Films

The Entertainer

Film - Feature | October 2 | 3:10 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 >

Cine Latino: Amazônia Groove

Film - Documentary | October 2 | 7-8:30 p.m. | 102 Moffitt Undergraduate Library

Sponsor:  Center for Latin American Studies

Amazônia Groove is framed by a trip up the Amazon River into remote parts of northeastern Brazil. Trees and water glide by along with stories and songs, and director Bruno Murtinho introduces a group of accomplished musicians, each of whom tells a tale of land, water, and life. From traditional bolero music to modern "technobrega," artists perform and discuss the power of music in Brazil and...   More >

L’age d’or

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The film perhaps most identified with the Surrealist movement, L’age d’or was described on its release as a “desperate pursuit of a wonderful love across the ferocious and cunning snares of social life” (Jean-Paul Dreyfus). Luis Buñuel himself reflected, “L’age d’or is the only film in my career conceived and created in a state of euphoria and enthusiasm, of vertigo for overthrowing things and...   More >

Screening: Aswat Jadida (New Voices): Arab Film Festival Kick-Off

Film - Short | October 3 | 6:30-9 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Sponsors:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Arab Film and Media Institute

Join the Arab Film and Media Institute for a special pre-festival Kick-Off at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, a week before the opening night of the Arab Film Festival. We will show the shorts program “Aswat Jadida أصوات جديدة (New Voices)” and host a Q&A session with AFMI Director Serge Bakalian after the screening.


Aswat...   More >

Struggling: (Fen dou)

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The tale of a young woman’s battle against her bullying father expands into a rousing cry against all tyranny in Shi Dongshan’s strikingly fresh 1932 melodrama, recently rescued from obscurity thanks to a brilliant restoration from the China Film Archive. Chinese film icons Chen Yanyan and Zheng Junli star as the young woman and the bookish neighbor who helps rescue her, but the film’s...   More >

The Blood of Passion on the Volcano: (Huoshan Qingxie)

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A warlord’s lusty nephew destroys a simple farming family’s pastoral idyll and sends its favorite son into tropical exile in Sun Yu’s delirious combination of Chinese peasant drama and Hollywood-style decadent island exotica. Brokenhearted after his family’s ruin, our hero (Zheng Junli) winds up in a South Seas hellhole seemingly borrowed from some leftover Lon Chaney film set, where saloon...   More >

Crows and Sparrows: (Wuya yu maque)

Film - Feature | October 5 | 1:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A Shanghai apartment building serves as a microcosm of China’s class struggles in Zheng Junli’s striking urban drama, filmed during the last days of China’s Nationalist rule and already looking forward to, as one character states, “a New Society.” A scheming Nationalist official and his greedy wife purchase an apartment building and proceed to lord it over the hardworking families still renting...   More >

Why Can’t I Be Me? Around You

Film - Documentary | October 5 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A chance encounter between recently transitioned mechanic Rusty Tidenberg and filmmaker Harrod Blank (Wild Wheels, Automorphosis) sparks a captivating portrayal of the multifaceted life of a transgender woman. Blank, son of revered documentarian Les Blank, first hires Rusty to work on his broken-down van, an interactive art car adorned with cameras, leading to their unexpected collaboration....   More >

Marighella

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Carlos Marighella, a politician, writer, and Marxist insurrectionist, remains one of Brazil’s most divisive historical figures. During the military coup of 1964 and subsequent right-wing dictatorship, Marighella fought against the destruction of human rights, leaving his wife and child behind to pursue a revolution in the streets that would ultimately lead to his bloody assassination. Marighella...   More >

Crows and Sparrows: (Wuya yu maque)

Film - Feature | October 6 | 1:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A Shanghai apartment building serves as a microcosm of China’s class struggles in Zheng Junli’s striking urban drama, filmed during the last days of China’s Nationalist rule and already looking forward to, as one character states, “a New Society.” A scheming Nationalist official and his greedy wife purchase an apartment building and proceed to lord it over the hardworking families still renting...   More >

The Kingmaker

Film - Documentary | October 6 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Dubbed “Marie Antoinette with shoes,” Imelda Marcos was the first lady of the Philippines for twenty-one years, notorious for her lavish lifestyle while her country sank into unrest and economic turmoil. She and her husband Ferdinand amassed a fortune in the billions before they were forced into exile during the 1986 revolution. Director Lauren Greenfield first featured Marcos in her book...   More >

The Whistlers

Film - Feature | October 6 | 7:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

One of the pillars of the Romanian New Wave, Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) is known for his somber, wry studies of human nature, but none of his previous features will fully prepare you for The Whistlers, a sleek and exhilarating thriller that pays homage to the escapist spirit of Hollywood’s yesteryear. Veteran character actor Vlad Ivanov (Snowpiercer) gives a standout performance as...   More >

The Servant

Film - Feature | October 9 | 3:10 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 >

Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome

Film - Documentary | October 9 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This haunting, poetic film calls forth the dreams of nine sixteen-year-old orphans in Kazakhstan. With the aid of filmmakers Jeanne C. Finley and Lyazzat Khanim, the teens present vividly imagined visions of their future lives. Their current reality is quickly changing as they prepare to move away from the only place they’ve known as home and the only family they’ve ever had. The fact that these...   More >

Cine Latino: ¡Las Sandinistas!

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

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 >

Film Screening - The Long Shadow

Film - Documentary | October 10 | 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. | Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium

Panelist/Discussants:  john powell, Haas Institute; Frances Causey

Sponsor:  400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice

Of all the divisions in America, none is as insidious and destructive as racism. In this powerful documentary, the filmmakers, both privileged daughters of the South, who were haunted by their families slave owning pasts, passionately seek the hidden truth and the untold stories of how America—guided by the South's powerful political influence—steadily, deliberately and at times secretly,...   More >

The Spring River Flows East: (Yijiang chunshui xiang dong liu)

Film - Feature | October 10 | 6:30 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 >

Free Outdoor Screening: Inequality for All

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In this still timely and entertaining documentary, noted economic policy expert and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich takes on the enormous question of what has been happening to the American economy. He distills the story through the lens of widening income inequality—currently at historic highs—and explores what effects this increasing gap has not only on the economy but on our democracy...   More >

The Cave

Film - Feature | October 11 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Amani, Salim, and Samaher work in an underground hospital called “The Cave” in besieged Al Ghouta, Syria. In this haunting film from the Oscar-nominated team behind Last Men in Aleppo, the camera is a mute witness to their daily work treating victims of Syria’s civil war. Through the lens of director Feras Fayyad, the smoke-filled city suggests dystopian sci-fi, its inhabitants living in...   More >

Homework: (Mashq-e shab)

Film - Feature | October 11 | 8 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 >

Coup 53

Film - Documentary | October 12 | 12 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Nine years in the making, Iranian director Taghi Amirani’s feature film debut is a fascinating investigation into the 1953 Anglo-American coup d’état in Iran that displaced democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah, turning Iran into a despotic monarchy. Tracing the coup from the events leading up to it through its aftermath, Amirani and...   More >

Varda by Agnès

Film - Feature | October 12 | 3:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A cinema institution unto herself, the delightfully irreverent Agnès Varda conducts a personal career retrospective as only she can: with accomplished skill, inimitable charm, wit, reverie, and copious wonder. The many outlets of her boundless creativity (photography, art, filmmaking, and architecture) coalesce as Varda shares insight into her artistic fancies and flights in the many projects of...   More >

Nie Er

Film - Feature | October 12 | 5:45 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The second of two films Zheng made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, this biopic celebrates the life of Nie Er, the young composer of the PRC’s national anthem, March of the Volunteers, who died at the age of twenty-three. Whereas Zheng’s first anniversary-related film, Lin Zexu, was a lavish, adventure-filled Opium War–set costumer filled with...   More >

Paranoid Park

Film - Feature | October 12 | 8:15 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Gus Van Sant returned to his roots as the foremost chronicler of Pacific Northwest teen alienation with this dreamy examination of bodies in motion and lives in stasis, which follows a young skateboarder in over his head after a trip to an edgy Portland skate park. Combining the youth culture fascination of Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho with the experimental bent of his Elephant and Last Days,...   More >

Kaifinama: A documentary on Kaifi Azmi (South Asian Literature and Arts Festival)

Film - Documentary | October 13 | 2-4 p.m. | #37 Serra Theatre

Location:  200 Serra Way, Milpitas, CA 95035

Sponsors:  Institute for South Asia Studies, South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley, Art Forum SF

Join us for the Bay Area's first South Asian Literature & Art Festival, presented by Art Forum SF in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Institute of South Asian Studies.

Tickets required

Ticket info:   Buy tickets online

In the Image: Palestinian Women Capture the Occupation

Film - Documentary | October 13 | 2:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Films about Palestinian life under Israeli occupation appear in festivals around the world, but few are actually created by those living it. In the Image springs from a unique joint Israeli–Palestinian endeavor, The Camera Project, which gave video equipment to Palestinian women living in the occupied West Bank. Their day-to-day recordings capture both the mundane and the extraordinary,...   More >

First Graders: (Avali ha)

Film - Feature | October 13 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Innocence meets regulation and play meets punishment in this documentary on unwary first graders reporting for their first day of school. Filming in one of Tehran’s poorest school districts, Kiarostami splits the action between two polarized battlegrounds: the playground and the principal’s office. In one, ways of socializing, communicating, and working in groups are taught or intuited; in the...   More >

First Graders: (Avali ha)

Film - Feature | October 13 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Innocence meets regulation and play meets punishment in this documentary on unwary first graders reporting for their first day of school. Filming in one of Tehran’s poorest school districts, Kiarostami splits the action between two polarized battlegrounds: the playground and the principal’s office. In one, ways of socializing, communicating, and working in groups are taught or intuited; in the...   More >

This Sporting Life

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Lindsay Anderson’s first feature plunges into the muck of manhood: it opens in the midst of a blunt, muddy clash of bodies on the rugby field. A tooth-crushing punch batters footballer Richard Harris and knocks loose a series of fragmented flashbacks, to the mines and to a boarding house where a pretty widow (Rachel Roberts) resists Harris’s ungainly advances, until a violent need erupts. These...   More >

Film Screening Series: Arab Cities | Al Awda Ila Homs

Film - Documentary | October 15 | 5:30-8 p.m. | 172 Wurster Hall

Speakers/Performers:  Ahmad Diab, Professor, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Ussama Makdisi, Visiting Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Screening: ‘AL-AWDA ILA HOMS ’ (THE RETURN TO HOMS)

Director: Tarek Derki, 2013 (89 min)

Guests: Prof. Ahmad Diab (Department of Near-Eastern Studies) and Prof. Ussama Makdisi (Department of History)

Moderated by: Heba Alnajada (Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Architecture)

Synopsis: A documentary that looks behind the barricades of besieged Homs and the material and immaterial...   More >

If . . .

Film - Feature | October 16 | 3:10 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 >

The Infiltrators: Film Screening and Live Q&A: Meet the filmmakers of the award winning new film followed by a screening.

Film - Feature | October 16 | 6:30-8:05 p.m. | A1 Hearst Field Annex

Location:  2545-2581 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704

Speaker/Performer:  Alex Rivera, Co-Director, The Infiltrators

Sponsor:  Latinx Research Center

The Infiltrators is a docu-thriller that tells the true story of young immigrants who get arrested by Border Patrol, and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center – on purpose.

Found Images: Films by Scott Stark

Film - Feature | October 16 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Tonight’s program focuses on one strain in local filmmaker Scott Stark’s extensive oeuvre—the use of found images, whether industrial footage, movie trailers, amateur films, pornography, books, photographs, or, in the case of I’ll Walk with God, emergency information cards. Conceptually intriguing, often humorous, always surprising, these films are also often uncharacterizable. Stark constructs...   More >

The Silent Enemy: Representation of Native Americans

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Exploring the on-screen representation of Native Americans over the course of forty years reveals varying interplays between how they see and how they are seen. The Silent Enemy, a 1930 feature-length melodrama based on detailed accounts of French missionaries, is a collaboration with Native American actors to recount Ojibwe life as it was before the arrival of European settlers. The educational...   More >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | October 18 | 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 >

Shiraz: A Romance of India

Film - Feature | October 18 | 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 >

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

Film - Feature | October 18 | 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 | October 18 | 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 >

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives

Film - Documentary | October 18 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Quite possibly as relevant today as it was on its debut over forty years ago, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives is widely considered the first feature-length documentary on gay and lesbian identity. The film presents a diverse group of twenty-six gay and lesbian individuals who describe their struggle to live a decent life in America despite prejudice, discriminatory laws, and society’s...   More >

Darling

Film - Feature | October 19 | 5 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“What are you ashamed of in Britain today?” asks tweedy TV commentator Dirk Bogarde, interviewing the average man-on-the-street. Well, for starters . . . John Schlesinger’s bitter, stylish answer is framed as the autobiography of Diana (Julie Christie), a media darling telling/selling “My Story” to Ideal Woman magazine. Her blandly self-justifying narration is undercut by the images as she leaves...   More >

Close-Up: (Nama-ye nazdik)

Film - Feature | October 19 | 8 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 >

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

Film - Feature | October 20 | 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 | October 20 | 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 >

Husband and Wife

Film - Feature | October 20 | 4:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

An absorbing example of genre filmmaking in the People’s Republic of China, Husband and Wife could at first glance be mistaken for any other romantic melodrama chronicling the rise and decline of a married couple’s love; here, though, that love takes place in (and is entirely defined by) a realm of political upheaval and Maoist ideology. A Shanghai intellectual marries an illiterate peasant...   More >

Stories We Tell

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Actress-turned-director Sarah Polley sets her gaze toward her own family history—and her remarkable, remarkably unconventional mother—in this moving, constantly surprising documentary on home life, marriage, and female independence. Polley and cinematographer Iris Ng weave between straightforward, shot-on-digital first-person interviews and more romanticized, gauzy fictional Super 8mm “home...   More >

Period. End of Sentence: A screening of the Academy-Award winning documentary, followed by panel discussion with MCAH experts

Film - Documentary | October 22 | 5:30-7:30 p.m. | Berkeley Way West, Colloquium Rooms, First Floor

Panelist/Discussants:  Julianna Deardorff, PhD, Professor, UC Berkeley Maternal and Child Health Program, Director, UC Berkeley Center of Excellence in Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health; Ndola Prata MD, MSc, Professor, UC Berkeley Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Program, Director, Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health; Dilys Walker, MD, Professor, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, University of California San Francisco

Sponsor:  Center of Excellence in Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health

The Center of Excellence in Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health and the Bixby Center for Population Health & Sustainability present Period. End of Sentence.

Winner of Best Documentary Short Academy Award and directed by Iranian-American filmmaker Rayka Zehtabchi, the film documents the story of a rural village in India, where a group of women band together to install and operate a sanitary...   More >

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The Whistleblower of My Lai

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Longtime activist/filmmaker Connie Field (The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter) follows the Kronos Quartet’s production of Jonathan Berger and Harriet Chessman’s opera My Lai, which takes at its heart the actions and life of Hugh Thompson, the “whistleblower” helicopter pilot who revealed the 1968 massacre by US troops in Vietnam. Tackling the concept of heroism, the definition of morality in...   More >

Blow-Up

Film - Feature | October 23 | 3:10 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 >

Film Screening Series: Arab Cities | Sur La Planche

Film - Feature | October 23 | 5:30-8 p.m. | 172 Wurster Hall

Speakers/Performers:  Leila Kilani; Stefania Pandolfo, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Director: Leïla Kilani, 2011 (110 min)

Conversation with director Leïla Kilani and Stephania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology.

Synopsis: A factory worker (Soufia Issami) believes that she and her best friend are being groomed for criminal activities by a pair of more privileged women.

Tongues Untied

Film - Documentary | October 23 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Tongues Untied is about the silence that envelops the lives of black gay men. This exhilarating work is a loquacious attempt to break free of the homophobia and racism that mute the possibilities for human fulfillment. Marlon Riggs creates a poetic pastiche that has the emotional uplift of gospel music and the sobering impact of reportage. The words of gay poets, personal testimony, rap tableaux,...   More >

Cine Latino: La Camarista (The Chambermaid)

Film - Documentary | October 23 | 7-9 p.m. | 160 Kroeber Hall

Sponsor:  Center for Latin American Studies

Eve, a young chambermaid, works long hours at a luxurious Mexico City hotel. A young single mother who travels far to get to her place of work, Eve has aspirations for the future and hopes that her diligence will get her a coveted spot as the cleaner on an executive floor. She confronts the monotony of long workdays with budding friendships and quiet examinations of forgotten belongings. 102...   More >

Free Outdoor Screening: Inequality for All

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

In this still timely and entertaining documentary, noted economic policy expert and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich takes on the enormous question of what has been happening to the American economy. He distills the story through the lens of widening income inequality—currently at historic highs—and explores what effects this increasing gap has not only on the economy but on our democracy...   More >

Billy Liar

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The problem child of the British New Wave, Billy Liar has always had an attitude issue, preferring to daydream, mock, and tell lies while others raged and drank. No dreary realism for this study of an outsider imagining a better world outside his boring northern town; instead, director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) concentrates on fantasy and satiric lunacy, exchanging the era’s typical...   More >

Reflections and Affirmations: Marlon Riggs and Others

Film - Series | October 25 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

This program puts the work of Marlon Riggs in conversation with that of other artists reflecting on, affirming, and celebrating their identities. In Relatives by Julie Dash, Ishmael Huston-Jones recounts family history in a cinematic duet with his mother. Isaac Julien’s This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement counters clinical government PSAs about AIDS with an uncompromising defense of romance and...   More >

Playtime

Film - Feature | October 25 |  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 >

Black Life: Films by Ephraim Asili

Film - Feature | October 26 |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Writer Ruth Gebreyesus introduces four short films from The Diaspora Suite by filmmaker, DJ, and traveler Ephraim Asili. Created over the course of seven years, the suite is built around footage shot in American and international locations—from Harlem, Philadelphia, and Detroit to Ethiopia, Ghana, and Jamaica—each an important site within the African diaspora. Locating a shared geographical and...   More >

Abbas Kiarostami: Five Short Films

Film - Feature | October 26 | 3 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Anyone curious about what episodes of Sesame Street would look like if they were directed by one of the world’s greatest filmmakers should catch this collection of children’s shorts by Abbas Kiarostami, who began his career making films for an Iranian children’s cultural institute. Whether teaching kids to identify colors, imparting the value of going to the dentist, celebrating the joys of...   More >

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Just months after Monster made Aileen Wuornos a household name—and Charlize Theron an Oscar darling—documentarian Nick Broomfield and co-director/cinematographer Joan Churchill unleashed this riveting portrait of the real-life serial killer. Of the two films, it remains the more chilling experience, an unflinching face-to-face encounter with a deeply damaged soul who, as she prepares for her...   More >

Cine Latino: Wiñaypacha (Eternity)

Film - Documentary | October 30 | 7-8:30 p.m. | 160 Kroeber Hall

Sponsor:  Center for Latin American Studies

Wiñaypacha is the first film shot entirely in Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by Aymara people in Peru and Bolivia. Incorporating and expressing the intricacies of Aymara language and cosmology, Wiñaypacha depicts the story of an elderly couple named Willka and Phaxsi (Sun and Moon). Amidst the backdrop of the captivating and rugged Andes mountains, they wait for their son who has left for...   More >

Afterimage: Sky Hopinka in Person

Film - Series | October 30 | 7 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“The searching, striking digital films of Sky Hopinka are complex formal arrangements, conceptually and aesthetically dense, characterized by an intricate layering of word and image. But they are also wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, color and motion. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Hopinka has described his work as...   More >

Séance on a Wet Afternoon

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

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Even with a new generation of directors, there would always be the English psychological thriller lorded (or ladied) over by dotty women with strange powers. In Séance on a Wet Afternoon, the marvelous, too-little-known Kim Stanley is Myra, a medium with a message: to bring attention to her “gift,” she and her beleaguered mate Billy (Richard Attenborough, who also produced the film) kidnap a...   More >