Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
Read full descriptionRevered Spanish auteur Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Sun) returns with his fourth feature, a meditation on memory, absence, and the magic of cinema—a “poignant cinematic swan song” (Hollywood Reporter).
For decades Barbara Dane lent her stellar singing voice to social-justice movements in the Bay Area and beyond, garnering an impressive FBI file along the way. “A true unsung hero of American music” (Boston Globe).
A searing look at the culture that overturned Roe v. Wade, In the Bones is a cinematic journey through Mississippi that provides a poetic and sometimes painful portrait of American culture through the ordinary lives of women and children.
New York Times Critic’s Pick: “An electrifying courtroom drama” that delves into the sensationalized 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman. The film communicates so much about the complexity of Jewish identity in recent European history.
4K Digital Restoration
Four desperate men are hired by a ruthless oil company to drive trucks filled with explosives across a mountainous South American country in one of the toughest noirs ever filmed. Starring Yves Montand.
4K Digital Restoration
Also screens on Sunday, November 24
A ragtag group of samurai bands together to protect a village from bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, often cited as one of the ten best films ever made.
4K Digital Restoration
For those who love the 1960s, French culture, Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Demy, design, romance, musicals, or cinema itself, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg stands alone, unmatched.
4K Digital Restoration
In Claire Denis’s surprising second film, Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas play immigrants who train birds for cockfights on the outskirts of Paris. The film “has a seedy, claustrophobic power that says as much about human as about animal exploitation” (Time Out).
Revered Spanish auteur Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Sun) returns with his fourth feature, a meditation on memory, absence, and the magic of cinema—a “poignant cinematic swan song” (Hollywood Reporter).
4K Digital Restoration
In Claire Denis’s surprising second film, Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas play immigrants who train birds for cockfights on the outskirts of Paris. The film “has a seedy, claustrophobic power that says as much about human as about animal exploitation” (Time Out).
Bay Area Premiere
Fairytale resurrects from the dead, via animated archival imagery, the twentieth-century leaders Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin. A cinematic phantasmagoria that was banned by the Russian censors.
New York Times Critic’s Pick: “An electrifying courtroom drama” that delves into the sensationalized 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman. The film communicates so much about the complexity of Jewish identity in recent European history.
4K Digital Restoration
Four desperate men are hired by a ruthless oil company to drive trucks filled with explosives across a mountainous South American country in one of the toughest noirs ever filmed. Starring Yves Montand.
BAMPFA Collection
Béla Tarr’s extraordinary seven-and-a-half-hour epic Sátántangó. “Set on an entropic collective farm during the last years of Hungarian Communism, it’s a mordant, characteristically Eastern European tale of hapless peasants and charismatic swindlers. . . . Despair has never been more voluptuously precise” (Village Voice).
A chilling, mysterious, and stunning debut film. “Selcen Ergun’s acute and wide-awake direction emphasizes the undertones of a rigid patriarchal society while brilliantly setting the atmosphere for this anti fairy-tale” (Toronto International Film Festival).
Digital Restoration
Victims of Sin is famed Mexican director Emilio Fernández’s unique blend of film noir, melodrama, and musical. Fernández infuses the film with impassioned songs and performances by Ninón Sevilla, an icon of Mexican cinema and a purveyor of African, Caribbean, and Cuban dance styles.
Digital Restoration
One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. New German Cinema icon Hanna Schygulla appears in a welcome cinematic comeback, while Lars Rudolf contributes a fevered performance of Klaus Kinski–like proportions.
Esteemed documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s latest is a food lover’s heaven—a long, behind-the-scenes excursion into the world of France’s venerable restaurant La Maison Troisgros, which has held three Michelin stars for more than five decades.
Digital Restoration
One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. New German Cinema icon Hanna Schygulla appears in a welcome cinematic comeback, while Lars Rudolf contributes a fevered performance of Klaus Kinski–like proportions.
Digital Restoration
Victims of Sin is famed Mexican director Emilio Fernández’s unique blend of film noir, melodrama, and musical. Fernández infuses the film with impassioned songs and performances by Ninón Sevilla, an icon of Mexican cinema and a purveyor of African, Caribbean, and Cuban dance styles.
Esteemed documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s latest is a food lover’s heaven—a long, behind-the-scenes excursion into the world of France’s venerable restaurant La Maison Troisgros, which has held three Michelin stars for more than five decades.
Digital Restoration
“Steeped in history, myth, religion, and politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement’s most uncompromising statements on current social issues as well as the universal problem of mindless fanaticism” (Janus Films).
A chilling, mysterious, and stunning debut film. “Selcen Ergun’s acute and wide-awake direction emphasizes the undertones of a rigid patriarchal society while brilliantly setting the atmosphere for this anti fairy-tale” (Toronto International Film Festival).
Bay Area Premiere of the Digital Restoration
Open Captions
BAMPFA presents the Bay Area premiere of the recently completed restoration of Bushman, directed by Bay Area independent filmmaker David Schickele. 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. Paired with Schickele’s earlier film Give Me a Riddle.
Copresented with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
BAMPFA partners with The Magnes to host the East Bay Premiere of Vishniac, Laura Bialis’s new portrait of famed photographer Roman Vishniac’s life and work. Bialis joins the February 4 screening to discuss her film with Bay Area documentary filmmaker Veronica Selver (Irmi, KPFA on the Air).
Copresented with UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, in conjunction with Imagining Beyond Authoritarianism: Race and Gender in Our Times
Closed Captions
Surrealism meets satire in Oakland. Boots Riley’s black comedy chronicles a hapless telemarketer whose sudden burgeoning success in the workplace is directly proportional to his alienation from his coworkers, his girlfriend, and himself.
Digital Restoration
“Steeped in history, myth, religion, and politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement’s most uncompromising statements on current social issues as well as the universal problem of mindless fanaticism” (Janus Films).
Copresented with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
BAMPFA partners with The Magnes to host the East Bay Premiere of Vishniac, Laura Bialis’s new portrait of famed photographer Roman Vishniac’s life and work.
Esteemed documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s latest is a food lover’s heaven—a long, behind-the-scenes excursion into the world of France’s venerable restaurant La Maison Troisgros, which has held three Michelin stars for more than five decades.
BAMPFA presents the recently completed restoration of Bushman, directed by Bay Area independent filmmaker David Schickele. Paired with Schickele’s earlier film Give Me a Riddle.
Esteemed documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s latest is a food lover’s heaven—a long, behind-the-scenes excursion into the world of France’s venerable restaurant La Maison Troisgros, which has held three Michelin stars for more than five decades.
Free Admission
A selection of outstanding student films from around the Bay Area.
Free Admission
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.
Digital Restoration
Andrei Tarkovsky’s breathtaking journey through the ruined but magical spaces of Tuscany follows a Russian man who feels the longing for home, closure, and the absolute that the film’s title describes. “Not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours” (J. Hoberman).
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and Academy Awards for Best International Feature and Best Sound
Audio Description
Closed Captioned
Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity.
Presented in conjunction with A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration
A film experienced in sequences, from the perspective of several generations of women, including an unborn daughter, Daughters of the Dust creates a fabric of universal themes: the conflicts between personal and collective history, and between spiritual and industrial life.
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and Academy Awards for Best International Feature and Best Sound
Audio Description
Closed Captioned
Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity.
A lyrical exploration across a woman’s life in Mississippi, the feature debut from award-winning poet, photographer, and filmmaker Raven Jackson is a richly layered portrait. One of the film’s producers is Barry Jenkins.
Nestled away in the wintry East Anatolia region of Turkey, public-school art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) yearns to leave the sleepy village for cosmopolitan Istanbul.
For decades Barbara Dane lent her stellar singing voice to social-justice movements in the Bay Area and beyond, garnering an impressive FBI file along the way. “A true unsung hero of American music” (Boston Globe).
Digital Restoration
Andrei Tarkovsky’s breathtaking journey through the ruined but magical spaces of Tuscany follows a Russian man who feels the longing for home, closure, and the absolute that the film’s title describes. “Not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours” (J. Hoberman).
Nestled away in the wintry East Anatolia region of Turkey, public-school art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) yearns to leave the sleepy village for cosmopolitan Istanbul.
4K Digital Restoration
Seven Samurai also screens Sunday, September 22 and Sunday, November 24.
A ragtag group of samurai bands together to protect a village from bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, often cited as one of the ten best films ever made.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, this riveting thriller explores the European migrant crisis from multiple ground-level perspectives. “A stunning, harrowing film. . . . Reverberates with deep empathy and quiet fury” (Time Out).
Presented in collaboration with the Berkeley Historical Society & Museum, located at 1931 Center Street, where the Berkeley and the Movies exhibition is on display until September 21.
Founding Director of the Pacific Film Archive Sheldon Renan joins us for a special presentation on the early history of the film archive. Following his talk, we will screen a 35mm print of Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide, a striking and artful adaptation of a Bunraku puppet play about doomed love.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, this riveting thriller explores the European migrant crisis from multiple ground-level perspectives. “A stunning, harrowing film. . . . Reverberates with deep empathy and quiet fury” (Time Out).
The titular Senegalese couple at the heart of this visually ravishing romantic drama faces the challenges of drought and communal responsibility. Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s poetic debut competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023.
Digital Restoration
Banned in Iran after the 1979 revolution, “this visually ravishing masterwork invents its own mythology to critique the sociopolitical conditions of 1970s Iran” (Film at Lincoln Center).
4K Digital Restoration
Seven Samurai also screens Sunday, November 24.
A ragtag group of samurai bands together to protect a village from bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, often cited as one of the ten best films ever made.
The titular Senegalese couple at the heart of this visually ravishing romantic drama faces the challenges of drought and communal responsibility. Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s poetic debut competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023.
Bay Area Premiere
This event is organized by the Consulate General of Sweden in San Francisco, the Embassy of Sweden in Washington D.C., and the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm with support from Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and the Swedish Arts Council.
A special screening of the Swedish documentary Waiting for Life, presented by Stockholm-based filmmaker Staffan Julén. The post-screening conversation includes the two main subjects of the film, Donald “Twin” James and Reginald “Happy” Wilson, as well as Swedish criminologists Amir Rostami and Jerzy Sarnecki. Moderated by Andrea Crider
Free Admission
Join us for CineSpin, the BAMPFA Student Committee’s annual event featuring terrific UC Berkeley student musicians and/or DJs providing original live accompaniment for great movies.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, this riveting thriller explores the European migrant crisis from multiple ground-level perspectives. “A stunning, harrowing film. . . . Reverberates with deep empathy and quiet fury” (Time Out).
Digital Restoration
Alain Delon embodies cool as a solitary, silent Parisian killer flitting between hits and flings in this essential, influential assassin film. “Achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty” (Slant).
A celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is the definitive swan song of one of the world’s greatest musicians. A concert film featuring just him and his piano.
Digital Restoration
Alain Delon embodies cool as a solitary, silent Parisian killer flitting between hits and flings in this essential, influential assassin film. “Achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty” (Slant).
Digital Restoration
Banned in Iran after the 1979 revolution, “this visually ravishing masterwork invents its own mythology to critique the sociopolitical conditions of 1970s Iran” (Film at Lincoln Center).
4K Digital Restoration
Also screens on Saturday, December 14
A ragtag group of samurai bands together to protect a village from bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, often cited as one of the ten best films ever made.
A celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is the definitive swan song of one of the world’s greatest musicians. A concert film featuring just him and his piano.
Digital Restoration
Alain Delon embodies cool as a solitary, silent Parisian killer flitting between hits and flings in this essential, influential assassin film. “Achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty” (Slant).