Limited Engagements & Special Screenings

Ongoing

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

  • Mister Universo

  • Beuys

  • Greta Garbo Rarities: The Divine Woman

  • All That Heaven Allows

  • The Sacrifice

  • The Assassin

  • Satantango

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

Upcoming Films

  • Infrastructure of the Universe

    Friday, April 27 3:30 PM


    This program of short films explores how the interweaving of built, natural, and virtual media environments shapes our world.

    Zachary Epcar in Person

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    All screenings
    • Friday, April 27 3:30 PM

  • Works from the Eisner Competition 2018

    Sunday, April 29 4:30 PM


    Free Admission. Student Filmmakers in Person

    We present this year’s prizewinners and honorable mentions in the film and video competition for the Eisner Prize, UC Berkeley’s highest award for creativity.

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    All screenings
    • Sunday, April 29 4:30 PM

  • In the Intense Now

    Friday, May 4 7 PM

    João Moreira Salles
    Brazil, 2017

    Salles portrays the pivotal, tumultuous 1960s through archival footage and home movies from May ’68 Paris, Soviet-invaded Czechoslovakia, China during the Cultural Revolution, and Brazil under military rule. “It’s a documentary that’s really a meditation—history made poetic” (Variety).

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    All screenings
    • Wednesday, April 4 7 PM
    • Friday, May 4 7 PM

  • Way Bay on Screen

    Saturday, May 5 4 PM


    This selection of works from the exhibition Way Bay reveals the rich and varied landscape and people of the Bay Area. Featuring a time capsule of San Francisco before the 1906 quake and works by Bruce Baillie, Alice Anne Parker (Severson), Sara Kathyrn Arledge, and Ernie Gehr.

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    All screenings
    • Saturday, May 5 4 PM

  • Time Regained

    Sunday, May 6 3:30 PM

    Raúl Ruiz
    France, Italy, Portugal, 1999

    New Digital Restoration

    “For those who know the final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Ruiz’s film sets off its own chain of memories and associations; for those who do not, it serves as a superb introduction to the shape and texture of the Proustian universe” (Dave Kehr).

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    All screenings
    • Sunday, March 18 1 PM
    • Sunday, May 6 3:30 PM

  • Greta Garbo Rarities

    Wednesday, May 30 3 PM


    Copresented with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

     

    This program of rare film fragments, commercials, and newsreels from the archives of the Swedish Film Institute offers glimpses of Garbo at various points throughout her career.

    Illustrated Lecture by Jon Wengström; Stephen Horne on Piano

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    All screenings
    • Wednesday, May 30 3 PM

Past Films

  • In the Intense Now

    • Wednesday, April 4 7 PM
    • Friday, May 4 7 PM
     João Moreira Salles
    Brazil, 2017

    Salles portrays the pivotal, tumultuous 1960s through archival footage and home movies from May ’68 Paris, Soviet-invaded Czechoslovakia, China during the Cultural Revolution, and Brazil under military rule. “It’s a documentary that’s really a meditation—history made poetic” (Variety).

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  • Beuys

    • Friday, March 9 4 PM
    • Sunday, March 11 4:30 PM
    • Saturday, March 31 3 PM
     Andres Veiel
    Germany, 2018

    East Bay Theatrical Premiere

    This new documentary explores the life and work of avant-garde sculptor, painter, performance artist, and social activist Joseph Beuys, chronicling his art and ideas about media, community, and capitalism in an intimate way.

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  • All That Heaven Allows

    • Sunday, March 25 4:30 PM
    • Friday, March 30 7 PM
     Douglas Sirk
    United States, 1955

    Vintage Technicolor 35mm Print

    Rock Hudson comes to prune widow Jane Wyman’s garden and uproots her sterile, upper-middle-class suburban life in this elegiac, Thoreauvian mood piece that inspired Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven.

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  • Mister Universo

    • Saturday, March 24 8 PM
    • Wednesday, March 28 7 PM
    • Friday, March 30 4 PM
     Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel
    Austria, Italy, 2016

    The spirits of early Fellini and De Sica can be felt in this captivating docudrama about an Italian lion-tamer on the hunt for the strongman who started him on the circus life.

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  • Time Regained

    • Sunday, March 18 1 PM
    • Sunday, May 6 3:30 PM
     Raúl Ruiz
    France, Italy, Portugal, 1999

    New Digital Restoration

    “For those who know the final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Ruiz’s film sets off its own chain of memories and associations; for those who do not, it serves as a superb introduction to the shape and texture of the Proustian universe” (Dave Kehr).

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  • The Burning Child

    • Saturday, March 17 4 PM
     Joseph Leo Koerner, Christian D. Bruun
    United States, 2017

    Special Preview Screening

    A film journey into Vienna’s interior—both its domestic architecture and the space of the psyche—set against the backdrop of Austria’s troubled past.

    Joseph Leo Koerner and Winnie Wong in conversation

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  • The Assassin

    • Saturday, March 10 5 PM
    • Friday, March 16 7 PM
     Hou Hsiao-Hsien
    Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, 2015

    Film to Table dinner follows the March 10 screening

    Winner of the Best Director prize for Hou Hsiao-hsien at the 2015 Cannes film festival, The Assassin is “a mesmerizing slow burn of a martial-arts movie” (Variety).

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  • The Sacrifice

    • Friday, January 12 7 PM
    • Sunday, January 28 4 PM
    • Friday, February 23 4 PM
     Andrei Tarkovsky
    Sweden, France, 1986

    New 4K Digital Restoration

     

    A retired actor and his family find themselves on a remote Baltic island when word arrives of nuclear war in Tarkovsky’s elegiac final film.

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  • Satantango

    • Sunday, February 18 1 PM
     Béla Tarr
    Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, 1994

    35mm Mint Print / BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!

    Don’t miss a rare chance to witness one of cinema’s “genuine masterpieces” (Cahiers du cinéma) on the big screen. Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour opus of melancholia and alcohol is “devastating, enthralling for every minute” (Susan Sontag).

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  • Ex Libris: The New York Public Library

    • Sunday, February 4 3 PM
    • Wednesday, February 14 7 PM
     Frederick Wiseman
    United States, 2017

    Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary provides welcome confirmation of the survival of intelligent life in discouraging times, following the work behind and beyond the books at the New York Public Library.

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  • The End of the Ottoman Empire

    • Friday, February 2 4 PM
    • Saturday, February 10 2 PM
     Mathilde Damoisel
    France, Switzerland, 2016

    This recent documentary offers an overview of the Ottoman Empire and its decline, the essential backstory of our world today.

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  • Memories of Underdevelopment

    • Thursday, January 18 7 PM
    • Friday, January 26 7 PM
    • Saturday, February 3 5 PM
     Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
    Cuba, 1968

    New Digital Restoration / Bay Area Theatrical Premiere!

    The Cuban cinema reached full maturity with this classic study of a bourgeois writer who stays in Cuba after the revolution. “Beautifully understated, sophisticated and cosmopolitan” (New York Times).

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  • Woman in the Dunes

    • Friday, January 19 7 PM
    • Friday, February 2 7 PM
     Hiroshi Teshigahara
    Japan, 1964

    35mm Print / BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!

    The sands of time have not worn away the startling beauty of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s adaptation of Kobo Abe’s acclaimed postmodernist novel. “It’s like a dream—the kind from which you awake bolt upright in a cold sweat” (The Guardian).

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  • Letters from Baghdad

    • Friday, January 26 4 PM
    • Sunday, January 28 2 PM
     Zeva Oelbaum, Sabine Krayenbühl
    United States, United Kingdom, France, 2017

    Narrated by Tilda Swinton, this documentary tells the fascinating story of Gertrude Bell—who shaped the modern Middle East after World War I and helped draw the borders of Iraq—through intimate letters and secret documents.

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  • Woodstock

    • Saturday, January 27 6:30 PM
     Michael Wadleigh
    United States, 1970

    Archival Print

    This legendary documentary captures a rock-and-roll who’s who at their heights: Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Janis Joplin, and many more. With Robert N. Zagone’s short A Day in the Life of Country Joe and the Fish.

    Country Joe McDonald and Robert N. Zagone in Person

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  • Free Speech and Its Limits: An Unfinished Conversation

    • Thursday, January 25 7:10 PM

    A screening of Near Normal Man, a profile of Holocaust survivor Ben Stern and his fight against a 1977 Nazi rally in Illinois, anchors this discussion of free speech.

    Introduction by Carol Christ; Ira Glasser, Ben Stern, Charlene Stern, Manu Meel, Simone Dill, Luis Tenorio and Edward Wasserman in Conversation

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  • The Crime of Monsieur Lange

    • Saturday, January 13 6 PM
    • Sunday, January 21 2 PM
     Jean Renoir
    France, 1936

    New Digital Restoration. Film to Table dinner follows the January 13 screening

    Workers at a publishing company form a successful collective after their loathsome boss disappears in Renoir’s vivacious drama of crime, romance, and ethics. “A film touched by divine grace” (François Truffaut).

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  • The Rules of the Game

    • Sunday, January 14 4 PM
    • Friday, January 19 4 PM
     Jean Renoir
    France, 1939

    35mm Print / BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!

    Made just before the outbreak of World War II, Renoir’s masterpiece turns a country-house gathering into a tragicomic study of polite society on the brink of collapse.

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