September 2023

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    5 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    • Performance
    Sunday, August 27, 2023
    5 PM
    Oleksandr Dovzhenko,
    USSR,
    1930,
    (79 mins)

    Copresented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

    “Earth is Dovzhenko’s pictorial love song to nature, a radiant canvas for flowing wheat fields, oceans of crops, and idyllic close-ups of produce and foliage” (Jeremy Carr, Senses of Cinema).
    • Judith Rosenberg
      On Piano
    Sunday, August 27, 2023
    7 PM
    Yuliya Solntseva,
    USSR,
    1964,
    (80 mins)

    Free Admission

    Based on a quasi-autobiographical script by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuliya Solntseva’s The Enchanted Desna was described by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as “among the most ravishingly beautiful and poetic spectacles ever made.”

    Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 4 PM.

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    Wednesday, August 30, 2023
    7 PM
    Ari Folman,
    France, Germany, Israel,
    2008,
    (90 mins)

    Recommended for adults

    Waltz with Bashir is a striking animation film depicting the horrors of Israel’s first war in Lebanon in 1982, and the events leading up to the killings in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Awarded the prestigious Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign-Language Film and nominated in the same category at the Academy Awards.
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    7 PM
    Thursday, August 31, 2023
    7 PM
    Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud,
    France,
    2007,
    (96 mins)

    Recommended for ages 12 and up

    The story of a young girl’s coming of age in difficult times, Persepolis, based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is a striking animated production that unfolds with grace, intelligence, and charm.
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    7 PM
    Friday, September 1, 2023
    7 PM
    Luis Buñuel,
    Mexico,
    1950,
    (88 mins)

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    Luis Buñuel’s unsentimental portrait of slum kids in Mexico City. “Its matter-of-fact brilliance continues to astonish” (BBC). 
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    7 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, September 2, 2023
    7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard,
    France,
    1963,
    (103 mins)

    4K Digital Restoration

    Jean-Luc Godard’s Homeric homage to Fritz Lang, “one of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking” (Film Comment).
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    7 PM
    Wednesday, September 6, 2023
    7 PM
    Luis Buñuel,
    France,
    1930,
    (88 mins)

    New Digital Restorations

    Luis Buñuel partnered with legendary artist Salvador Dalí for two incendiary Surrealist films that both scandalized audiences. Decades later, they still shock. With Un chien Andalou.
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    7 PM
    • Film
    Friday, September 8, 2023
    7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard,
    France,
    1965,
    (98 mins)

    4K Digital Restoration

    “[Jean-Luc] Godard’s conceptual masterpiece is a hardboiled, Pop Art, sci-fi gloss on [Jean] Cocteau’s Orpheus and [George] Orwell’s 1984” (Village Voice).
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    5 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, September 9, 2023
    5 PM
    Amir Naderi,
    Iran,
    1984,
    (91 mins)

    4K Digital Restoration

    Amiro, an illiterate eleven-year-old orphan living alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan, survives by shining shoes, selling water, and diving for deposit bottles, while being bullied by both adults and competing older kids. But he finds solace by dreaming about departing cargo ships and airplanes and by running . . . seemingly to nowhere.
    • Madjid Niroumand
      In Person on October 6
      Born in Tehran, Madjid Niroumand played the central role of the resourceful young street kid in The Runner—and his performance was hailed as one of the great screen performances by a child actor.
    7 PM
    Saturday, September 9, 2023
    7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville,
    France,
    1969,
    (145 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Jean-Pierre Melville’s drama of the French Resistance, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret, “grips tighter than a Gestapo handcuff. . . . A film of noirish compositions and fantastic cool” (Independent).
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    7 PM
    • Film
    Sunday, September 10, 2023
    7 PM
    Luis Buñuel,
    Mexico,
    1951,
    (86 mins)
    An extremely loose young woman spreads consternation throughout the hacienda of an ultra-bourgeois family in Luis Buñuel’s over-the-top Mexican melodrama, which takes every cliché and exaggerates it even more.
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    Wednesday, September 13, 2023
    7 PM
    (80 mins)
    All three films in this program—Words of Mercury, Bagatelle II, and In the Stone House—represent a journey of sorts, and between them they include footage from throughout Jerome Hiler’s filmmaking life.
    • Jerome Hiler
      In Person
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    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Thursday, September 14, 2023
    7 PM
    Salomé Jashi,
    Georgia, Germany, Switzerland,
    2021,
    (91 mins)
    The opening shot of this striking environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a fifteen-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea. Its destination lies in a garden countless miles away, privately owned by a wealthy and anonymous man whose passion is the removal, and subsequent replanting, of foreign trees into his own man-made Eden.
    • Salomé Jashi
      In Person
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    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Friday, September 15, 2023
    7 PM
    Salomé Jashi,
    Georgia, Germany,
    2011,
    (98 mins)
    A meditation on a lively but decaying building that once used to be a hotel called Bakhmaro in a provincial Georgian town. At the center of the building is a restaurant where tables are set, waiting for customers who rarely come. Paired with two short films, Their Helicopter (2006) and A Crypto Rush Aftermath (2023).
    • Salomé Jashi
      In Person
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    4:30 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    • Performance
    Saturday, September 16, 2023
    4:30 PM
    Nikoloz Shengelaia,
    USSR,
    1928,
    (97 mins)

    BAMPFA Collection

    One of Georgian cinema’s greatest silent film achievements, this historical epic evokes the tragic fate of a nation pacified in 1864 by the Tsarist Russian Empire. It features beautiful portrayals of Caucasus customs and celebrations.
    • Salomé Jashi
      Introduction
    • Judith Rosenberg
      On Piano
    Saturday, September 16, 2023
    7 PM
    Luis Buñuel,
    Mexico,
    1952,
    (91 mins)
    Lies and insults, passion and heartbreak flow like wine in another of Luis Buñuel’s giddy Mexican melodramas, which follows the lifetime of intrigue that occurs when a young wife’s extramarital dalliance results in the birth of an illegitimate son.
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    4 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Sunday, September 17, 2023
    4 PM
    Jerome Hiler,
    United States,
    2023,
    (100 mins)
    Jerome Hiler’s passion for medieval stained glass impacted his filmmaking practice and led to a fascinating evolving lecture, “Cinema Before 1300,” here premiering in digital form. 
    • Jerome Hiler
      In Person
    7 PM
    Sunday, September 17, 2023
    7 PM
    Salomé Jashi,
    Finland, Georgia, Germany,
    2016,
    (90 mins)
    Beautifully shot and strangely comic, Jashi’s documentary The Dazzling Light of Sunset follows Dariko and Khaka, an ultra-low-budget local news team in rural western Georgia. Paired with two short films, The Tower and Speechless.
    • Salomé Jashi
      In Person
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    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Wednesday, September 20, 2023
    7 PM
    (78 mins)

    Cosponsored by Canyon Cinema

    Ernie Gehr has always filmed the urban spaces where he lives and visits, finding abstractions, reflections, and “digital delirium.” We present four of his recent city films, “profoundly cinematic experiences of place” (Haden Guest).
    • Ernie Gehr
      In Person
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    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Thursday, September 21, 2023
    7 PM
    Dawn Porter,
    United States,
    2023,
    (100 mins)
    A fascinating perspective on a momentous period in US history, gleaned from 123 hours of candid audio recordings made by Lady Bird Johnson during her years in the White House.
    In Conversation
    • Dawn Porter
    • Andrés Cediel
      Andrés Cediel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and professor of visual journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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    3 PM
    Friday, September 22, 2023
    3 PM
    In this talk, illustrated with excerpts from the many documentaries she has made over the past decade, Dawn Porter discusses what inspires her, her career trajectory, why and how she began making documentaries, and her approach to creating successful and enduring nonfiction films.
    In Conversation
    • Dawn Porter
    • Lisa Armstrong
      Award winning journalist Lisa Armstrong is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Texas Tribune, The Atlant
    7 PM
    • Film
    Friday, September 22, 2023
    7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard,
    France,
    1963,
    (103 mins)

    4K Digital Restoration

    Jean-Luc Godard’s Homeric homage to Fritz Lang, “one of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking” (Film Comment).
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    4 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Saturday, September 23, 2023
    4 PM
    Dawn Porter,
    United States,
    2013,
    (95 mins)
    “In this study of exceptional grace under extreme pressure, a trio of public defenders makes considerable personal sacrifices to shield their indigent clients from the full weight of the judicial system” (Deadline Hollywood). “Essential . . . gripping and beautiful” (Esquire Magazine).
    In Conversation
    • Dawn Porter
    • Mridula Raman
      Mridula Raman is a capital-defense lawyer and the interim deputy director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
    7 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, September 23, 2023
    7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard,
    France,
    1965,
    (98 mins)

    4K Digital Restoration

    “[Jean-Luc] Godard’s conceptual masterpiece is a hardboiled, Pop Art, sci-fi gloss on [Jean] Cocteau’s Orpheus and [George] Orwell’s 1984” (Village Voice).
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    5 PM
    Sunday, September 24, 2023
    5 PM
    Kavich Neang,
    Cambodia,
    2021,
    (90 mins)

    Bay Area Premiere!

    Twentyish Samnang dreams of fame as a dancer and singer, yet the realities of day-to-day life constantly thwart his hopes for the future, specifically the looming destruction of the apartment complex where he and his family live. “White Building soars along on quiet moments thanks to Douglas Seok’s stunning cinematography” (Pat Padua, Spectrum Culture).
    7 PM
    Sunday, September 24, 2023
    7 PM
    Luis Buñuel,
    France, Spain,
    1933,
    (103 mins)
    Luis Buñuel’s only documentary showed the deprivation suffered by the inhabitants of the Las Hurdes region of Spain with the intention of jolting viewers out of complacency and into revolutionary action. Screening with Buñuel’s Prisoners, Ramón Gieling’s 2000 account of the lasting effects of the film on its subjects and their descendants.
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    Wednesday, September 27, 2023
    7 PM
    (70 mins)
    Paul Fillinger’s magical educational films made with his children transform the genre into what he calls experiential cinema, celebrating curiosity and connection to nature. 
    In Conversation
    • Paul Fillinger
      Paul Fillinger, attracted by early underground films made in the Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s, left advertising to make experimental films, then educational films and corporate documentar
    • Adrianne Finelli
      Adrianne Finelli, an artist and curator based in Berkeley, is currently project manager for the Prelinger Archives’s mass digitization project in collaboration with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentr
    • Jon Shibata
      Jon Shibata is BAMPFA’s film archivist.
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    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Thursday, September 28, 2023
    7 PM
    Želimir Žilnik,
    Serbia,
    2013,
    (108 mins)
    A biographical video essay on Pirika, a strong-willed woman living in Serbia, made forty-four years after she appeared as a child actor in two films directed by Želimir Žilnik. With four of Žilnik’s innovative short documentary films about immigrant and refugee experiences.
    Introduction
    • Želimir Žilnik
      Želimir Žilnik, currently living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia, has written and directed numerous feature and documentary films and is renowned as an initiator of the docudrama genre.
    • Pavle Levi
      Pavle Levi is a professor of film studies at Stanford University and the author of a number of books, including Disintegration in Frames, Cinema by Other Means, and Hypnos in Cineland.
    • Djordje Popović
      Djordje Popović is assistant professor of Yugoslav literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and affiliate faculty member in the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.
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    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Friday, September 29, 2023
    7 PM
    Želimir Žilnik,
    Yugoslavia,
    1989,
    (95 mins)
    Želimir Žilnik reinvents the road movie with an aged rocker who travels through Yugoslavia and becomes involved in unexpected turmoil: Milošević’s “antibureaucratic revolution.” With Black Film, a short film made with a group of homeless men.
    In Conversation
    • Želimir Žilnik
      Želimir Žilnik, currently living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia, has written and directed numerous feature and documentary films and is renowned as an initiator of the docudrama genre.
    • Pavle Levi
      Pavle Levi is a professor of film studies at Stanford University and the author of a number of books, including Disintegration in Frames, Cinema by Other Means, and Hypnos in Cineland.
    • Antje Postema
      Antje Postema is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, where she teaches and writes on language, literature, and film from the Yugoslav region.
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    Saturday, September 30, 2023
    3:30 PM
    Rithy Panh,
    Cambodia, France,
    1996,
    (60 mins)
    Rithy Panh’s sensitive attention to detail and skilled direction make Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy a film of incredible power. His inquiry into the lives and deaths of Hout Bophana and Ly Sitha, a married couple who were casualties of the Pol Pot regime, personalizes the horror.
    5 PM
    Saturday, September 30, 2023
    5 PM
    Kavich Neang,
    Cambodia,
    2021,
    (90 mins)

    Bay Area Premiere!

    Twentyish Samnang dreams of fame as a dancer and singer, yet the realities of day-to-day life constantly thwart his hopes for the future, specifically the looming destruction of the apartment complex where he and his family live. “White Building soars along on quiet moments thanks to Douglas Seok’s stunning cinematography” (Pat Padua, Spectrum Culture).
    7 PM
    Saturday, September 30, 2023
    7 PM
    Luis Buñuel,
    Mexico,
    1951,
    (74 mins)
    An about-to-be-married peasant takes a very long and often-detoured bus ride to visit his dying mother in this surprisingly carefree social comedy, which shows off Luis Buñuel’s more light-hearted, but still biting side.