Films

Screening and Discussion: Advocate

Film - Documentary | August 1 | 5-7 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Speakers/Performers:  Smadar Ben Natan; Rachel Leah Jones; Philippe Bellaïche

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

A look at the life and work of Jewish-Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel who has represented political prisoners for nearly 50 years.

Gang of Four: (La bande des quatre)

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Four women, a shadowy conspiracy, and a whole lot of acting exercises: we’re firmly in Rivette territory in one of the director’s most spellbinding explorations of the sometimes terrifyingly thin line between everyday life and the strangeness beneath it. A quartet of aspiring actresses live together while studying with a demanding coach (Bulle Ogier). As they rehearse Pierre Marivaux’s La double...   More >

The Traveler: (Mossafer)

Film - Feature | August 2 | 6:30 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 >

Weekend

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Godard brilliantly and satirically depicts the horrors of bourgeois ideology in this, his most Buñuelian film; L’age d’or meets Road Warrior in the spectacle of Parisians fighting for their weekend leisure. Weekend is an explosion of images and ideas screeching toward a car wreck of a plot, along the way shattering all illusions of fiction or comfortable “art.” Here we see une femme...   More >

Christ Stopped at Eboli: (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)

Film - Feature | August 3 | 1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In the mountain village of Gagliano, in the impoverished Lucania region of south-central Italy, a proverb reflects the unchanging nature of the inhabitants’ isolation: even Christ stopped at Eboli, the town at the bottom of the bare and craggy hill. In 1935 Carlo Levi, the leftist writer, physician, and painter, was banished by the Fascist government to three years’ exile in Gagliano. His...   More >

Clash by Night

Film - Feature | August 3 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This is a noir vision of a Sirkian Barbara Stanwyck role: the worldly-wise woman trying to make a go of domesticity. Defeated by the city, she returns to her small fishing town and attempts to suppress her sophistication by marrying a goodhearted fisherman, Paul Douglas. But she is drawn into the adulterous net of Robert Ryan, like her, an anguished misfit. The film, adapted from a play by...   More >

Wattstax

Film - Feature | August 3 | 8:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Grittier and funkier than Motown and with stronger gospel and fewer pop elements, the Stax sound became immensely popular in the second half of the 1960s. The label’s director, Al Bell, a black entrepreneur strongly committed to both civil rights and economic advancement, planned a concert to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 insurrection in Watts, a deindustrialized and...   More >

Today: (Aujourd’hui),(Tey)

Film - Feature | August 4 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

American musician/slam poet Saul Williams stars in this dreamlike fable of one man’s last day on earth, as prescribed by fate. Awaking alone, Satché (Williams) leaves his room to discover most of his family, friends, and neighborhood elders gathered outside, all echoing a strange message: You have been chosen to die, and today is your last day on earth. Stunned and uncertain, he spends his time...   More >

The Wind Will Carry Us: (Bad mara khahad bourd),(Le vent nous emportera)

Film - Feature | August 4 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Kiarostami’s film of plainspoken poetry is blatantly allegorical in its messages yet mysterious and marvelous in its rhythms. A man identified as an engineer arrives in Siah Dareh, a Kurdish village growing out of the side of a hill. “If anyone asks, say we’re looking for treasure,” he advises his unseen crew; in fact they are here to record a mourning ritual, for a death expected any day. But in...   More >

Warrior Women: Documentaries at Doe

Film - Documentary | August 6 | 3-4:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Sponsor:  Library

Warrior Women is the award-winning film that tells the story of the women in the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970s and their fight for Native liberation. The film runs approximately 64 minutes and will be followed by a short discussion.

The Inheritance: (Karami-ai)

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“For his follow-up to The Human Condition, Kobayashi turned to an intimate, character-driven story. As superficially different as the family-scandal melodrama The Inheritance may be from that nine-and-a-half-hour epic, it shares its moral sensibility. Shot mostly in interiors, the film charts the quiet chaos that erupts after a dying businessman (So Yamamura) announces that the lion’s share of...   More >

Christ Stopped at Eboli: (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)

Film - Feature | August 8 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In the mountain village of Gagliano, in the impoverished Lucania region of south-central Italy, a proverb reflects the unchanging nature of the inhabitants’ isolation: even Christ stopped at Eboli, the town at the bottom of the bare and craggy hill. In 1935 Carlo Levi, the leftist writer, physician, and painter, was banished by the Fascist government to three years’ exile in Gagliano. His...   More >

Monterey Pop: Free Outdoor Screening!

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“The first great pop festival, the first great festival film” (Greil Marcus). With legendary performances by Otis Redding, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Scott McKenzie, Hugh Masekela, Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, the Animals, Ravi Shankar, and Janis Joplin, Monterey Pop celebrates the inclusive power of popular music and epitomizes the optimism of the Summer of Love.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Film - Feature | August 9 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The time is ripe for Lang’s last, low-budget noir, on the subject of capital punishment and a D.A. “trying to reach the governor’s chair on the bodies of executed men.” A crusading newspaper publisher hatches a plot to prove that, on purely circumstantial evidence, an innocent man might be executed. Ace reporter Dana Andrews willingly lets himself be set up as the prime suspect in the murder of a...   More >

Tokyo Sonata

Film - Feature | August 9 | 8:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Downsized from his company, Ryuhei Sasaki still leaves home each day pretending to go to work. Ryuhei’s wife attempts to keep the family from unraveling, but a series of events accelerates their transit to an inevitable, destructive destination. Though the darkly comic and deeply unsettling tone recalls Kurosawa’s previous works, the sharply observed crevices in the seemingly ordinary family are...   More >

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

Film - Feature | August 10 | 6 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 >

Samurai Rebellion: (Joiuchi)

Film - Feature | August 10 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Rebellion” is the fitting original title of this relentless social portrait of those who demand subservience, and those who have had enough. A magisterial Toshiro Mifune slow-burns his way through the role of dutiful samurai Sasahara—henpecked by his wife and dominated by his lord—whose attempts to be a “good servant” are about to end. “You retreat, and retreat,” says his friend Asano (Tatsuya...   More >

La réligieuse: (The Nun)

Film - Feature | August 11 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Banned for two years in France for its supposedly excessive attack on the Church, Rivette’s adaptation of Denis Diderot’s famous novel of eighteenth-century convent life became a cause célèbre. Anna Karina plays a young woman, Suzanne, whose parents force her to enter a convent. The institution proves prisonlike and on a deeper level of individual repression, is revealed as an arena for sexual...   More >

While the City Sleeps

Film - Feature | August 11 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A lurid dime-novel murder propels us into the film Lang regarded as a personal favorite. Here we move ever farther from the moody lighting and striking camera angles of Fury, and ever closer to implicit expressionism; move from big stars to a B ensemble (Ida Lupino and company, plus Vincent Price) who give it their all. Here the Langian shadows and vectors are convergent plotlines, as the...   More >

Cameraperson

Film - Feature | August 14 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker:  Emiko Omori, Filmmaker, Trashed: The Lost World of May’s Studios

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Kirsten Johnson has been the principal cinematographer on more than forty documentaries. For her, “The joys of being a documentary cameraperson are endless . . . and yet, the dilemmas I face while holding my camera are formidable.” In Cameraperson, she assembles a selection of her footage—whose subjects include a Nigerian midwife, an Afghan boy, and Jacques Derrida, as well as her twin children...   More >

Kwaidan

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Breathtakingly photographed on hand-painted sets, Kwaidan is at once a Japanese woodcut writ large, and an abstract wash of luminescent colors that seem to come from another world. An electronic soundtrack by avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu plays hauntingly with natural sounds—crickets, rain, the cracking of wood, the loud silence of snow. Yet the stories—four of Lafcadio Hearn’s ghostly...   More >

3 Faces

Film - Feature | August 16 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking in his home country, this captivating road movie feels very much like an homage to Abbas Kiarostami. Panahi and his female traveling companion, Behnaz Jafari, play themselves on a journey to a tiny village near the Turkish border, where they are in search of a young woman and her family. “A sly fictional...   More >

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Film - Feature | August 16 | 8:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“By 1971, David Bowie had failed to make a mark in either the UK or US pop market apart from the single “Space Oddity.” His fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, changed everything: his music, his persona, and his fame. His self-dramatization as Ziggy allowed him to assume and perform a role that previously he had disdained: a rock ’n’ roll star. After...   More >

Christ Stopped at Eboli: (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)

Film - Feature | August 17 | 1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In the mountain village of Gagliano, in the impoverished Lucania region of south-central Italy, a proverb reflects the unchanging nature of the inhabitants’ isolation: even Christ stopped at Eboli, the town at the bottom of the bare and craggy hill. In 1935 Carlo Levi, the leftist writer, physician, and painter, was banished by the Fascist government to three years’ exile in Gagliano. His...   More >

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

Film - Feature | August 17 | 6 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 >

Day for Night: (La nuit américaine)

Film - Feature | August 17 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Truffaut gives us a behind-the-scenes romantic comedy in which the love interest is moviemaking. Every love affair must have its complications, and so the production-within-the-production is plagued by accidents, erotic misadventures, and wayward performers, including an alcoholically forgetful diva, an imported ingénue not quite over her nervous breakdown, and an uncooperative kitten—plus, of...   More >

I Will Buy You: (Anata kaimasu)

Film - Feature | August 18 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Baseball had been Japan’s favorite sport for decades by the time [I Will Buy You] was released. Kobayashi fully intended to shock viewers with his takedown of the beloved institution. . . . The film is told from the perspective of and narrated by Kishimoto (Keiji Sada), a ruthless scout hot to sign the up-and-coming college player Kurita (Minoru Oki) to the major-league Toyo Flowers. . . ....   More >

Close-Up: (Nama-ye nazdik)

Film - Feature | August 18 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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, documentary, and the construction of both social reality and personal identity. After the arrest of Hossein Sabzian, a cineaste/grifter who wormed his way into a family’s home by promising to make a...   More >

La vie de Bohème

Film - Feature | August 21 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Forget Puccini: Aki Kaurismäki declared that his aim in this film was to rescue Henri Murger’s novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème from the opera and its bourgeois proprieties. As usual with Kaurismäki, the effort is both ironic and improbably sincere. In a black-and-white Paris of timeless shabbiness, dotted with dreary cafes that might as well be in Helsinki, three impoverished artistes—an...   More >

The Wonders

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Rohrwacher’s vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father, Italian mother, four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter. The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program, and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy...   More >

The Mother and the Whore: (La maman et la putain)

Film - Feature | August 23 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The idea that there is one Woman, and she is mother, saint, and whore, is a subtext in much of cinema. In Jean Eustache’s masterpiece, it is text. Set in Paris, this is the mammoth account of three not-so-young castaways from the sixties and the sexual revolution. Jean-Pierre Léaud is at the center of the maelstrom for nearly the entire three and a half hours as a narcissistic, perpetually...   More >

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

Film - Feature | August 24 | 6 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 >

The Last Waltz

Film - Feature | August 24 | 8:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Martin Scorsese grew up listening to seminal rock DJ Alan Freed and from Mean Streets onward, his movies have been driven by the power of rock ’n’ roll. His love of music is innate and instinctual, so it was particularly fortuitous that when The Band decided to hang it up after seventeen years on the road, they chose Scorsese to film their farewell concert. From their beginnings in 1959 backing...   More >

3 Faces

Film - Feature | August 25 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking in his home country, this captivating road movie feels very much like an homage to Abbas Kiarostami. Panahi and his female traveling companion, Behnaz Jafari, play themselves on a journey to a tiny village near the Turkish border, where they are in search of a young woman and her family. “A sly fictional...   More >

Irma Vep

Film - Feature | August 25 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Olivier Assayas inserts his passion for visual, chaotic Hong Kong action movies into the verbose, yet equally chaotic, landscape of the French art film in this “remake” of the silent French serial Les vampires. Pop-culture icon Maggie Cheung, as both “Irma Vep” and “Maggie Cheung,” tiptoes through the wreckage, her latex-catsuited presence triggering as much anarchy, confusion, and sexual...   More >

The Traveler: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | August 28 | 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.

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...   More >

The Traveler: In Focus: Abbas Kiarostami

Film - Series | August 28 | 3:10-5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Speaker/Performer:  Ahmad Kiarostami

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

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.

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...   More >

La Chinoise

Film - Feature | August 28 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In an apartment painted brilliant shades of red and blue, five young people—including Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), a philosophy student, and the actor Guillaume (an ardent Léaud)—attempt to live according to the precepts of Chairman Mao, their shortwave tuned to Radio Peking. In an assemblage of skits that bridges Pop and agitprop, Godard portrays the progress of these “petit Maoists” from playing...   More >

The Decline of Western Civilization

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Penelope Spheeris’s writhing and raucous portrait of the L.A. punk scene circa 1979/80 is about the surface tension, the appearance of decline. And on the surface there is a certain decrepitude as Darby Crash, lead singer of the Germs, slogs around his house issuing an inventory of his addictions, or Lee Ving, the chilling frontman for Fear, spews off-color jokes meant to raise the heckles. But...   More >

Transit

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As a fascist occupation descends on France, refugees—including a German camp survivor who assumes a dead writer’s identity (Franz Rogowski) and the writer’s unwitting wife (Paula Beer)—gather in the sunlit purgatory of Marseille, seeking passage out of an increasingly dangerous Europe. It’s a classic scenario for a World War II thriller, but Christian Petzold’s Transit is no period piece:...   More >

The Death of Louis XIV: (La mort de Louis XIV)

Film - Feature | August 30 | 7:45 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“In Albert Serra’s masterful The Death of Louis XIV, we are a guest in the bedchamber of King Louis (Jean-Pierre Léaud), where, among his loyal servants, all energy and concern is devoted to the king’s well-being and hoped-for recovery. Serra draws from literary references for historical accuracy; the room is candlelit and the scenes hover between the somber reality of death and the humor that...   More >

The White Balloon

Film - Feature | August 31 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A seven-year-old girl navigates the busy streets of Tehran while trying to buy a goldfish in the utterly charming 1995 debut of Jafar Panahi, the widely acclaimed director whose recent feature 3 Faces also screens at BAMPFA this season. Cowritten by Abbas Kiarostami (Panahi’s mentor and the subject of a current BAMPFA retrospective), the film captures a city landscape through a child’s...   More >

25 Watts

Film - Feature | August 31 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“It’s another aimless day down Montevideo way for a trio of teenage buddies. Given to genial putdowns and arguing over things like who started a catchphrase, los tres amigos find a kind of reassuring comfort in routine, repetition, and ritual. Wine, cigarettes, and rock ’n’ roll provide them with distractions, if not quite pleasure. Shot in naturalistic black-and-white and infused with a loopy...   More >

Dave Chappelle's Block Party

Film - Feature | August 31 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Featuring a stellar lineup of R&B and hip-hop artists including Kanye West, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, the Fugees, Dead Prez, Erykah Badu, and Jill Scott, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is an exuberant ode to the legendary Wattstax. Gondry’s film follows Chappelle to his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, where he surprises a random assortment of residents with transportation, accommodation, and tickets...   More >