Recent Releases & Restorations

Ongoing

Enjoy newly released films and restored classics selected by our curators, now available in your own home.

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  • Center Stage

  • The Fever

  • Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

  • Yiddish

  • Mandabi

  • Lost Course

  • maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
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  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
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Available Films

  • BAMPFA Student Committee Student Film Festival


    Free Streaming Program Available April 8–May 31

    A selection of outstanding student films from around the Bay Area.

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  • maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore

    Sky Hopinka
    United States, 2019

    Honoring connections to nature and the cycles of life, Sky Hopinka’s poetic experimental documentary follows two Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest as they share their personal rituals and relationships to life, identity, language, and homeland.

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  • My Darling Supermarket

    Tali Yankelevich
    Brazil, Denmark, 2019

    Tali Yankelevich’s portrait of the Veran supermarket in São Paulo records the dreams and philosophies of the workers who populate the meticulously stocked aisles. “An existentialist delight” (Los Angeles Times).

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  • Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

    Jia Zhangke
    China, 2020

    Three of China’s greatest living authors share their stories and memories in Jia Zhangke’s tribute to storytelling, and to the connection between intellectual thought and working-class labor. “A spiritual depiction of China. Illuminating” (South China Morning Post).

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  • The Fever

    Maya Da-Rin
    Brazil, France, Germany, 2019

    Acclaimed documentarian Maya Da-Rin’s first narrative film is an atmospheric exploration of the divide between urbanity and the Amazonian wilderness. “Gives us an elusive but powerful sense of the limits of our own vision” (New York Times).

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  • The Inheritance

    Ephraim Asili
    United States, 2020

    Experimental filmmaker Ephraim Asili calls his feature debut a “speculative reenactment” of Black activism and artistry in his hometown Philadelphia, from the Black Arts Movement to MOVE. “Playful, erudite, and boundary-blurring” (James Lattimer, Cinema Scope).

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  • Un film dramatique

    Éric Baudelaire
    France, 2019

    French artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire’s Un film dramatique is made collaboratively with twenty middle schoolers as they explore the details and politics of their daily lives. “A work of refreshing spontaneity and continuous revelation” (Jordan M. Smith, Nonfics).

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  • Center Stage

    Stanley Kwan
    Hong Kong, 1991

    4K Digital Restoration

    Maggie Cheung stars in Stanley Kwan’s modernist biopic on the life and tragic early death of Chinese film star Ruan Lingyu. “A masterpiece . . . the greatest Hong Kong film I've seen” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

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  • Black Life: Losing Ground

    Kathleen Collins
    United States, 1982

    Free Streaming Presentation
    Available starting May 28

    Kathleen Collins’s nuanced portrayal of a strained marriage expands beyond the domestic sphere to explore existential and aesthetic questions. One of the first features directed by a Black woman, it “still feels fresh, over three decades later” (Indiewire).

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  • Coup 53

    Taghi Amirani
    United Kingdom, 2019

    Cowritten and edited by Oscar winner Walter Murch, this documentary is a fascinating investigation into the 1953 Anglo-American coup d’état in Iran that displaced democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossaddegh and installed the despotic Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah. “Passionate and fearless” (Hollywood Reporter).

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  • Edo Avant Garde

    Linda Hoaglund
    Japan, United States, 2019

    This beautiful examination of the tradition of Japanese folding screen and scroll painting explores the sensuous style and innovative methods of Edo period painting and reveals its influence on Western art.

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  • If I go, where do I go?

    Amit Dutta
    India, 2021

    Streaming Premiere!

    Available starting April 30

    At ninety-three, Krishna Baldev Vaid (1927–2020), a pioneer of Hindi experimental writing living in New York, feels at a loss for words. Yet he is eager to access the “dance of language,” to which he has devoted his life. With shorts The Scent of Earth and Ten Questions from a Critic.

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  • Irmi

    Veronica Selver, Susan Fanshel
    United States, 2020

    This beautiful documentary portrait of German Jewish émigrée Irmi Selver (1906–2004), based on her memoirs (read by Hanna Schygulla), takes us on a unique journey through a life marked by love, unimaginable loss, and strength of spirit.

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  • Lost Course

    Jill Li
    Hong Kong, 2019

    Jill Li’s formidable documentary is a comprehensive account of the 2011 grassroots uprising and its aftermath in Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong Province in southern China. “Engrossing, revealing and bittersweet” (Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter).

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  • Mandabi

    Ousmane Sembène
    Senegal, 1968

    A comic fable about a middle-aged man in Dakar whose life changes when he receives a money order from Paris. African master Ousmane Sembène’s approach is “spare, laconic, slightly ironic, and never patronizing” (New York Times).

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  • Paris Calligrammes

    Ulrike Ottinger
    Germany, France, 2020

    Ottinger’s latest film describes her experiences as a young artist living in Paris in the 1960s, evoking a place and time of intellectual, artistic, and political ferment.

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  • Tell Them We Were Here

    Griff Williams, Keelan Williams
    United States, 2021

    Available starting May 7
    Tuesday, May 11, 6 PM PDT: Livestream conversation: Griff and Keelan Williams, Nigel Poor, and Julie Rodrigues Widholm

    Featuring Sadie Barnette, Amy Franceschini, Jim Goldberg, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Alicia McCarthy, Tucker Nichols, Nigel Poor, and Michael Swaine, this documentary reflects on a Bay Area art scene less concerned with money and power than with imagination, innovation, community, and care.

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  • The Mirror

    Andrei Tarkovsky
    USSR, 1974

    Juxtaposing fragments of childhood memory with the collective memories and nightmares of the twentieth century, Andrei Tarkovsky invented “a new language, true to the nature of film . . . life as a dream” (Ingmar Bergman).

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  • The Passionate Thief

    Mario Monicelli
    Italy, 1960

    In Monicelli’s beloved comedy, struggling actress Anna Magnani just wants to have a nice time on New Year’s Eve but is unwittingly dragged into a night of attempted thievery by her broke friend Totò and handsome pickpocket Ben Gazzara.

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  • The Story of a Three Day Pass

    Melvin Van Peebles
    France, 1968

    Available starting May 14

    In an exuberant, inventive, and poignant film about an American soldier’s sojourn in Paris, Melvin Van Peebles brilliantly balances French New Wave style with profound social critique and psychological substance.

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  • Yiddish

    Nurith Aviv
    France, Israel, 2020

    Seven young scholars share their love for Yiddish, and for the avant-garde Yiddish poetry written between the world wars. “Pulsates with the sounds of forgotten rhythms” (Genica Baczynski, L’Humanité). 

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