Limited Engagements & Special Screenings

Ongoing

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

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  • The Atomic Cafe

  • RBG

  • Zama

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey

  • The Third Murder

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

Upcoming Films

  • The End of the Ottoman Empire

    Mathilde Damoisel, Sylvie Jézéquel
    France, Switzerland, 2016
    • Friday, June 29 4:30 PM
    • Friday, July 27 4:30 PM
    • Friday, August 17 4 PM
    • Thursday, August 30 4 PM

    Back by popular demand! This documentary offers an overview of the Ottoman Empire and its decline, the essential backstory of our world today.

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  • Le corbeau

    Henri-Georges Clouzot
    France, 1943

    Digital Restoration
    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    • Sunday, September 2 7 PM
    • Saturday, September 8 8 PM
    • Sunday, September 9 5 PM

    With this noir made in occupied France, director Clouzot (Diabolique) turns a thriller about an outbreak of poison-pen letters into a study of group psychology and all-encompassing suspicion.

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  • The Atomic Cafe

    Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty
    United States, 1982

    Digital Restoration

    • Sunday, September 2 5 PM
    • Friday, September 7 7 PM
    • Friday, September 14 5 PM
    Jayne Loader and Rick Prelinger in conversation on September 7

    A blast of nuclear nostalgia with a long half-life, this found-footage documentary is both a deft history of the Cold War and a comic essay on the American knack for turning tragedy and terror into kitsch.

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  • RBG

    Julie Cohen, Betsy West
    United States, 2018
    • Friday, September 7 5 PM
    • Friday, October 5 4 PM
    • Sunday, October 14 2 PM

    Profiling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “this clear-eyed and admiring documentary . . . emphasize[s] not just Ginsburg’s work on the court but how extraordinarily influential she was before she even got there” (L.A. Times).

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  • Zama

    Lucrecia Martel
    Argentina, 2017
    • Sunday, September 23 4:30 PM
    • Friday, October 19 4 PM
    • Friday, November 9 4 PM

    The latest feature from acclaimed director Martel is a glimpse into the colonial abyss, adapted from a famed Argentine novel about a Spanish officer in a remote proto-Paraguayan outpost. “Perplexing and thrilling in equal measure” (Variety).

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  • CineSpin: The Blood of a Poet

    Jean Cocteau
    France, 1930

    Free Admission with Student ID!

     

    • Friday, October 19 9 PM

    Live student DJs and musicians perform an original score to Cocteau’s Surrealist classic. Plus surprise shorts!

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  • 2001: A Space Odyssey

    Stanley Kubrick
    United Kingdom, United States, 1968

    50th Anniversary Rerelease

    • Saturday, November 10 2 PM
    • Friday, November 16 3:30 PM
    • Saturday, November 24 6:30 PM
    • Sunday, November 25 3:30 PM

    Kubrick harnesses the widescreen, epic format for an intensely metaphysical experience in space and time. Since 2001’s release fifty years ago, “no movie has matched its solemnly jaw-dropping techno-poetic majesty” (Variety).

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  • The Third Murder

    Hirokazu Kore-eda
    Japan, 2017
    • Saturday, November 17 8 PM
    • Friday, November 23 7 PM

    Kore-eda’s latest film is “a captivating puzzle” (The Guardian). A man has confessed to murder, but when his defense lawyer tries to establish a motive, he wanders into a web of uncertainties that are both factual and existential.

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  • Blind Chance

    Krzysztof Kieslowski
    Poland, 1981/87

    Digital Restoration

     

    • Sunday, November 18 7 PM
    • Saturday, November 24 4 PM

    Kieslowski’s Solidarity-era work is three films in one, telling the possible futures of its protagonist: Party member, dissident, or apolitical family man. “One of Kieslowski’s best films. . . . Should not be missed” (Hollywood Reporter).

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Past Films

  • My Journey Through French Cinema

    • Thursday, July 12 7 PM
    • Friday, August 17 7 PM
     Bertrand Tavernier
    France, 2017

    East Bay Premiere

    A great director takes viewers on an idiosyncratic tour of French film in this delightful documentary, which offers an entire lifetime of cinema knowledge and passion within its running time. “Exhilarating and inspiring” (New York Times).

  • The End of the Ottoman Empire

    • Friday, June 29 4:30 PM
    • Friday, July 27 4:30 PM
    • Friday, August 17 4 PM
    • Thursday, August 30 4 PM
     Mathilde Damoisel, Sylvie Jézéquel
    France, Switzerland, 2016

    Back by popular demand! This documentary offers an overview of the Ottoman Empire and its decline, the essential backstory of our world today.

  • Harp of Burma

    • Wednesday, July 25 7 PM
     Kon Ichikawa
    Japan, 1956

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    A lyrical, haunting requiem for the victims of war, set amid the giant Buddhas of Burma. Winner of the top prize at the Venice film festival and one of Ichikawa’s most famous films.

  • Mur Murs

    • Friday, June 15 5 PM
    • Wednesday, July 4 5 PM
     Agnès Varda
    France, United States, 1980

    Digital Restoration

    Venturing from Venice Beach to Watts, the great Agnès Varda looks at the murals of Los Angeles as backdrop to and mirror of the city’s many cultures circa 1980.

  • Cielo

    • Sunday, June 24 5 PM
    • Saturday, June 30 8:30 PM
     Alison McAlpine
    Canada, Chile, 2017

    East Bay Premiere

    Poet-turned-filmmaker Alison McAlpine finds her wonder at the night sky of Chile’s Atacama Desert reflected in the people she meets there, from cowboys to algae collectors, astronomers to miners and storytellers. “A beautiful film” (Walter Murch).

  • Daisies

    • Saturday, June 23 8:15 PM
     Vera Chytilová
    Czechoslovakia, 1966

    35mm Print

    Chytilová's most acclaimed film, spawned by the Prague Spring, is a brilliantly colored surrealist comedy starring a couple of chicks in search of kicks.

  • Leaning into the Wind—Andy Goldsworthy

    • Saturday, June 2 5 PM
    • Sunday, June 10 5 PM
    • Friday, June 22 5 PM
     Thomas Reidelsheimer
    United Kingdom, 2017

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
    Film to Table dinner follows the June 2 screening

    This visually striking, thought-provoking documentary about the British installation artist Andy Goldsworthy is a sequel to the director’s groundbreaking Rivers and Tides—Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time.

  • Western

    • Friday, June 8 7 PM
    • Thursday, June 21 7 PM
     Valeska Grisebach
    Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, 2017

    East Bay Premiere

    This intense, slow-burning thriller follows a group of German construction workers installing a hydroelectric plant in remote rural Bulgaria. “A stunning existential study of masculinity” (Sight & Sound).

  • A Touch of Zen

    • Sunday, June 3 6:30 PM
     King Hu
    Taiwan, 1971

    Digital Restoration

    A swordswoman on the run takes refuge with a shy scholar, but soon finds herself back under attack. King Hu’s visionary martial arts epic turns swordplay into ballet, and remains one of the greatest action films of all time.

  • 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

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • The End of the Ottoman Empire

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

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

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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).

  • 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.