The museum’s popular Fisher Family Art Lab welcomes drop-in visitors of all ages to explore their creativity through hands-on artmaking.

Agnès Varda’s short films offer incredible insights into her aesthetic approach as a filmmaker. She uses the language of cinema in a remarkably free and creative way. This collection of shorts finds Varda observing people, spaces, and places from France to Cuba, in L’opéra-Mouffe, Du côté de la côte, Ô saisons, ô chateaux, and Salut les Cubains.

An aging, affluent businessman about to marry his third wife is struck with the curse of xala (impotence) in “one of the most sophisticated works of the African cinema—at once both comic satire and a deadly accurate polemic against the black bourgeoisie of Dakar” (Albert Johnson).

Tours of What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection take place on selected Sundays at 2 PM and Free First Thursdays at 1:15 PM

Drawing on a collection of twenty films safeguarded in the home of a Japanese scholar in Tokyo, Palestinian filmmaker and archivist Mohanad Yaqubi tells the story of Palestine’s struggle through the lens of international solidarity.

The museum’s popular Fisher Family Art Lab welcomes drop-in visitors of all ages to explore their creativity through hands-on artmaking.

Tours of What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection take place on selected Sundays at 2 PM and Free First Thursdays at 1:15 PM

Join writer and UC Berkeley professor of English Cathy Park Hong in conversation with Ocean Vuong, 2023–24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, and the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Four films, all concerned with Guinea-Bissau’s and Cape Verde’s struggles for independence, from different time frames and perspectives, include an analysis of four colonial statues and a celebration of carnival mask making.

First Thursdays are a great time to visit BAMPFA! Admission to our galleries is free all day.

The museum’s popular Fisher Family Art Lab welcomes drop-in visitors of all ages to explore their creativity through hands-on artmaking.

Ocean Vuong presents a poetry reading focusing on Time Is a Mother. In this latest poetry collection, he searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death and—in concert with the themes of his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—contends with loss and the meaning of family.

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

Artist Yee I-Lann presents BAMPFA’s 2024 endowed Lijin Lecture in conjunction with her Art Wall project, TIKAR/MEJA/PLASTIK. The Borneo-based multidisciplinary artist addresses this work in the context of her wider practice, and in relation to the art and film landscape in Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on issues of climate crisis, precarious ecologies, and the creation of resilient communities. The lecture will be followed by a screening of short films from Borneo.

The museum’s popular Fisher Family Art Lab welcomes drop-in visitors of all ages to explore their creativity through hands-on artmaking.

An assortment of half-assed young tough guys, British carpetbaggers, and mob enforcers flitter about a Taipei nightspot in Edward Yang’s almost screwball takedown of the blinding hunt for modern riches. “A jaundiced love letter to late ’90s Taipei” (Film at Lincoln Center).

One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema, Nicolás Pereda presents four short films at the permeable border of documentary and fiction that explore the everyday through thoughtful, elliptical narratives.