Frederick Wiseman: City Hall, 2020
Frederick Wiseman: America at Work
October 18, 2025–February 19, 2026
With the federal government slashing staff and reneging on promised funding to local governments and grant-supported institutions (including BAMPFA), this timely series spotlights the labor of public employees through seven decades of documentary films from Frederick Wiseman, “an artist of extraordinary vision” (Mark Binelli, New York Times).
Please note that Addison Street and the BAMPFA Parking Lot will be closed all day on Friday, October 17 due to a Cal Athletics game.
You can find additional parking lots and alternate ways of getting to BAMPFA on our Getting Here page. Please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-0808 if you need assistance.
Cheryl Dunye’s Short Work
In Conversation: Cheryl Dunye and Allegra Madsen
Cheryl Dunye’s fantastic short films chart the evolution of her voice: ”DIY, Black, queer, and always a little bit disruptive. These shorts are where I found my vision and learned to bend form to tell truths that didn’t yet have a genre.”
Series: Cheryl Dunye Selects!
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Directed by Roy Andersson, 2014
Winner of the 2014 Venice Film Festival, Roy Andersson’s third film in his Living Trilogy refines his unique aesthetic—part Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. “What if Ingmar Bergman directed Upright Citizens Brigade?” (Wesley Morris).
No. 89 Shimen Road
Directed by Shu Haolun, 2010
No. 89 Shimen Road vividly recalls not only an era of Shanghai and the nation’s history, but also a crisis in values affecting its youth that resonates with the present. Preceded by a Hearst Metrotone Newsreel from 1935.
Series: Cities & Cinema: Shanghai
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
Directed by Frederick Wiseman, 2017
Frederick Wiseman’s documentary provides welcome confirmation of the survival of intelligent life in discouraging times, following the work behind and beyond the books at the New York Public Library.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Directed by Ivan Dixon, 1973
Introduction: Michael Mark Cohen
In Conversation: Greg Bridges and Nomathandé Dixon
Restored 35mm Archival Print
Ivan Dixon’s chronicle of the CIA’s first Black agent turned freedom fighter on the streets of Chicago is “guerrilla cinema at its finest—radical, unapologetic, and still dangerous. It lit the match for a conversation on resistance that we’re still having today” (Cheryl Dunye).
Series: Cheryl Dunye Selects!
Traveling Actors
Directed by Mikio Naruse, 1940
This atypically comic outing for Mikio Naruse follows an itinerant Kabuki troupe, focusing on a pair of actors who play the two halves of a horse—until a real animal is hired for the part.
Outsider. Freud
Directed by Yair Qedar, 2025
In Conversation: Yair Qedar, Harriet Wolfe, MD, and Robby Adler Peckerar
“There is no writer or philosopher who has shaped the way we think about our own thoughts, dreams, relationships, and inner lives more profoundly than Sigmund Freud . . . Outsider. Freud illuminates Freud’s life in new ways” (Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post).
Copresented with New Lehrhaus and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art Life
Series: Special Screenings 2025
About Endlessness
Directed by Roy Andersson, 2019
Roy Andersson’s most recent take on the foibles, disasters, and despair of human existence—and some of its hope and beauty as well. “Individually somber and cumulatively exhilarating” (New York Times).
Mako Idemitsu Videos
Recoding the conventions of soap opera melodrama, Mako Idemitsu creates domestic narratives that examine the cultural role and identity of women within the context of the late twentieth-century Japanese family.
Series: Alternative Visions
Accessibility
If you have any questions about accessibility or need accommodations to attend a film screening, please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-1412 (Wed–Sun, 11 AM–7 PM) as soon as you can. Advance notice helps us fulfill your request.
Berkeley Art Museum
and Pacific Film Archive
2120 Oxford St.
Berkeley, CA 94720
