    World Premiere of BAMPFA Preservation Print!

    • Sunday, December 15 3:30 PM
    ruth weiss, Robyn Beattie, and Steve Seid in Person

    Built around the existential musings of two contentious lovers, ruth weiss’s Beat-era cinepoem jettisons narrative logic for a skeptical embrace of the moment. We showcase BAMPFA’s new preservation print alongside works by weiss’s compatriots Paul Beattie and Steven Arnold. 

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Tokyo Twilight

    Yasujiro Ozu
    Japan, 1957

    Bay Area Premiere of Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, December 21 7 PM
    • Friday, December 27 2 PM
    • Wednesday, January 8 7 PM

    Setsuko Hara stars as a woman trying to hold her family together in Ozu’s darkest, most urban film, set in the shadowy back streets of Ginza. “Retains an enormous dramatic power, perhaps because of [its] very divergences from the Ozu oeuvre” (Michael Koresky).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Fanny and Alexander

    Ingmar Bergman
    Sweden, 1983

    Full-Length Television Version

    • Thursday, December 26 12 PM

    A rare theatrical presentation of Bergman’s magnum opus in its full-length television version, which runs more than five hours. Bergman himself described the project as “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Notorious

    Alfred Hitchcock
    United States, 1946

    4K Digital Restoration

    • Friday, December 27 7 PM
    • Wednesday, January 22 7 PM
    • Friday, February 28 4 PM

    Trying to infiltrate a group of Nazis in Latin America, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman find themselves entangled in a cruel love affair. Hitchcock’s polished, perverse thriller exploits an espionage plot to explore the nature of love and loyalty. 

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

  • Elevator to the Gallows

    Louis Malle
    France, 1958

    Digital Restoration

    • Sunday, December 29 7 PM

    A restored print of Louis Malle’s first feature, an elegant thriller featuring an iconic performance by Jeanne Moreau and a celebrated Miles Davis jazz score. This “consistently engaging, atmospheric noir . . . remains worth treasuring” (Time Out New York).

    View Details
    Buy Tickets

Past Films

  • Shiraz: A Romance of India

    • Saturday, September 21 8 PM
    • Friday, October 18 4 PM
    • Sunday, November 17 2 PM
    • Friday, November 29 4 PM
     Franz Osten
    UK, Germany, India, 1928

    East Bay Premiere of Digital Restoration!

    This ravishing silent epic tells the romantic tale behind the creation of the Taj Mahal. We present a recent restoration featuring a stunning new score from sitar master Anoushka Shankar.

  • Jim Allison: Breakthrough

    • Sunday, November 17 4:30 PM
    • Saturday, November 23 3 PM
    • Friday, November 29 6:30 PM
     Bill Haney
    United States, 2019

    Jim Allison: Breakthrough also screens November 15 with a panel discussion featuring scientists Greg Barton, Rachel Humphrey, Steve Isaacs, David Raulet, and Julia Schaletzky.

    This documentary tells the remarkable story of a Nobel Prize–winning Bay Area biologist who found a cure for cancer through his trailblazing immunotherapy research.

  • Ash Is Purest White

    • Tuesday, November 12 6:30 PM
    • Saturday, November 23 7:30 PM
     Jia Zhangke
    China/France/Japan, 2018

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    A gangster’s wife stands on her own in Jia’s expansive narrative of empowerment and survival, inspired by Hong Kong gangster films and set against the tumultuous changes in contemporary China. “Fierce, gripping, emotionally generous, and surprisingly funny” (Los Angeles Times).

  • Green Days

    • Sunday, September 29 3:30 PM
     Ahn Jae-hoon, Han Hye-jin
    South Korea, 2011

    Free Admission!
    Recommended for ages 10 & up

    Three high schoolers come of age in a small Korean town in this warmhearted, hand-drawn animated feature, presented in conjunction with Korea Week 2019.

    Ahn Jae-hoon in Person

  • War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

    • Saturday, September 7 7:45 PM
    • Sunday, September 8 7 PM
    • Saturday, September 14 5:45 PM
    • Friday, September 27 4 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration
    Back by Popular Demand!

    The final installment in the four-part epic opens as the Russian army retreats, leaving Moscow in flames; it closes as the city rebuilds, and life and love begin again.

  • War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

    • Saturday, September 7 6 PM
    • Sunday, September 8 2:30 PM
    • Saturday, September 14 4 PM
    • Friday, September 20 4 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration
    Back by Popular Demand!

    In Part III of War and Peace, the emphasis is on the war: it is 1812 and Napoleon’s armies are crossing into Russia. Pierre visits the battlefield as a casual observer and finds himself in the midst of chaos, while Andrei rediscovers his love of life through a brush with death.

  • War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

    • Friday, September 6 7 PM
    • Saturday, September 7 3:30 PM
    • Friday, September 13 4 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration
    Back by Popular Demand!

     

    In the second part of Bondarchuk’s epic adaptation, young Natasha becomes engaged to military man Andrei, but his protracted absence leaves her vulnerable.

  • War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

    • Sunday, September 1 7 PM
    • Friday, September 6 3:30 PM
    • Saturday, September 7 12 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration
    Back by Popular Demand!

    Part I of Bondarchuk’s Academy Award–winning adaptation of Tolstoy’s revered novel moves between ballroom and battlefield, hinging on the disastrous Battle of Austerlitz.

  • Transit

    • Saturday, June 15 6 PM
    • Friday, June 21 8:30 PM
    • Friday, July 26 8:30 PM
    • Friday, August 30 5:30 PM
     Christian Petzold
    Germany, 2018

    Petzold’s tale of displaced people in fascist-occupied France transposes a 1940s novel to today’s Marseille. “Moody, beguiling, and formally bold. . . . Turns history into an existential maze” (New York Times). “Like a remake of Casablanca as written by Kafka” (IndieWire).

  • 3 Faces

    • Friday, August 16 6:30 PM
    • Sunday, August 25 4:30 PM
     Jafar Panahi
    Iran, 2018

    East Bay Premiere

    Acclaimed director Jafar Panahi plays himself in this captivating road movie, “a gently provocative meditation on the role of creative souls in modern-day Iran” (Time Out).

     

  • Christ Stopped at Eboli

    • Sunday, June 23 2 PM
    • Friday, July 5 6:30 PM
    • Saturday, July 13 1:00 PM
    • Saturday, August 3 1:00 PM
    • Thursday, August 8 6:30 PM
    • Saturday, August 17 1:00 PM
     Francesco Rosi
    Italy, 1979

    Bay Area Premiere of Full-Length Digital Restoration

    Gian Maria Volonté portrays leftist writer Carlo Levi, banished by the Italian fascist government to a profoundly isolated mountain village. “An absorbing and sometimes stunningly beautiful movie with an impressive sense of historical detail and social insight” (Christian Science Monitor).

  • La religieuse

    • Thursday, June 13 6:30 PM
    • Thursday, July 11 6:30 PM
    • Sunday, August 11 4 PM
     Jacques Rivette
    France, 1965

    Digital Restoration

    Anna Karina plays a young woman forced to become a nun in Rivette’s notorious adaptation of Diderot’s novel. A work of “brilliant filmmaking and impassioned restraint . . . as sumptuous in its color photography as it is austere in its mise-en-scène” (New York Times).

  • War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

    • Wednesday, June 5 7 PM
    • Saturday, June 8 5:30 PM
    • Saturday, June 15 1:30 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration

    In Part III of War and Peace, the emphasis is on the war: it is 1812 and Napoleon’s armies are crossing into Russia. Pierre visits the battlefield as a casual observer and finds himself in the midst of chaos, while Andrei rediscovers his love of life through a brush with death.

  • War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

    • Thursday, June 6 7 PM
    • Saturday, June 8 7:30 PM
    • Saturday, June 15 3:30 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration

    The final installment in the four-part epic opens as the Russian army retreats, leaving Moscow in flames; it closes as the city rebuilds, and life and love begin again.

  • War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

    • Saturday, June 1 8 PM
    • Sunday, June 2 6:30 PM
    • Sunday, June 9 4:30 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration

     

    In the second part of Bondarchuk’s epic adaptation, young Natasha becomes engaged to military man Andrei, but his protracted absence leaves her vulnerable.

  • War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

    • Saturday, June 1 4:30 PM
    • Sunday, June 2 2:30 PM
    • Saturday, June 8 2 PM
     Sergei Bondarchuk
    USSR, 1966

    Digital Restoration

    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.

  • The Baker's Wife

    • Saturday, May 11 5 PM
    • Friday, May 17 7 PM
     Marcel Pagnol
    France, 1938

    Film to Table dinner follows the May 11 screening

     

    A warm and ribald comedy based on the idea that food is the life of a community. Orson Welles once called The Baker's Wife “a perfect movie,” and star Raimu “the greatest actor of the cinema.”

  • Works from the Eisner Competition 2019

    • Sunday, May 5 4:30 PM

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

     

    The student filmmakers join us for a screening of this year’s prizewinners and honorable mentions in the film and video category of the Eisner Prize competition, UC Berkeley’s highest award for creative media making.

    Student Filmmakers in Person

  • Grand Tour Italiano, 1905–1914

    • Wednesday, May 1 3 PM

    Presented in partnership with San Francisco Silent Film Festival

     

    The director of the Cineteca di Bologna presents an enthralling collection of silent travelogues from Italy. The early twentieth-century grand tour wends from Sicily through Amalfi, Rome, Bologna, and Milan before ending in Venice.

    Illustrated Lecture by Gian Luca Farinelli; Stephen Horne on Piano

  • Detour

    • Saturday, March 30 8:15 PM
    • Saturday, April 6 6 PM
     Edgar G. Ulmer
    United States, 1945

    Digital Restoration

     

    “No matter where you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you”: this lean, mean little movie sums up the film noir philosophy. “Detour isn’t just a masterpiece, it’s . . . a jagged chunk of the American psyche” (Village Voice).

  • BAMPFA Student Committee Film Festival

    • Friday, April 5 9 PM

    Join the BAMPFA Student Committee for their annual festival showcasing short films made by students in Berkeley and the wider Bay Area.

  • The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice

    • Saturday, March 23 5:30 PM
    • Thursday, March 28 7 PM
     Yasujiro Ozu
    Japan, 1952

    Digital Restoration

     

    A series of extraordinarily revealing domestic details forms a portrait of middle-class marriage, domestic tension, and reconciliation. One of Ozu’s less screened works, recently digitally restored.

  • The Mystery of Picasso

    • Friday, March 1 7 PM
    • Saturday, March 9 5:30 PM
    • Sunday, March 24 2 PM
     Henri-Georges Clouzot
    France, 1956

    New Digital Restoration

    Film to Table dinner follows the March 9 screening

    Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, this colorful documentary glimpse of the seventy-five-year-old Picasso captures the fecund nature of his creative process. “One of the most exciting and joyful movies ever made” (Pauline Kael).

  • The Cold Heart

    • Saturday, March 2 4 PM
     Karl Ulrich Schnabel
    Germany, 1933/2016

    US Premiere!

    Austrian pianist Karl Ulrich Schnabel was also an experimental filmmaker, and this rediscovered film displays a surprising aesthetic affinity with the psychodramas of avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage.

    Ann Schnabel Mottier, François Mottier, and Sarah Cahill in Conversation

  • Monrovia, Indiana

    • Saturday, February 16 4:30 PM
    • Tuesday, February 19 6:30 PM
     Frederick Wiseman
    United States, 2018

    Film to Table dinner follows the February 16 screening

    The eternal Frederick Wiseman trains his camera on small-town America in the age of Trump, observing the citizens of Monrovia, Indiana, after the 2016 national election.

  • Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable

    • Sunday, February 3 1:30 PM
    • Friday, February 15 4 PM
     Sasha Waters Freyer
    United States, 2018

    This poignant documentary spotlights one of the greatest photographic chroniclers of Cold War–era America, mingling Winogrand’s images with archival materials and musings from eminent curators, photographers, and friends.

  • The Image Book

    • Friday, February 1 6:30 PM
    • Saturday, February 9 2 PM
     Jean-Luc Godard
    Switzerland/France, 2018

    The newest essay film by Jean-Luc Godard is “a kaleidoscopic bulletin on the state of our world” (Variety). Winner of the first Special Palme d’Or award in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

  • Nasser’s Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt

    • Friday, January 25 4 PM
    • Saturday, February 2 2 PM
     Michal Goldman
    United States, 2016

    An intriguing overview of Egypt’s political history in the modern age, Nasser’s Republic examines the transformative influence of the country’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, on the Arab world.

  • Workingman’s Death

    • Wednesday, January 16 7 PM
    • Sunday, January 20 6:30 PM
     Michael Glawogger
    Austria/Germany, 2005

    BAMPFA Collection

    Glawogger’s documentary starts from a global question—Is hard manual labor a thing of the past?—and finds the unflinching answer in portraits of grueling and dangerous professions in Ukraine, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and China.

  • Not Wanted

    • Saturday, January 12 8 PM
    • Sunday, January 20 4:30 PM
     Elmer Clifton, Ida Lupino
    United States, 1949

    Digital Restoration

    A waitress finds herself pregnant and out of options in Lupino’s dissection of small-town values and women’s choices (or lack of them), made with “a startling blend of compassion and invention” (New Yorker).  

  • Megacities

    • Saturday, January 19 6 PM
     Michael Glawogger
    Austria, 1998

    BAMPFA Collection

    Glawogger takes us deep into the megacities of Mexico City, Bombay, Moscow, and New York, telling stories of people struggling at the bottom of the urban food chain.

  • Bicycle Thief

    • Saturday, January 12 6 PM
    • Friday, January 18 6:30 PM
     Vittorio De Sica
    Italy, 1948

    Digital Restoration
    Film to Table dinner follows the January 12 screening

    De Sica’s tale of a father and son searching the streets of Rome for their stolen bicycle is a masterwork of Italian neorealism, “an allegory at once timeless and topical” (Village Voice).