Films

Ethnic Notions

Film - Feature | November 1 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Inspired by and named for a 1982 exhibition of racist memorabilia at the Berkeley Art Center, the Emmy Award–winning Ethnic Notions “became one of Riggs’s most important works because of its direct approach to an unpopular but important subject: cultural racism and its psychological impact on the development of race and race relations in America,” curator Rhea Combs writes. “Riggs’s thorough and...   More >

Taste of Cherry: (Ta’am-e gilas)

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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 left in extended suspense as to the nature of his proposition; when at last we learn what the driver, Mr. Badii, wants—to die—his motivation is never explained, his anguish never explored. Instead the film gives us afternoon light and lengthening shadows, the...   More >

76 Minutes and 16 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami: (76 daghighe va 15 sanieh ba Abbas Kiarostami)

Film - Feature | November 2 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Filmmaker Seifollah Samadian was one of Abbas Kiarostami’s closest friends and worked alongside him for over twenty-five years, collaborating on projects such as ABC Africa and Five. In this intimate portrait, which is revealing in subtle and touching ways, Samadian draws upon footage he shot of Kiarostami on location and while traveling in Iran and abroad, showing him at work as a photographer,...   More >

76 Minutes and 16 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami: (76 daghighe va 15 sanieh ba Abbas Kiarostami)

Film - Feature | November 2 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Filmmaker Seifollah Samadian was one of Abbas Kiarostami’s closest friends and worked alongside him for over twenty-five years, collaborating on projects such as ABC Africa and Five. In this intimate portrait, which is revealing in subtle and touching ways, Samadian draws upon footage he shot of Kiarostami on location and while traveling in Iran and abroad, showing him at work as a photographer,...   More >

Jour de fête

Film - Feature | November 2 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This loose series of village vignettes follows the misadventures of a postman (Tati) who, inspired by a hyperbolic newsreel at a traveling fair, attempts to emulate the spectacular speed and efficiency of the American postal service—on his bicycle. The fair’s boisterous energy, in contrast to the lull of village routine, is brilliantly evoked by the controlled cacophony of the soundtrack. The...   More >

The Big Road

Film - Feature | November 2 | 5:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A group of hopeful Chinese youth awaken to their patriotic duty while building a strategic highway in Sun Yu’s stirring socialist agitprop drama, set during the Japanese invasion of the country and starring a who’s-who of legendary Chinese actors, including Jin Yan (the “Chinese Valentino”), Zheng Junli, and Li Lili. The collective body politic may be glorified here, but the body itself is as...   More >

The Watermelon Woman

Film - Feature | November 2 | 8 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Funky screwball comedy in the key of queer” is how critic B. Ruby Rich characterized The Watermelon Woman, the first feature of video artist/comedienne Cheryl Dunye. In it, Dunye plays a lesbian video-store clerk and would-be filmmaker who becomes obsessed with uncovering the history of a star of the early “race” films, the so-called Watermelon Woman. It develops that this “mammy” was a sister,...   More >

The Judge

Film - Documentary | November 3 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih became the first female appointed to any of the Middle East’s Shari’a courts in 2009, challenging longstanding traditions and customs regarding women’s roles in society. Constantly battling controversy over her position, Al-Faqih offers guidance, mentorship, and support both in and outside the courts. In this intimate portrait, “we get to see Al-Faqih in her office-like...   More >

Free Screening: Films by Sally Cruikshank

Film - Series | November 3 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Intrigued by the idea of seeing her drawings move, Sally Cruikshank learned to animate while in college. Her love of surreal 1930s cartoons, as well as her desire to make her own amusement park, is evident in her wildly colorful and wonderfully detailed films. The psychedelic Quasi at the Quackadero, named to the National Film Registry in 2009, and other exuberant vehicles star a recurring cast...   More >

The Judge

Film - Feature | November 3 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih became the first female appointed to any of the Middle East’s Shari’a courts in 2009, challenging longstanding traditions and customs regarding women’s roles in society. Constantly battling controversy over her position, Al-Faqih offers guidance, mentorship, and support both in and outside the courts. In this intimate portrait, “we get to see Al-Faqih in her office-like...   More >

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

Film - Feature | November 3 | 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 >

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

Film - Feature | November 3 | 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 >

The Order I Live In: An Indoor Urban Symphony With Co-Director Francisco Cruces: Film Screening and Live Q&A

Film - Documentary | November 4 | 4-6 p.m. |  2334 Bowditch (Center for Latin American Studies)

Sponsor:  Center for Latin American Studies

Cities have been narrated from manifold perspectives, but rarely from the inside. This ethnographic documentary on contemporary urban life highlights the voices of 20 people in Madrid, Mexico City, and Montevideo.

"For Sama" Screening

Film - Documentary | November 4 | 6:15 p.m. | Boalt Hall, School of Law, Booth Auditorium

Sponsor:  Human Rights Center

For Sama is an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film documents Waad Al-Kateab's life through the uprising in Aleppo, Syria, as she falls in love, gets married, and gives birth. The screening will be
followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers—currently touring with Frontline's international release of this...   More >

Perfumed Nightmare

Film - Feature | November 6 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Perfumed Nightmare “reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment, even innocence, are still available to film,” Susan Sontag wrote. It merges reverie and documentary as jeepney driver “Kidlat Tahimik” dreams of a trip to the moon. Tahimik’s surreal ethnography finds wonder and mystery both at home in the Philippines and in Europe, where his ambition guides him. Critic Gene Youngblood...   More >

My Grandmother

Film - Feature | November 6 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Gogol meets Charlie Chaplin in this riotous, scathingly antibureaucratic satire. My Grandmother is a genuine piece of grotesquerie descended from the Soviet Eccentric Cinema (FEKS) of the twenties. For invention, it matches any film of the French avant-garde, taking in all kinds of advanced filmic devices such as stop-motion, bits of puppetry, and animation, as well as expressionist decor and...   More >

Screening and Discussion: “Mouth Harp in Minor Key” with Dr. Hamid Naficy

Film - Documentary | November 6 | 7-9 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Speakers/Performers:  Hamid Naficy, Northwestern University; Persis Karim, San Francisco State University

Sponsors:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies

Join the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and San Francisco State's Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies for a special screening of "Mouth Harp in Minor Key", a documentary about prolific Iranian-American academic Dr. Hamid Naficy. Following the screening, Dr. Naficy will be in conversation with Dr. Persis Karim, Chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at SFSU.

Bilingual and...   More >

Bollywood and Beyond: 3rd i's 17th Annual SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival

Film - Series | November 7 – 16, 2019 every day with exceptions |  Screenings at different locations: November 7-10 (San Francisco) November 16 (Palo Alto)

Sponsors:  Institute for South Asia Studies, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies

The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies and the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley cosponsor 3rd i's 17th Annual SF International South Asian Film Festival. (November 7-10 and November 16, 2019).

Katka’s Reinette Apples

Film - Feature | November 7 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In this mid-twenties comedy-melodrama, a young peasant woman named Katka (Veronika Buzhinskaya) arrives in Petrograd in the first days of the New Economic Policy. She has come to find work and to help save money for her family back home, but this goal becomes unobtainable. Down on her luck, she resorts to selling apples in the street, and it is not long before Katka encounters the city’s...   More >

Wings of a Serf

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Directed by the Belarusian Yuri Tarich, this extraordinary feature set in the sixteenth century was influential in the direction of Sergei Eisenstein’s two-part Ivan the Terrible (1944–46). As film historian Jay Leyda has written, “Wings of a Serf (shown abroad as Ivan the Terrible) is a drama of the time of Ivan IV: the unhappy fate of a serf who is so unwisely clever as to invent an apparatus...   More >

Bollywood and Beyond: 3rd i's 17th Annual SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival

Film - Series | November 7 – 16, 2019 every day with exceptions |  Screenings at different locations: November 7-10 (San Francisco) November 16 (Palo Alto)

Sponsors:  Institute for South Asia Studies, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies

The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies and the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley cosponsor 3rd i's 17th Annual SF International South Asian Film Festival. (November 7-10 and November 16, 2019).

Two-Buldi-Two

Film - Feature | November 8 | 3:10 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A father-and-son clown act are separated during the Russian Civil War in this little-seen, energetic gem by the great Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, best known as the “father of montage” and for his dynamic comedy The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. Influenced by Hollywood filmmakers like D. W. Griffith yet speeding up their aesthetics exponentially, Kuleshov’s...   More >

Still Raining Still Dreaming

Film - Series | November 8 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Uncanny landscapes and mysterious journeys emerge in these five works by filmmakers who construct surreal worlds by repurposing appropriated materials, including films, engravings, and video games. Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart distills the 1931 B movie East of Borneo into an uncanny twenty-minute ode to the eponymous actress. Phil Solomon’s works Last Days in a Lonely Place and Still Raining...   More >

Bollywood and Beyond: 3rd i's 17th Annual SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival

Film - Series | November 7 – 16, 2019 every day with exceptions |  Screenings at different locations: November 7-10 (San Francisco) November 16 (Palo Alto)

Sponsors:  Institute for South Asia Studies, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies

The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies and the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley cosponsor 3rd i's 17th Annual SF International South Asian Film Festival. (November 7-10 and November 16, 2019).

A Familiar Face

Film - Feature | November 9 | 2:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“The story of an enterprising Ukrainian ‘philistine,’ Apollon Shmyhuev (Ivan Sadovskiy), whose peaceful bourgeois existence is upset by the 1917–1921 Civil War. He accidentally joins a Bolshevik military regiment [and what ensues is] an adventure road-movie with touches of the absurd. Featuring a camel as one of the main characters and mocking Bolshevik bureaucracy and fanaticism, as well as the...   More >

Ten

Film - Feature | November 9 | 5:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

It makes sense that if Kiarostami were to create a chamber piece, the “chamber” would be the front seat of a car. It is here, on the crowded streets of Tehran, that a middle-class woman (we never know her name) does her best thinking, engages loved ones on issues of family life, and strangers on religion and the oppression of women. And it was here, we suspect, that she came to the decision to...   More >

Don Diego and Pelageya

Film - Feature | November 9 | 7:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Protazanov was a master of stylization, adapting new forms and techniques with the flexibility of a chameleon. Examining his films one can easily trace the influence of Bauer, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Lubitsch, Griffith, the French ‘avant-garde,’ and so forth. Perhaps Don Diego and Pelageya, too, offers a stylization of sorts—but a cleverly concealed one. A comedy of the 1920s is easily...   More >

Bollywood and Beyond: 3rd i's 17th Annual SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival

Film - Series | November 7 – 16, 2019 every day with exceptions |  Screenings at different locations: November 7-10 (San Francisco) November 16 (Palo Alto)

Sponsors:  Institute for South Asia Studies, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies

The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies and the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley cosponsor 3rd i's 17th Annual SF International South Asian Film Festival. (November 7-10 and November 16, 2019).

The Spring Comes to the Withered Tree

Film - Feature | November 10 | 1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A critical hit during one of China’s most politically charged periods, Zheng’s follow-up to his 1959 anniversary epics merged Soviet-style socialist realism with his own breakthroughs in film technique, specifically his use of continuous camera movement in the spirit of traditional Chinese scrolls. Tractor-kino at its finest, the film revolves around two rural lovers—one struck with a deadly...   More >

Cain and Artem

Film - Feature | November 10 | 3:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Pavel Petrov-Bytov was an enfant terrible of the highbrow Leningrad Sovkino film factory. He was notorious for his article “We Have No Soviet Filmmaking,” in which he criticized all the achievements of the Soviet avant-garde. In spite of his beliefs and his scandalous struggle with “bourgeois” and “formalist” filmmaking, Petrov-Bytov directed an aesthetically refined work, shot entirely on set...   More >

Sidney Peterson’s San Francisco Surrealism

Film - Series | November 10 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

After collaborating with James Broughton on The Potted Psalm, Sidney Peterson was invited to teach the first-ever filmmaking classes at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). There, with his Workshop 20 students, he made a series of dazzlingly strange and wonderful films in which poetic intelligence, a spirit of radical experimentation, and the exuberant energy...   More >

Film Screening Series: Arab Cities | The Time That Remains

Film - Documentary | November 12 | 5:30-8 p.m. | 172 Wurster Hall

Speaker/Performer:  Ahmad Diab, Professor, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Director: Elia Shohat, 2009 (109 min)

Guest presentation given by Professor Ahmad Diab, Near Eastern Studies.

The Time That Remains is a 2009 semi-biographical drama film written and directed by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman. The film stars Ali Suliman, Elia Suleiman, Saleh Bakri and Samar Qudha Tanus. It gives an account of the creation of the Israeli state from 1948 to the present.

Ash Is Purest White

Film - Feature | November 12 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A gangster’s wife stands on her own in Jia Zhangke’s expansive narrative of empowerment and survival, set against the tumultuous political and cultural changes of twenty-first-century China. Jia’s wife and longtime muse Zhao Tao, whose roles in his Unknown Pleasures and Still Life serve as inspiration, stars as a woman saddled with a mobster lover who’s seen one too many John Woo films; she first...   More >

RESCHEDULED: Cine Latino ¡Las Sandinistas!

Film - Documentary | November 12 | 7-9 p.m. | 106 Moffitt Undergraduate Library

Sponsor:  Center for Latin American Studies

¡Las Sandinistas! reveals the untold stories of Nicaraguan women warriors and social revolutionaries who shattered barriers during Nicaragua’s 1979 Sandinista Revolution and the ensuing U.S.-backed Contra War. Today, as the current Sandinista government is erasing these women's stories of heroism, social reform, and military accomplishments from history books, these same women are fighting to...   More >

Change the Subject: A Documentary About Labels, Libraries, and Activism

Film - Documentary | November 13 | 12-1:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Sponsor:  Library

This documentary chronicles the efforts of a group of Dartmouth College students to promote the rights and dignity of undocumented people by amending instances of anti-immigrant terminology in the library catalog. Their advocacy took them from their campus library to the halls of Congress, and describes how a cataloging phrase became a flashpoint in the immigration debate.

The Time of “Women’s Work”

Film - Series | November 13 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Cinema and human labor are linked through the ephemeral experience of time. As a time-based medium, film is uniquely able to reveal the complex temporalities of work. But it is the work of women—often overlooked or even invisible—that poses unique challenges for the medium. This program focuses on four experimental approaches to the temporalities of women’s work. Harun Farocki’s classic video An...   More >

Beyond Recognition: Indigenous Activism

Film - Series | November 14 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Indigenous activism comes in many forms: survival, continuance or regeneration of cultural practices, political protest, legal actions, and creative interventions in writing and art making, to name a few. The ironically titled Home of the Brave, a four-minute history of conquest and subjugation of Native people, offers a searing critique of settler colonialism. Made forty years after the...   More >

Room at the Top

Film - Feature | November 15 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

As if to prove there’s nothing new in New Wave, Laurence Harvey’s Joe Lampton is right up there with some of the great working-class social climbers of literature and film—Stendhal’s Julian Sorel, Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths (cum Montgomery Clift’s George Eastman)—adrift in an alien world of the moneyed. Joe’s past is a bomb site, literally and figuratively; the way he sees it, he has no place to...   More >

76 Minutes and 16 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami: (76 daghighe va 15 sanieh ba Abbas Kiarostami)

Film - Feature | November 15 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Filmmaker Seifollah Samadian was one of Abbas Kiarostami’s closest friends and worked alongside him for over twenty-five years, collaborating on projects such as ABC Africa and Five. In this intimate portrait, which is revealing in subtle and touching ways, Samadian draws upon footage he shot of Kiarostami on location and while traveling in Iran and abroad, showing him at work as a photographer,...   More >

76 Minutes and 16 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami: (76 daghighe va 15 sanieh ba Abbas Kiarostami)

Film - Feature | November 15 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Filmmaker Seifollah Samadian was one of Abbas Kiarostami’s closest friends and worked alongside him for over twenty-five years, collaborating on projects such as ABC Africa and Five. In this intimate portrait, which is revealing in subtle and touching ways, Samadian draws upon footage he shot of Kiarostami on location and while traveling in Iran and abroad, showing him at work as a photographer,...   More >

Jim Allison: Breakthrough

Film - Documentary | November 15 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This documentary tells the remarkable story of the perseverance of a biological scientist who found a cure for cancer through his trailblazing immunotherapy research. Jim Allison spent a significant part of his career as a professor of immunology and director of the Cancer Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley between 1985 and 2004, and concurrently at UC San Francisco from 1997. Among his many...   More >

Bollywood and Beyond: 3rd i's 17th Annual SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival

Film - Series | November 7 – 16, 2019 every day with exceptions |  Screenings at different locations: November 7-10 (San Francisco) November 16 (Palo Alto)

Sponsors:  Institute for South Asia Studies, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies

The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies and the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley cosponsor 3rd i's 17th Annual SF International South Asian Film Festival. (November 7-10 and November 16, 2019).

My Uncle

Film - Feature | November 16 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Young Gerard Arpel feels alienated and constricted in his parents’ house, in which ingenious modern gadgets replace human effort and precision scheduling passes for interaction. Therefore he loves to spend time with his Uncle Hulot (Jacques Tati), whose home resembles a nest at the top of a ramshackle old house in a lively, impoverished quarter of the city. Much of the humor of this delicately...   More >

10 on Ten

Film - Feature | November 16 | 5:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In this self-portrait of the artist in his natural habitat—the driver’s seat of a car—Kiarostami offers his teachings on movies and on what he makes, which may be something else altogether. Taking his 2002 film Ten, shot with a stationary video camera on the dashboard of a car, as a case in point, he dissects his approach to filmmaking throughout his oeuvre. He has a lesson plan: the film is...   More >

10 on Ten

Film - Feature | November 16 | 5:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In this self-portrait of the artist in his natural habitat—the driver’s seat of a car—Kiarostami offers his teachings on movies and on what he makes, which may be something else altogether. Taking his 2002 film Ten, shot with a stationary video camera on the dashboard of a car, as a case in point, he dissects his approach to filmmaking throughout his oeuvre. He has a lesson plan: the film is...   More >

The Spring River Flows East

Film - Feature | November 16 | 7:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Part I: Wartime Separation (Ba nian li luan); Part II: Darkness and Dawn (Tianliang qian-hou). Included on the Hong Kong Film Awards list of the greatest Chinese-language films of all time, The Spring River Flows East has been termed China’s Gone with the Wind, a sweeping decades-spanning epic that sums up an entire nation’s history and identity. A married couple in Shanghai are separated during...   More >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | November 17 | 2 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 >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | November 17 | 2 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsors:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Institute for South Asia Studies

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 >

Jim Allison: Breakthrough

Film - Documentary | November 17 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This documentary tells the remarkable story of the perseverance of a biological scientist who found a cure for cancer through his trailblazing immunotherapy research. Jim Allison spent a significant part of his career as a professor of immunology and director of the Cancer Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley between 1985 and 2004, and concurrently at UC San Francisco from 1997. Among his many...   More >

If . . .

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Which side will you be on?” asked the ads for Lindsay Anderson’s surrealist dissection of conformity and oppression, metaphorically set in that most brutal of institutions: boarding school. “Don’t speak to us; you’re scum,” scowl the stuffy, well-sodomized senior leaders of College House, cruelly keeping order like true sons of the Establishment. The lackadaisical fantasist Travis (Malcolm...   More >

Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa

Film - Documentary | November 19 | 5-8 p.m. | Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium (#310)

Speaker:  Hanayo Oya, Journalist; Documentary Filmmaker

Speakers/Performers:  Renee Pastel, Film & Media, UCB; Katherine Mezur, Comparative Literature, UCB

Sponsor:  Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

Heralding the downfall of the Japanese military regime in 1945, the Battle of Okinawa has already been the topic of various documentary and fiction films. However, the history of the guerilla war, fought by Okinawan child soldiers under the command of Japanese officers, is still regarded as taboo. With an acute sense of urgency, this documentary depicts the inhumanity of militaristic...   More >

Registration required:Free

Registration info:   Register online

The Sky on Location

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

Speaker:  Babette Mangolte, Filmmaker

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Babette Mangolte wrote, “The Sky on Location explores the concept of wilderness that was unknown to me when I was raised in France. The film attempts to construct a kind of geography of the land from North to South, East to West and season-to-season through colors instead of maps. While shooting I wanted to establish the mood of the landscape as in a Turner painting. And as viewers of the film we...   More >

CANCELLED - Screening and Discussion: Seeds of All Things

Film - Documentary | November 21 | 5-7 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall | Canceled

Speaker/Performer:  Yehuda Sharim, UC Merced

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Amid the backdrop of a contentious presidential election, a health clinic in Southwest Houston is run by and for immigrants and refugees. A family from Iran is bound by love as they build a new home in the city’s most diverse neighborhood.

Yehuda Sharim is a scholar, filmmaker, and an Assistant Professor in the Program of Global Art Studies, University of California, Merced. He has directed...   More >

Routine Pleasures

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

Speaker:  Babette Mangolte, Cinematographer

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Routine Pleasures is an essay film in which Manny Farber’s work plays an essential role and my closer-than-close relationship to him is abundantly evoked. It is not a documentary on Manny (he never appears in it). It is a meditation on method and work, the American landscape, the male imaginary, the high and low of American culture, the materialist nature of artistic imagination, friendship, the...   More >

ABC Africa

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

For his first film shot outside Iran, Kiarostami went to Uganda to document the reality of some 1.6 million orphans left by AIDS. But before you get out your handkerchiefs, hold on: the director of And Life Goes On finds life wherever he goes. The Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans has organized women widowed by AIDS into cells of mutual support and creative entrepreneurship. They are creating...   More >

ABC Africa

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

For his first film shot outside Iran, Kiarostami went to Uganda to document the reality of some 1.6 million orphans left by AIDS. But before you get out your handkerchiefs, hold on: the director of And Life Goes On finds life wherever he goes. The Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans has organized women widowed by AIDS into cells of mutual support and creative entrepreneurship. They are creating...   More >

Vintage: Families of Value

Film - Documentary | November 22 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Thomas Allen Harris explores the intersections of race, family, and sexuality in this pioneering essay film, which focuses on three groups of queer black siblings (including the director and his brother) and the dynamics that have evolved between themselves, their families, and the worlds through which they travel. Jumping between multiple film stocks and video formats, interviews and monologues,...   More >

CineSpin: The Unholy Three

Film - Feature | November 22 | 9:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Join the BAMPFA Student Committee for the 2019 edition of CineSpin, where local student musicians and DJs provide live musical accompaniment to great films. Justifiably one of the most celebrated collaborations between director Tod Browning and star Lon Chaney, The Unholy Three centers on a trio of sideshow performers—a ventriloquist, a strongman, and a dwarf—who, after an incident during a show,...   More >

Homework

Film - Documentary | November 23 | 12:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Only Kiarostami could turn a documentary about homework into a delightful, absorbing, and stirring portrait of the “human condition.” The style is simplicity itself: the film consists of a series of interviews with several little boys (and, occasionally, with their parents) about the Iranian school system and its methods of assigning homework. Beleaguered by their rigorous workload, the boys...   More >

Jim Allison: Breakthrough

Film - Documentary | November 23 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This documentary tells the remarkable story of the perseverance of a biological scientist who found a cure for cancer through his trailblazing immunotherapy research. Jim Allison spent a significant part of his career as a professor of immunology and director of the Cancer Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley between 1985 and 2004, and concurrently at UC San Francisco from 1997. Among his many...   More >

The Servant

Film - Feature | November 23 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“Don’t be fooled . . . by PBS prestigerie like Upstairs Downstairs,” critic Raymond Durgnat wrote in 1977 (and decades later, we would add Downton Abbey to the comparison); “they’re nostalgic recuperations of all the tensions plotted by Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey in this, their seminal study of master-servant relationships. How and why does the rich young man with aristocratic pretensions...   More >

Ash Is Purest White

Film - Feature | November 23 | 7:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A gangster’s wife stands on her own in Jia Zhangke’s expansive narrative of empowerment and survival, set against the tumultuous political and cultural changes of twenty-first-century China. Jia’s wife and longtime muse Zhao Tao, whose roles in his Unknown Pleasures and Still Life serve as inspiration, stars as a woman saddled with a mobster lover who’s seen one too many John Woo films; she first...   More >

Fellow Citizen

Film - Feature | November 24 | 2 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

An endless array of bossy citizens bombard a poor traffic policeman with all the excuses and reasons why they (but no one else) should be allowed into a restricted area in Kiarostami’s satiric document of humanity’s seemingly endless capacity for lying through its teeth—that is, telling stories. Kiarostami uses a telephoto lens to eavesdrop on the action, fashioning out of one traffic panic an...   More >

Traffic

Film - Feature | November 24 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In Traffic, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot is a resourceful automobile salesman en route to an Amsterdam car show, where he will present an elaborate camper on behalf of a Paris firm. Getting there is half the agony in Tati’s apocalyptic vision of mechanized modernity, in which humankind indulges in a perpetual love-hate relationship with its favorite pet, the automobile. Tati’s rigorously composed...   More >

Alfie

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Michael Caine makes a fabulous cad as the randy playboy Alfie, but it’s the female leads who make a more lasting impression in this surprisingly candid study of British sexual and social mores just as the sixties began to really swing. Directly addressing the camera through pre- or post-coital confessionals, the casual misogynist Alfie serves up a lothario’s list of do’s and who’s: married women...   More >

Port Triumph screening

Film - Documentary | November 25 | 7-9 p.m. | 160 Kroeber Hall

Speaker/Performer:  Jeffrey Gould, History Department, Indiana University Bloomington

Sponsors:  Department of History, Center for Latin American Studies

During the 1970s, El Salvador boasted a vast shrimp
industry, and nearly all of the 3700 tons that it
exported each year made its way to the United States.
As shrimp was transitioning away from luxury status, few
Americans were likely to give much thought to how the
shrimp reached their plates. Fewer still would ever have
heard of the story of Puerto el Triunfo—Port Triumph in
English—and...   More >

M. Hulot's Holiday

Film - Feature | November 29 | 1:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In a cinematic postcard from a seaside summer resort, Tati observes the forced gaiety and gently absurd antics of the English and French on vacation. A stream of sight and sound gags, this is comedy as choreography, plotless and virtually without dialogue. Or, rather, with almost inaudible dialogue that lays waste the speaker’s vanity even as he speaks. As in a dance, people are recurring motifs:...   More >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | November 29 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsors:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Institute for South Asia Studies

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 >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | November 29 | 4 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 >

Jim Allison: Breakthrough

Film - Documentary | November 29 | 6:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This documentary tells the remarkable story of the perseverance of a biological scientist who found a cure for cancer through his trailblazing immunotherapy research. Jim Allison spent a significant part of his career as a professor of immunology and director of the Cancer Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley between 1985 and 2004, and concurrently at UC San Francisco from 1997. Among his many...   More >

The Wizard of Oz

Film - Feature | November 30 | 1:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

What better activity for a holiday weekend than a trip down the Yellow Brick Road together with Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Woodsman? In a 35mm print that shows off its jewel-like colors and unforgettable music, this true classic has delights to beckon little munchkins and Auntie Ems alike to the theater (just don’t bring your little dog, too). The Wizard may be a sham,...   More >

Playtime

Film - Feature | November 30 | 4 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

An apotheosis of modern design as both subject matter and technique, Playtime envisions a sixties Paris as sleek and strange as something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey (released the following year). This is the city as terrarium, a realm of glassy reflections where the distinction between interior and exterior is often not seen, only heard. (As always, Tati’s manipulation of sound is...   More >

Blow-Up

Film - Feature | November 30 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

For his first English-language film, Michelangelo Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps pictures of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the...   More >