Coming Soon: Mill Valley Film Festival at BAMPFA

16mm Notebooks and Diaries

Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas were forerunners in the development of poetic 16mm cinema sketches and diaries documenting everyday life, and their work inspired many filmmakers, including Mako Idemitsu and Ute Aurand.

Series: Alternative Visions

You, the Living

Directed by Roy Andersson, 2007

“‘Keaton-esque’” hardly begins to describe this brutally deadpan comedy . . . [Roy Andersson] seems to have translated the entire range of human misery into a loosely connected series of slapstick gags” (Chicago Reader).

Series: The Signature Cinema of Roy Andersson

Stranger Inside

Directed by Cheryl Dunye, 2001
In Conversation: Cheryl Dunye and Lisa Armstrong

Free admission. Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 6 PM.

Yolanda Ross stars as Treasure, a tough, young butch, in this terrific, rarely seen women’s prison drama, in which Chery Dunye centers the experiences of Black queer women behind bars.

Series: Cheryl Dunye Selects!

Exile Shanghai

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger, 1997

Digital Restoration

Fascinating and rich with wry humor, Exile Shanghai is an extraordinary cultural odyssey that affectionately conjures up the lost Jewish world of 1930s Shanghai.

Series: Cities & Cinema: Shanghai

The Fall of Otrar

Directed by Ardak Amirkulov, 1991

4K Digital Restoration

Set in the early thirteenth century, Kazakh New Wave director Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar is a hypnotic epic about one of world history’s crucial military battles. Written by Amirkulov's former teacher Aleksei German and his wife, Svetlana Karmalita.

Series: Special Screenings 2025

Short Films & Commercials by Roy Andersson

Introduction: Linda Haverty Rugg

These hilarious little capitalist nightmares will change how you look at advertising. Droll, strange, completely original: “the best commercials in the world” (Ingmar Bergman). With Roy Andersson’s three early shorts plus World of Glory and Something Happened.

Series: The Signature Cinema of Roy Andersson

Scattered Clouds

Directed by Mikio Naruse, 1967

A young woman still grieving over her husband’s death in a car accident meets the driver of the car, and soon fate, and the past, come to call. This is Mikio Naruse’s last film and “one of his strangest and strongest” (Phillip Lopate).

Series: Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman

Everything Is Now: J. Hoberman in Person

In Person: J. Hoberman

BAMPFA welcomes J. Hoberman to discuss his book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. He will also present a program of films representing the cross-pollination of poetry, painting, film, music, and performance the book chronicles.

Series: Alternative Visions