Films

Bending the Arc

Film - Documentary | August 2 | 3:45-7 p.m. |  Albany Twin

Location:  1115 Solano Ave, Albany, CA 94706

Featured Speaker:  Pedro Kos, Filmmaker, Global Oneness Project

Director:  Kief Davidson, Filmmaker, Park Pictures

Sponsors:  Public Health, School of, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Thirty years ago, a group of young, enthusiastic, and caring friends came together with a goal that was both simple and complex: to provide health care for all, particularly the poor in the developing world. This inspiring documentary charts the success of Partners in Health, an NGO which builds hospitals and delivers health care throughout the world as they work to bend the arc toward justice.

Tickets required:$15

Ticket info:   Tickets go on sale June 20. Buy tickets online or by calling 415-621-0556

Yojimbo

Film - Feature | August 2 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In one of his best-known roles, Toshiro Mifune plays the boisterous, bullying, amoral ronin (masterless samurai) who calls himself simply Sanjuro (“Thirty Years Old”). When Sanjuro wanders into a town terrorized by an ongoing war between two factions, he decides to make a fistful of ryo—and have a little fun—by cleaning up the place....   More >

Le doulos

Film - Feature | August 3 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A Melvillean roundabout of ambiguity and betrayal in the underworld: Serge Reggiani is an ex-con who suspects his friend of being a stool pigeon—un doulos or finger man in French slang—and shoots him. Enter Jean-Paul Belmondo, the finger man; or is he? As in Bob le flambeur and Le Samouraï, the gangsters display an impassive, underplayed demeanor, increasing a sense of equivocation in characters...   More >

Ride the Pink Horse

Film - Feature | August 4 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

When Lucky Gagin, a luckless veteran played by Robert Montgomery, steps from the interstate bus, he is greeted by a flashing neon sign: “Buenos Dias. Howdy.” The border town, known generically as San Pablo, is an indistinct zone of amalgamated cultures—Mexican Americans, gringos, and local Pueblo Indians—though it bears distinct resemblance to the Santa Fe of Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1946 novel....   More >

The Hanged Man

Film - Feature | August 4 | 8:40 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Siegel’s economical, no-nonsense direction in this early made-for-TV movie adaptation of Ride the Pink Horse (1946) is exciting in itself and well suited to Hughes’s clipped prose (her “dread dream”). Santa Fe at fiesta is now New Orleans but there’s no magic in Mardi Gras, only masked threat. Robert Culp does his best Robert Ryan, sloughing off aid or empathy in the role of Harry Pace, in town...   More >

Le doulos

Film - Feature | August 5 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A Melvillean roundabout of ambiguity and betrayal in the underworld: Serge Reggiani is an ex-con who suspects his friend of being a stool pigeon—un doulos or finger man in French slang—and shoots him. Enter Jean-Paul Belmondo, the finger man; or is he? As in Bob le flambeur and Le Samouraï, the gangsters display an impassive, underplayed demeanor, increasing a sense of equivocation in characters...   More >

Julieta

Film - Feature | August 5 | 8:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Based on three stories by Alice Munro, Almodóvar’s most recent film finds the great director in an autumnal mood, stripping away his more manic and surreal touches to linger instead on intimacy and solitude in a mother’s life. With a successful career and attentive lover, the middle-aged Julieta (Emma Suárez) still has a sorrow she cannot share. An unexpected letter triggers a breakdown, and an...   More >

Le cercle rogue

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Alain Delon, a highline thief who lives in studied elegance when he’s not languishing in jail, plans an elaborate jewelry-store heist with two cohorts picked up almost at random: an escaped convict (Gian-Maria Volonté) and an alcoholic lapsed lawman rescued from a lost weekend (a great role for Yves Montand). The popular French actor André Bourvil is superbly cast against type as the nemesis cop,...   More >

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors

Film - Feature | August 9 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

With this gorgeous picture set among a small Ukrainian sect, Sergei Paradjanov “was the first to indicate the degree to which folklore and local artistic tradition could once again become a source of visual wealth in Soviet national cinema. In the beautiful but fierce Carpathian Mountains, an environment of overwhelming Christian-pagan rituals, demonology, and constant struggle with overpowering...   More >

The New Babylon

Film - Feature | August 10 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

We present The New Babylon with Dmitri Shostakovich’s original symphonic score for the silent film. Originally banned for its excess and aestheticism, this energetic avant-garde extravaganza represents a culmination of the experimental Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), founded by directors Kozintsev and Trauberg. Set in the 1871 Paris Commune and centered around a posh department store...   More >

In a Lonely Place

Film - Feature | August 11 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Ray must have been after the corrosive core of doubt and mistrust at the center of Dorothy B. Hughes’s most pathological novel (1947) when he took on Andrew Solt’s terrific adaptation. Hughes’s riveting story about Dix Steele, a serial killer trolling the streets of Los Angeles for women, was discarded like one of the novel’s many victims. Still, this repurposing of Dix (Humphrey Bogart) as a...   More >

Obit.

Film - Documentary | August 11 | 8:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

It’s no surprise that the small team of journalists on the obituaries desk at the New York Times are a thoughtful group and make for excellent subjects in this witty and illuminating documentary. Filmmaker Vanessa Gould conceived of the subject for Obit. after being interviewed by a staff writer at the Times following the death of a friend. Her film sheds light on how deaths are covered by the...   More >

Un flic

Film - Feature | August 12 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, and Richard Crenna star in Melville’s last feature, a consummate cops-and-robbers tale of remarkable set pieces and an even more remarkable sense of nihilism. A windswept seaside bank robbery, a hospital breakout, a giddily ludicrous train heist: Melville’s nearly wordless action scenes are miracles of staging, timing, and movement, and prove that suspense can...   More >

Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls Like Mo

Film - Feature | August 12 | 8:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón). Madrid’s nascent punk and gay underground provides the fertile setting of Almodóvar’s debut feature, a manic slice of screw-you life that could outshock even early John Waters with its transgressive energy. Swearing vengeance on a rapist cop, “modern girl” Carmen Maura (beginning a collaboration with Almodóvar that would last decades) joins forces...   More >

Obit.

Film - Documentary | August 13 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

It’s no surprise that the small team of journalists on the obituaries desk at the New York Times are a thoughtful group and make for excellent subjects in this witty and illuminating documentary. Filmmaker Vanessa Gould conceived of the subject for Obit. after being interviewed by a staff writer at the Times following the death of a friend. Her film sheds light on how deaths are covered by the...   More >

The Breach

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Chabrol liked Charlotte Armstrong (he based Merci pour le chocolat on her as well); like his camera, the women in her women-centered thrillers are off center. At any rate that is how our heroine’s in-laws, the wealthy Regniers, attempt to portray her when she tries to divorce their mentally unstable son. In her rooming house peopled by Tarot-playing biddies and a funny tragedian, Stéphane Audran...   More >

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

Film - Feature | August 16 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

An “ordinary” housewife navigates the usual working-class suburban life of deadbeat husbands, mad mothers-in-law, sex-worker neighbors, and child pandering in Almodóvar’s taboo-smashing send-up of the social realist drama, redone as crazed, John Waters–like comedy. Whether crushing her husband’s head with a ham bone, selling her youngest son to a dentist, or “helping out” the kindly dominatrix...   More >

Band of Outsiders

Film - Feature | August 17 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

No one’s dancing the Madison in Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold (1958). Godard traded her wind-smacked Pasadena and causeless strivers for the foggy, fluvial Paris suburbs and the existential poetry of “trembling” youth. But he admires the novel’s precise, pitiless prose in countless small ways in his tale of two aspiring thugs, Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur), who are drawn to the...   More >

Antonio Gaudí

Film - Feature | August 18 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926) designed some of the world’s most astonishing buildings, interiors, and parks; Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes) constructed some of the most aesthetically audacious films ever made. Here their artistry melds in a unique, enthralling cinematic experience, with a haunting score by Toru Takemitsu. Less a documentary than a visual...   More >

Samurai Rebellion

Film - Feature | August 18 | 8:15 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 >

A Quiet Passion

Film - Feature | August 19 | 6 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Relating the life of Emily Dickinson, Davies imbues the simple structure of the biopic with the elliptical intensity of poetry. Cynthia Nixon conveys ferocious intelligence and unexpected warmth in her portrayal of the quietly radical poet, who moves through a life of attachments, losses, and private striving, toward an urgent confrontation with eternity—all while embedded deep within her family...   More >

Passing Strange: The Movie

Film - Feature | August 19 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Free on Our Outdoor Screen!

Bring a blanket or lawn chair. Refreshments available.

The spectacular, one-of-a-kind musical Passing Strange was developed and premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and went on to be a Broadway hit, winning multiple awards including a Tony. Spike Lee captured the show on film, retaining its energy while also taking us behind the scenes. The...   More >

All About My Mother

Film - Feature | August 19 | 8:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Winner of the 1999 Cannes Best Director prize, this affectionate drama of a mother’s compassion serves as Almodóvar’s tribute to his two greatest inspirations: women and film. The tragic death of her son impels Manuela (Cecilia Roth) to find her long-missing husband, a trek that leads her across Madrid and Barcelona, and into the path of several women and men (and men who would be women) who need...   More >

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Film - Feature | August 20 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Liverpool has an unusual gravity. Witness Davies’s richly detailed portrait of working-class life and you’ll feel the extreme pull of the Liverpudlian past. It’s an homage to (and a forgiveness of) the daily trepidations of growing up in a brute household, ruled over by a stern father (the grand Pete Postlethwaite) and a doting mum (Freda Dowie). But Davies also finds strange comfort in this...   More >

Obit.

Film - Documentary | August 20 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

It’s no surprise that the small team of journalists on the obituaries desk at the New York Times are a thoughtful group and make for excellent subjects in this witty and illuminating documentary. Filmmaker Vanessa Gould conceived of the subject for Obit. after being interviewed by a staff writer at the Times following the death of a friend. Her film sheds light on how deaths are covered by the...   More >

A Quiet Passion

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Relating the life of Emily Dickinson, Davies imbues the simple structure of the biopic with the elliptical intensity of poetry. Cynthia Nixon conveys ferocious intelligence and unexpected warmth in her portrayal of the quietly radical poet, who moves through a life of attachments, losses, and private striving, toward an urgent confrontation with eternity—all while embedded deep within her family...   More >

The New Babylon

Film - Feature | August 24 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

We present The New Babylon with Dmitri Shostakovich’s original symphonic score for the silent film. Originally banned for its excess and aestheticism, this energetic avant-garde extravaganza represents a culmination of the experimental Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), founded by directors Kozintsev and Trauberg. Set in the 1871 Paris Commune and centered around a posh department store...   More >

High and Low

Film - Feature | August 24 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Kurosawa’s adaptation of an American detective novel is both a superb, suspenseful thriller, and a Dostoyevskian metaphysical probe into the ambiguities of guilt and innocence. In one of his finest performances, Toshiro Mifune portrays a wealthy executive who must pay ransom for the release of his chauffeur’s son when the boy is mistaken for his son by a kidnapper. Kurosawa creates a constant,...   More >

Of Time and the City

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A lyrical cinepoem about Davies’s hometown of Liverpool from 1945 to 1973, Of Time and the City taps many of the themes from his earlier narrative films—Catholicism, homosexuality, violence, death, loss, childhood, and the glory of cinema. Davies narrates the film; his reflections and emotive delivery are laced with candor and irony and mixed with favorite lines by other writers and poets. The...   More >

Movie in the Park at James Kenney Community Center

Film - Animated | August 25 | 7:40-10 p.m. | Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, Corner of Bancroft & Telegraph

Sponsor:  Berkeley International Office(BIO))

Come along for a relaxing evening in the park to watch a movie under the stars! Meet new friends, hang out with old ones, or just come for the movie (who doesn't love Zootopia?).

You can either meet us at the James Kenney Community Center at 8:15 PM, or meet us on campus outside of the MLK student union at 7:40 PM to travel to the park together.

Just bring yourselves, warm clothing, and a...   More >

Talk to Her

Film - Feature | August 25 | 8:40 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Almodóvar won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for this 2002 film, a detour for the director in its focus on masculine rather than feminine friendships and its restrained, earnest approach to such bonds. Javier Cámara and Darío Grandinetti star as two men who meet first at a dance performance by Pina Bausch, then in a hospital where each is caring for a woman in a coma. A friendship...   More >

The Long Day Closes

Film - Feature | August 26 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“The music of the years gone by”: with Nat “King” Cole singing “Stardust” while the camera slowly moves past tattered movie posters and down a dim studio street, Davies ushers us gently, lovingly into another world. This is a land of music and shadows and light, also known as 1956 Liverpool, where an eleven-year-old boy gazes through windows and dreams of pictures. The Long Day Closes maps some...   More >

Bad Education

Film - Feature | August 26 | 8:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Gael García Bernal stars in Almodóvar’s intricate hybrid of film noir, melodrama, autobiography, and Catholic Church exposé, “which continues Almodóvar’s excavation of the deepest emotions that dwell within established film genres” (New York Times). Merging separate timelines and stories along with sexual identities, Bad Education tracks back from a Madrid scriptwriter’s reunion with a former...   More >

Amos Gitai to Teach Seminar on Narrative and Form: Cinema and Architecture

Film - Series | August 29 – September 26, 2017 every day | 370 Wurster Hall

Sponsor:  College of Environmental Design

The Israeli film director Amos Gitai (Ph.D Architecture 79) will teach a five week course on film that explores the concepts of narrative and space. CLASS SIZE IS VERY LIMITED SO YOU MUST SIGN UP SOON. OPEN TO ALL STUDENTS ACROSS CAMPUS.

Amos Gitai to Teach Seminar on Narrative and Form: Cinema and Architecture

Film - Series | August 29 – September 26, 2017 every day | 370 Wurster Hall

Sponsor:  College of Environmental Design

The Israeli film director Amos Gitai (Ph.D Architecture 79) will teach a five week course on film that explores the concepts of narrative and space. CLASS SIZE IS VERY LIMITED SO YOU MUST SIGN UP SOON. OPEN TO ALL STUDENTS ACROSS CAMPUS.

Amos Gitai - Screening of Film “News From Home”

Film - Documentary | August 30 | 6:30-9 p.m. | 112 Wurster Hall

Sponsor:  College of Environmental Design

WED, AUG 30, 6:30pm. Amos Gitai (Ph.D Architecture 79) will be on hand for the film screening with Q&A to follow. The Public is welcome.

Samurai Rebellion

Film - Feature | August 30 | 7 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 >

Amos Gitai to Teach Seminar on Narrative and Form: Cinema and Architecture

Film - Series | August 29 – September 26, 2017 every day | 370 Wurster Hall

Sponsor:  College of Environmental Design

The Israeli film director Amos Gitai (Ph.D Architecture 79) will teach a five week course on film that explores the concepts of narrative and space. CLASS SIZE IS VERY LIMITED SO YOU MUST SIGN UP SOON. OPEN TO ALL STUDENTS ACROSS CAMPUS.

Volver

Film - Feature | August 31 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A welcome return to Almodóvar’s female-powered narratives, Volver spotlights a community of strong women striving to overcome the failures or absences of men. The strong-willed Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) forge ahead for a better life with little help from the male sex, aided by Raimunda’s teen daugher, their aunt, some plucky neighbors, and their long-lost mother...   More >