Films

War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

Film - Feature | September 1 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In 1969, Roger Ebert proclaimed Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace “the definitive epic of all time,” and no film has come along since to contradict that assessment. Bondarchuk undertook the adaptation of the revered Russian novel with all the resources of the Soviet state at his disposal, including priceless museum artifacts as props and literal armies of extras. He also drew on a full arsenal of...   More >

Close-Up: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | September 4 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker/Performer:  Marilyn Fabe

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Post-screening lecture by Marilyn Fabe.
Marilyn Fabe is the author of Closely Watched Films and was the longtime teacher of the popular BAMPFA lecture/screening series Film 50: History of Cinema.

A film buff on trial for impersonating the famed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf becomes the centerpiece of Kiarostami’s continuously surprising treatise on the intersections of cinematic fiction,...   More >

Dreams of Suitcases and a Blue Lobster: Latin Surrealism

Film - Series | September 4 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This program brings together short films that share an interest in exploring cinema’s oneiric, disturbing, and irrational potential. Within The Blue Lobster, a lost treasure from Barranquilla, Colombia, about a foreign secret agent investigating radioactive lobsters, one can detect the roots of what would later become magic realism. Álvaro Cepeda Zamudio [and co-filmmaker Gabriel García Márquez]...   More >

Naked Spaces: Living Is Round

Film - Feature | September 5 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker:  Trinh T. Minh-ha, Director

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The homes, daily ceremonies, and ordinary “living spaces” of Senegal, Mali, and four other West African countries are showcased in this elegantly composed, “anti-ethnographic” essay film from acclaimed Berkeley-based filmmaker/theorist/professor Trinh T. Minh-ha. “A film on the poetics of dwelling,” as Trinh’s own website puts it, Naked Spaces has little interest in the arid explanations of...   More >

The Love Bugs: One couples lifelong obsession with insects

Film - Documentary | September 5 | 8-8:45 p.m. | 2040 Valley Life Sciences Building

Speaker/Performer:  Pacific Coast Entomological Society, Essig Museum of Entomology

Sponsors:  Pacific Coast Entomological Society, Essig Museum of Entomology

Over the course of 60 years, Lois and Charlie O’Brien, two of the foremost entomologists and pioneers in their field, traveled to more than 67 countries and quietly amassed the world’s largest private collection of insects.

War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

Film - Feature | September 6 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In 1969, Roger Ebert proclaimed Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace “the definitive epic of all time,” and no film has come along since to contradict that assessment. Bondarchuk undertook the adaptation of the revered Russian novel with all the resources of the Soviet state at his disposal, including priceless museum artifacts as props and literal armies of extras. He also drew on a full arsenal of...   More >

War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

Film - Feature | September 6 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The second part of Bondarchuk’s epic adaptation opens in 1807 as Napoleon and Tsar Alexander negotiate in Tilsit. Meanwhile, far from the world of politics, young Natasha attends a grand ball, waltzes with Prince Andrei, and is soon engaged to him. However, his protracted absence leaves the emotionally volatile Natasha vulnerable. The film features a remarkable wolf-hunting sequence where...   More >

War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

Film - Feature | September 7 | 12 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In 1969, Roger Ebert proclaimed Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace “the definitive epic of all time,” and no film has come along since to contradict that assessment. Bondarchuk undertook the adaptation of the revered Russian novel with all the resources of the Soviet state at his disposal, including priceless museum artifacts as props and literal armies of extras. He also drew on a full arsenal of...   More >

War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

Film - Feature | September 7 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The second part of Bondarchuk’s epic adaptation opens in 1807 as Napoleon and Tsar Alexander negotiate in Tilsit. Meanwhile, far from the world of politics, young Natasha attends a grand ball, waltzes with Prince Andrei, and is soon engaged to him. However, his protracted absence leaves the emotionally volatile Natasha vulnerable. The film features a remarkable wolf-hunting sequence where...   More >

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

Film - Feature | September 7 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Part III of War and Peace, the emphasis is on the war: it is 1812 and Napoleon’s armies are crossing into Russia. Nobles discuss politics at their opulent tables as violence rages elsewhere. Pierre visits the battlefield as a casual observer and finds himself in the midst of chaos, while Andrei rediscovers his love of life through yet another brush with death. Bondarchuk moves between the...   More >

War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

Film - Feature | September 7 | 7:45 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As Part IV begins, the Russian army is in retreat, and Moscow soon goes up in flames. Pierre is drawn fully into the conflict at last; taken prisoner, he is witness to new cruelties. Andrei and Natasha reach a kind of peace, and as war recedes and Moscow rebuilds, life and love begin again. The series concludes where it started, with the words: “If evil men are linked with one another and are...   More >

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

Film - Feature | September 8 | 2:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Part III of War and Peace, the emphasis is on the war: it is 1812 and Napoleon’s armies are crossing into Russia. Nobles discuss politics at their opulent tables as violence rages elsewhere. Pierre visits the battlefield as a casual observer and finds himself in the midst of chaos, while Andrei rediscovers his love of life through yet another brush with death. Bondarchuk moves between the...   More >

The Traveler

Film - Feature | September 8 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A preteen delinquent, charmingly unencumbered by either reality or morality, sets off on a miniature Odyssey to see a soccer match in Kiarostami’s first full-length feature, which recalls Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in youthful tenderness and toughness. Ten years old and dreaming, the soccer fanatic Qassem is determined to travel to Tehran to see his favorite team, and certainly won’t let a few tiny...   More >

War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

Film - Feature | September 8 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As Part IV begins, the Russian army is in retreat, and Moscow soon goes up in flames. Pierre is drawn fully into the conflict at last; taken prisoner, he is witness to new cruelties. Andrei and Natasha reach a kind of peace, and as war recedes and Moscow rebuilds, life and love begin again. The series concludes where it started, with the words: “If evil men are linked with one another and are...   More >

Where Is the Friend’s Home?: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | September 11 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker/Performer:  Marilyn Fabe

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Post-screeing lecture by Marilyn Fabe.
Marilyn Fabe is the author of Closely Watched Films and was the longtime teacher of the popular BAMPFA lecture/screening series Film 50: History of Cinema.

Inspired by a poem by Iranian philosopher Sohrab Sepehri, Where Is the Friend’s Home? is a beautiful picture of the life of a child in a northern Iranian village—a child for whom an afternoon becomes...   More >

Surrealistic Animations by Stacey Steers

Film - Animated | September 11 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Stacey Steers’s handmade, hypnotic collage animations draw on a wide range of materials, including nineteenth-century prints, Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 motion studies, and silent cinema footage, particularly images of Lillian Gish and Janet Gaynor. The resulting narratives are dreamlike and mysterious, while exploring the subterranean depths of women’s inner experience. For the late filmmaker...   More >

The Exiles: Urban Dis/location

Film - Feature | September 12 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Set in the shadows of a 1950s Los Angeles that has all but disappeared, Kent MacKenzie’s hybrid feature The Exiles follows a group of American Indian friends over the course of a typical Friday night. Featuring themes of urban decay and intimate betrayals, the film is a gritty portrayal of the consequences of the federal Indian policy of urban relocation and one community’s determination to...   More >

Free Outdoor Screening: This Ain’t No Mouse Music!

Film - Feature | September 12 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Longtime Les Blank collaborators Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon codirected this loving musical tribute to Bay Area legend Chris Strachwitz, the founder of folk/roots/blues label Arhoolie Records, which has brought to the forefront such artists as Clifton Chenier, Flaco Jimenez, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and many more. “In This Ain’t No Mouse Music!, their vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth,...   More >

War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

Film - Feature | September 13 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The second part of Bondarchuk’s epic adaptation opens in 1807 as Napoleon and Tsar Alexander negotiate in Tilsit. Meanwhile, far from the world of politics, young Natasha attends a grand ball, waltzes with Prince Andrei, and is soon engaged to him. However, his protracted absence leaves the emotionally volatile Natasha vulnerable. The film features a remarkable wolf-hunting sequence where...   More >

Where Is the Friend’s Home?: (Khaneh-je doost kojast?),(Where Is the Friend’s House?)

Film - Feature | September 13 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Inspired by a poem by Iranian philosopher Sohrab Sepehri, Where Is the Friend’s Home? is a beautiful picture of the life of a child in a northern Iranian village—a child for whom an afternoon becomes an odyssey into and beyond the mysteries of adult behavior. Young Ahmad feels he must return an all-important notebook to his friend, Mohammad, who will be expelled from school if he shows up one...   More >

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

Film - Feature | September 14 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Part III of War and Peace, the emphasis is on the war: it is 1812 and Napoleon’s armies are crossing into Russia. Nobles discuss politics at their opulent tables as violence rages elsewhere. Pierre visits the battlefield as a casual observer and finds himself in the midst of chaos, while Andrei rediscovers his love of life through yet another brush with death. Bondarchuk moves between the...   More >

War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

Film - Feature | September 14 | 5:45 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As Part IV begins, the Russian army is in retreat, and Moscow soon goes up in flames. Pierre is drawn fully into the conflict at last; taken prisoner, he is witness to new cruelties. Andrei and Natasha reach a kind of peace, and as war recedes and Moscow rebuilds, life and love begin again. The series concludes where it started, with the words: “If evil men are linked with one another and are...   More >

Velvet Goldmine

Film - Feature | September 14 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The glam-rock era of David Bowie or early Queen lives again in Todd Haynes’s glitter-and-makeup-filled tribute to the excesses and pansexualities of the seventies music scene, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ewan McGregor, and Christian Bale lending their well-sculpted cheekbones to the operatic tale of a superstar singer’s rise and fall. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti explodes the screen with all...   More >

A Wedding Suit

Film - Feature | September 15 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Through almost purely visual means, Kiarostami creates an O. Henry–like story of a wedding suit “borrowed” from the tailor’s for a night, and uses it to explore the world of working youths in the shops and streets of Tehran. To outward appearances, the boys in question have only to wait on adults, delivering tea from the cafe or being a tailor’s assistant. But with adults out of earshot, an...   More >

Devil's Freedom

Film - Feature | September 15 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Both victims and victimizers bear witness to Mexico’s recent wave of violence in Everardo González’s unblinking documentary, which functions both as a work of highly stylized, at times surrealist art and as a more straightforward, old-school effort to “crystallize how Mexicans feel about both the violence itself and its omnipresence” (Boyd van Hoeij, Hollywood Reporter). The interviewees are clad...   More >

Through the Olive Trees: (Zir-e darakhtan-e zeyton)

Film - Feature | September 17 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A lovelorn village youth gets another chance at romance when he and his disinterested paramour are cast as husband and wife by a visiting film crew in Kiarostami’s wryly romantic, fittingly self-reflective third part of the Koker trilogy, shot in the same village as his earlier Where Is the Friend’s Home? and And Life Goes On. Effectively remixing the entire set-up of And Life Goes On, albeit...   More >

Taste of Cherry: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | September 18 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker/Performer:  Godfrey Cheshire

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Post-screeing lecture by Godfrey Cheshire.
Godfrey Cheshire is a New York–based filmmaker and critic who has written extensively about Iranian cinema and is the author of the new book Conversations with Kiarostami, which he will sign following the screening.

A man with a hangdog face circles the scrubby outskirts of Tehran in a dust-colored Range Rover, looking for someone to do a job. We’re...   More >

Jodie Mack: Pattern Language

Film - Series | September 18 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

For well over a decade, Jodie Mack has employed labor-intensive single-frame animation techniques to explore the graphic and poetic possibilities in the materials and patterns of everyday life. A virtuoso of the 16mm film medium, she creates works with a seemingly effortless exuberance that belies the rigorous process behind each lovingly rendered project. On the occasion of her residency at the...   More >

Black Is . . . Black Ain’t

Film - Feature | September 19 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Black Is . . . Black Ain’t is Marlon Riggs’s bold and richly textured exploration of black American identity. In this final work (completed by colleagues after his death), Riggs shows how this issue has shaped relationships among African Americans, and how people who haven’t “fit” because of color, region, sexuality, gender, even speech, have felt excluded. Commentary includes cultural critics...   More >

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

Film - Feature | September 20 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Part III of War and Peace, the emphasis is on the war: it is 1812 and Napoleon’s armies are crossing into Russia. Nobles discuss politics at their opulent tables as violence rages elsewhere. Pierre visits the battlefield as a casual observer and finds himself in the midst of chaos, while Andrei rediscovers his love of life through yet another brush with death. Bondarchuk moves between the...   More >

And Life Goes On...: (Zendegi va digar hich),(Life and Nothing More)

Film - Feature | September 20 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in northern Iran that killed some fifty thousand people, Kiarostami returned to the setting of Where Is the Friend’s Home? seeking to find out the fate of his nonprofessional child stars. In the devastated landscape, expecting to find death, Kiarostami found life, and proceeded to transform it into cinema. A filmmaker and his son go along the destroyed...   More >

Look Back in Anger

Film - Feature | September 21 | 5:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Of all the angry young men in the sixties British cinema who ever raged against the hypocrisy, regimentation, and disappointment of working-class life, none raged quite so eloquently and articulately as Richard Burton, portraying John Osborne’s antihero Jimmy Porter in the film that started it all. Crowded into a tiny Midlands flat with his taciturn wife Alison and two others, Jimmy torments all...   More >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | September 21 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Based on the romance between seventeenth-century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan and his queen, this epic silent film is the ravishing, romantic tale behind the creation of one of the world’s most iconic structures, the Taj Mahal. Shot entirely on location in India, it features lavish costumes and gorgeous settings—all the more impressive in this restoration by the BFI National Archive, which features a...   More >

Dogtown Redemption

Film - Feature | September 22 | 1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Shot over eight years, Dogtown Redemption is an intimate story of recyclers in West Oakland, a journey through a landscape of love and loss, devotion and addiction, prejudice and poverty. Following the lives of four recyclers, from a former minister to a Korean American ex–punk rock drummer, the film chronicles their battles to survive in Oakland’s Dogtown neighborhood, an area battered by...   More >

Dogtown Redemption

Film - Feature | September 22 | 1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Shot over eight years, Dogtown Redemption is an intimate story of recyclers in West Oakland, a journey through a landscape of love and loss, devotion and addiction, prejudice and poverty. Following the lives of four recyclers, from a former minister to a Korean American ex–punk rock drummer, the film chronicles their battles to survive in Oakland’s Dogtown neighborhood, an area battered by...   More >

Case #1, Case #2: (Ghazieh-e shekl-e aval, ghazieh-e shekl-e dou wom)

Film - Feature | September 22 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A seemingly simple classroom struggle between teacher and students becomes an absorbing lesson in solidarity, ideology, and resistance in Kiarostami’s gripping documentary feature, filmed during the last days of the Shah and finished during the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution. A question is posed to several educators, politicians, and religious figures: Should students name the person...   More >

A Taste of Honey

Film - Feature | September 22 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A Taste of Honey gave sixties Britain one of its most unexpected and delightful stars: Rita Tushingham, a nineteen-year-old Liverpudlian of wide-eyed spirit and wide-mouthed sarcasm. Tushingham plays Jo, a working-class teenager living in open hostility with her wildly vulgar, careless mother (Dora Bryan). After her brief romance with a black sailor leads to predictable complications, Jo strikes...   More >

24 Frames: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | September 25 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker/Performer:  Ahmad Kiarostami

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Post-screeing lecture by Ahmad Kiarostami.
Ahmad Kiarostami is a San Francisco–based entrepreneur with a wide range of experience, from startups to producing films and making music videos.

Kiarostami’s final, posthumously released work strips cinema down to its essence: a single frame, creating a hypnotic meditation on image making and the act of seeing that pays tribute to both cinema and...   More >

24 Frames: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | September 25 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker/Performer:  Ahmad Kiarostami

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Post-screeing lecture by Ahmad Kiarostami.
Ahmad Kiarostami is a San Francisco–based entrepreneur with a wide range of experience, from startups to producing films and making music videos.

Kiarostami’s final, posthumously released work strips cinema down to its essence: a single frame, creating a hypnotic meditation on image making and the act of seeing that pays tribute to both cinema and...   More >

Ism, Ism, Ism: Latin Camp

Film - Series | September 25 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

If nostalgia is the impossibility of a return to origin, queer nostalgia is the salvage of a symbolic past. These filmmakers borrow an alternative reading of Hollywood stars, figures who are also sites for mining, appropriation, and excess. These divas suggest private and collective mythologies that work against linear conceptions of time and history. This program proposes a new constellation of...   More >

Long Train Running: A History of the Oakland Blues

Film - Feature | September 26 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Marlon Riggs and Peter Webster’s thesis project reflects on the heyday of Oakland blues in the late 1940s and ’50s, when an influx of African American shipyard workers mostly hailing from Louisiana and Texas arrived in the Bay Area. Combining vintage photographs, archival footage, interviews, and performances at venues like Eli’s Mile High Club, Riggs and Webster chronicle Oakland’s vibrant past...   More >

War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

Film - Feature | September 27 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As Part IV begins, the Russian army is in retreat, and Moscow soon goes up in flames. Pierre is drawn fully into the conflict at last; taken prisoner, he is witness to new cruelties. Andrei and Natasha reach a kind of peace, and as war recedes and Moscow rebuilds, life and love begin again. The series concludes where it started, with the words: “If evil men are linked with one another and are...   More >

Through the Olive Trees: (Zir-e darakhtan-e zeyton)

Film - Feature | September 27 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A lovelorn village youth gets another chance at romance when he and his disinterested paramour are cast as husband and wife by a visiting film crew in Kiarostami’s wryly romantic, fittingly self-reflective third part of the Koker trilogy, shot in the same village as his earlier Where Is the Friend’s Home? and And Life Goes On. Effectively remixing the entire set-up of And Life Goes On, albeit...   More >

Through the Olive Trees: (Zir-e darakhtan-e zeyton)

Film - Feature | September 27 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A lovelorn village youth gets another chance at romance when he and his disinterested paramour are cast as husband and wife by a visiting film crew in Kiarostami’s wryly romantic, fittingly self-reflective third part of the Koker trilogy, shot in the same village as his earlier Where Is the Friend’s Home? and And Life Goes On. Effectively remixing the entire set-up of And Life Goes On, albeit...   More >

Ernest and Celestine

Film - Animated | September 28 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This magical animated feature inspired by Belgian writer-illustrator Gabrielle Vincent’s children’s books is a pure delight. The friendship between a mouse named Celestine, who is being groomed for a career in dentistry, and the bear Ernest, a musician and poet, is beautifully rendered in pen and watercolor drawings. The English-language version is voiced by an all-star cast including Forest...   More >

The Entertainer

Film - Feature | September 28 | 5:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“That’s right, chaps, remember we’re British!” That’s a running joke in this series, but it starts here. John Osborne’s screen adaptation of his tragicomisatiric play unabashedly retains an aura of theater, set against the evocative backdrop of a seedy seaside town. Laurence Olivier portrays a never-was music-hall comedian and philanderer, Archie Rice; Joan Plowright and Alan Bates (his screen...   More >

Swoon

Film - Feature | September 28 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The only three-time winner of Sundance’s cinematography award, renowned cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Summer of Sam) made her fiction debut with Tom Kalin’s atmospheric black-and-white 1992 revisiting of the notorious 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, which was also the basis for Hitchcock’s Rope. Wealthy, intellectual, Jewish, and gay, Leopold and Loeb...   More >

Green Days

Film - Animated | September 29 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As suggested by the name of Ahn Jae-hoon’s animation studio, Meditation with a Pencil, his first feature film—part of a trilogy, which he describes as “a fantasy story for all the children and those who once were”—began with all of the initial drawings done by hand. This warmhearted coming-of-age story is set in a rural town in the early 1980s, the period of the director’s “green days” of youth...   More >

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Film - Feature | September 29 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This novel-into-film is a devastating portrait of a young man’s turmoil, and a virtuoso display of film technique in translating that inner state into exterior imagery. Tom Courtenay stars as Colin Smith, who lives with his dying father, callous mother, and screaming siblings in a cramped house located somewhere between a rock and a hard place. He is sent to a reformatory where the outside...   More >