Recent releases, restored classics, and special guests grace the Barbro Osher Theater.
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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.
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.
UC Berkeley Student Filmmakers in Person
Free Admission
A selection of outstanding student films from around the Bay Area.
Student Filmmakers in Person
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.
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.
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 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.
Boots Riley and Darieck Scott in Conversation
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).
Laura Bialis and Veronica Selver in Conversation
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.
Gail Schickele, Nighttrain Schickele, Rob Nilsson, Ross Lipman, among others in Conversation
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.
Introduced by Peter Conheim and Viviana Garcia-Besné
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.