A woman relieves the heavy burden from her past when she finally exacts revenge on the man who murdered her entire family.

Presented as part of The 30th Annual Filipino International Cine Festival

The debut feature from Jeong Jae-eun, one of a handful of female directors to break into the South Korean film industry, focuses on five young women, recent high school graduates living in the industrial port city of Incheon and facing a precarious future together, in addition to having to handle the practical exigencies of caring for the feline that they’ve communally adopted. Bae, whose Tae-hee makes ends meet with shifts at her family’s sauna and occasional work as a typist for a cerebral palsy-afflicted poet, anchors an exceedingly fine ensemble cast in Jeong’s moving drama of fraying friendships and economic uncertainty, also one of the first films to acknowledge the increasingly central role of text messaging in 21st-century communication and find a way to integrate this new, faceless form of “keeping in touch” into a filmed narrative.

From the producers of MINARI and MOONLIGHT comes the next great coming-of-age journey.

Fourteen-year-old Olmo and his family are struggling to make ends meet in 1979 New Mexico. Due to an illness that keeps his father Nestor confined to his bed, his mother Cecilia, his sister Ana, and even he himself must contribute to the daily caretaking responsibilities. Olmo, in the throes of selfish adolescence, would much rather hang out with his best friend Miguel and try to impress his beautiful next-door neighbor Nina than take care of his dad. And when Nina finally invites him to a party on the day that he’s been left alone with his dad, Olmo will do whatever he can to get out of his duties, embarking on a journey of mischief and chaos. In his desperate attempt to escape his home life, he will come to realize that the place of his deepest pain is also where he will find solace: with his family.

See it in:

Standard version: English & Spanish with English subtitles

LAS version: English & Spanish with Spanish subtitles for the English dialogue and English subtitles for the Spanish dialogue, making it accessible to both English- and Spanish-speaking audiences.

Language Note: Approximately half of the screenings will be presented in the standard English-subtitled version. The remaining screenings will use the Spanish-subtitled (LAS) version, which provides Spanish subtitles for the English dialogue while retaining English subtitles for the Spanish dialogue, making these screenings accessible to both English- and Spanish-speaking audiences.

Nota sobre el idioma: Aproximadamente la mitad de las funciones se presentarán en la versión estándar con subtítulos en inglés. Las funciones restantes utilizarán la versión con subtítulos en español (LAS), que presenta subtítulos en español para los diálogos en inglés y mantiene subtítulos en inglés para los diálogos en español, por lo que estas funciones son accesibles tanto para el público hispanohablante como angloparlante.

When an uptown New Yorker innocently meets a downtown girl, he’s irresistibly drawn into a vortex of wild, malevolent, and increasingly paranoid adventures in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. After striking up a conversation with the enigmatic Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a neighborhood café, mild-mannered word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) accepts an invitation to visit her SoHo loft. Nothing in Paul’s ordinary life has prepared him for the surreal encounters that await: Marcy’s eccentric artist roommate Kiki (Linda Fiorentino); cocktail waitress Julie (Teri Garr); ice cream vendor Gail (Catherine O’Hara); June (Verna Bloom), who lives beneath a neighborhood nightclub; and Mark (Robert Plunkett), a bartender eager for his first gay experience. As one bizarre mishap leads to another, Paul longs only for the safety of his Upper East Side apartment—but will he ever make it home?

If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated best-selling poet, Pulitzer Prize-winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly fifty years in order to open herself – and her readers – to the known and unknowable world. From a lonely childhood to literary fame, Oliver’s life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. Her poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites, speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about attention, presence, and the human relationship with the natural world – issues that feel especially pressing in an era of climate crisis, digital distraction, and social fragmentation.

Featuring interviews with her close friends, including John Waters, never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive, and recitations of her work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, and Oprah Winfrey, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World considers the poet’s long lifetime of work in context, capturing the uniqueness of her world and the natural beauty that inspired her.

"Mary Oliver’s poetry moved Oprah & Stephen Colbert to tears. This documentary shows why…. If you like Oliver’s poems, [this film] is a documentary to see. If you don’t know Mary Oliver, this is a chance to discover something special." - Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle

Adnan, a young art student, arrives in New York City to flat-sit for the summer. He begins interning at a gallery where an unconventional older artist he once encountered is being exhibited. As moments from his past and present begin to intertwine, a series of encounters—both artistic and erotic—open cracks in his everyday reality.

Official selection: Cannes, New York Film Festival

“Humorous and horny in equal measure…the kind of queer art that (while it’s still legal) feels timeless and playful—a testament to the magical places the baser instincts can lead us.” – Nashville Scene

Co-presented by the Japan Society of Northern California

“Kurosawa has made one of his best films, a work that feels a bit like Agatha Christie, a bit like Shakespeare, and even a bit like Samurai Columbo.” —RogerEbert.com

Celebrated Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Serpent’s Path) explores a new path in this lush treatment of Honobu Yonezawa's prizewinning historical novel, detailing palace intrigue in the court of a samurai nobleman during the Azuchi era at the end of the 16th century. Turning against Oda Nobunaga, the ruthless, power-hungry warlord he previously served, Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki, of Departures) is besieged by Oda’s forces and bedevilled by a series of inexplicable crimes in his household. As tension rises and loyalties fray, Murashige is forced to strategize with Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda, of Kurosawa’s 2024 thriller Cloud), a samurai envoy sent by Oda and imprisoned by Murashige, while his wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka) and loyalists fight to preserve order.

Luis Valdez & filmmaker David Alvarado IN PERSON on Friday, July 31 // Filmmaker David Alvarado IN PERSON on Sunday, August 2!

Against political resistance and industry skepticism, Luis Valdez pushes Chicano storytelling from the fields to the film screen with Zoot Suit and La Bamba, crafting iconic works that challenge, celebrate, and expand America’s story.

Acclaimed playwright and director Luis Valdez recognized early on the profound impact of seeing one’s own humanity reflected onstage and on screen. He used theater to ignite change while working alongside farmworkers and Cesar Chavez, and he made films that amplified Chicano experiences. His work expanded audiences, bringing in people who had rarely seen their stories told before. Now, director David Alvarado reveals the fuel behind his legendary career.

Alvarado brings us close to Valdez, charting his career milestones and enduring cultural influence. He employs vibrant stylistic choices, using split screens, remarkable archival footage rescued from decay, and a pachuco narrator who tells it like it is by interjecting candid commentary throughout. Alvarado ensures Luis Valdez’s contributions are unmistakable and that his message — “America is Chicano” — resonates proudly, which feels especially vital for today.

Part of Chicano Visions.

Presented by RoxCine. Co-presented by Cine+Mas San Francisco Latino Film Festival and Clarion Alley Mural Project. In partnership with Cosecha Collective, an Indigenous women-led arts collaborative preserving and amplifying community stories through public art. Follow @cosechacolectiva.arte.

AMERICAN PACHUCO: THE LEGEND OF LUIS VALDEZ is now playing in theaters nationwide on its way to over 20 cities before heading to PBS this October. The release is entirely self-funded, help take it further.

Marcello Mastroianni, as a lonely city transplant, and Maria Schell, as a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise, meet by chance on a canal bridge and begin a tentative romance that quickly entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion. Luchino Visconti’s WHITE NIGHTS is an exquisite adaptation of Dostoevsky’s legendary novella, transforming this romantic, shattering tale of two restless souls into a ravishing black-and-white dream. Restored by Luce Cinecittà, from the original 35mm negative

“MASTROIANNI’S PERFORMANCE IS A DELIGHT.” – Screen Slate

“A crucial turning point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films.” – Chicago Reader

A portion of ticket sales go to benefit San Francisco’s, heroic  Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue!

The world's #1 cat video festival is back with screenings in theaters across the USA and around the world.

Oscilloscope Laboratories presents CatVideoFest 2026, a compilation of the latest and best cat videos culled from countless hours of unique submissions and sourced animations, music videos, and classic internet powerhouses. Each year, across the country, local theaters partner with nearby cat-focused charities, animal welfare associations and shelters alike — a portion of ticket proceeds from every show goes directly to local cats in need. 

Co-presented by Shatterproof

Post-Film Panel with Judge William Orrick, (Convictions Alternative Program) & Arlene Prince, (Executive Director, Ohlhoff Recovery Programs), moderated by Shatterproof CEO, Pam Jenkins, after the Sat, 8/15 show!

"Will Poulter gives one of the most understated yet shattering performances of the year in Adam Meeks’ caring and sensitive character-driven directorial debut" - Randy Myres, The Mercury News

Will Poulter and Noah Centineo deliver pitch-perfect performances as brothers Cody and Jack Parsons, each navigating a court-mandated drug rehabilitation program in a pocket of rural Ohio hit hard by the opioid epidemic. Provided with hope for the first time since their struggles began and with the support of a tireless counselor (Annette Deao), the brothers work toward a brighter, sober future.

Poulter and Centineo blend seamlessly with a supporting cast composed predominantly of non-professional actors as they share their actual experiences, pain, and optimism as they, themselves, navigate the program. Ohio-born filmmaker Adam Meeks creates a film imbued with realism for an honest, compassionate portrait of a battle being fought across America and the solidarity that flowers on its front lines.

Free advance screening (Little Roxie): Wed, 8/12 at 6pm!- 1st Come /1st Serve!

Mean Goals
Director: Ahuatl Amaro
Runtime: 17 min

Synopsis: An adorkable gay Latino joins an LGBTQ soccer team to bond with his father struggling with Alzheimer's over their shared passion for sports.

Sweet Nothing
Director: Robby Kendall
Runtime: 1hr 20 min

Synopsis: As Jack Bledsoe embarks on a journey to find and book a Drag Queen, his internalized homophobia begins to unravel his relationship with his partner and himself.

Medellin, 1987. A group of teen outcasts steals a news camera to document every detail of their dangerous lives. The first feature from acclaimed photographer and Bad Bunny music video director Stillz redefines the found footage genre as a haunting, poignant coming-of-age story with a disturbing twist. Set to an awe-inspiring score by Arca and produced by Harmony Korine’s collective EDGLRD, the film taps into the anxieties of a youth culture from the margins of history yearning to be understood.

"Exhilarating, tense, personal, and enigmatic, Barrio Triste is a compelling look at a lost generation in search of salvation, and among this year’s best first features." - C.J. Prince, The Film Stage

"A nightmarish odyssey into the depths of poverty and despair from Colombian-American director and photographer Stillz. [T]he director’s commitment to a realistic aesthetic never falters." - Jourdain Searles, RogerEbert.com

"[T]errifying and magical—as if Spielberg channeled Gabriel García Márquez. Backed by an entrancing score composed by Arca, Barrio Triste is a marvelous case of purposeful style gladly overcoming the routine in these kinds of coming-of-age stories." - Guillermo Lopez Meza, Film-Forward.com

Bullying (France)
Directed by: Christophe Madrolle
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: This video features a solitary character dancing in an abandoned, stripped-down setting. Little by little, the viewer understands that this figure is the ghost of someone who was bullied—deeply affected, traumatized, and broken by what they endured.

Hiko (Canada)
Directed by: Flavien Demeure
Runtime: 11 min

Synopsis: Hiko, an 11-year-old boy, runs away during a neighborhood festival after a disagreement with his mother over refusing to wear makeup. He stumbles upon a mysterious circus tent, where an unexpected encounter challenges his understanding of himself. This magical adventure compels him to confront personal choices and explore the expression of his own identity.

Muerde Sin Miedo (Puerto Rico)
Directed by: Cristóbal Guerra
Runtime: 12 min

Synopsis: In this modern, queer retelling of an antillean legend, a message from the heart of the islands awakens the memory of ancestral revenge within a couple. One day, amid passion, desire, and rage, the wound of the landscape compels them to repeat the act.

Ultramarino (Spain)
Directed by: Maren Zubeldia, Silvina Guglielmotti
Runtime: 19 min

Synopsis: Zazu, in the midst of searching their identity, must choose whether to take part in their village’s traditional celebration by assuming a predetermined role, or stay true to what they feel.

Uniformed (Brazil)
Directed by: Dan Biurrum
Runtime: 25 min

Synopsis: A gay military police officer, Gustavo lives two irreconcilable realities. In a world where the uniform condemns him to hiding, he feels his true nature being crushed by fear. But for how long is silence a shield, and when does it become a weapon? 

Why We Pride (U.K.)
Directed by: Natalie Scarsbrook
Runtime: 9 min

Synopsis: Why We Pride centres on the people behind Southend Pride, exploring what the event means to those who organise it, attend it, and find connection through it. Through voices from across the community, the film reflects on visibility, belonging, and the importance of creating affirming spaces in a coastal town often overlooked in wider conversations.

Just Not Naked Enough
Directed by: Sean Au
Runtime: 13 min

Synopsis: When a writer returns to celebrate one last birthday with his estranged husband, old wounds and buried feelings threaten to boil over.

MascLooking
Directed by: Jonathan Brandon Hammond
Runtime: 9 min

Synopsis: After two friends banter over the pros and cons of using Grindr, one is left chatting with a mysterious stranger. And he’s getting closer…

My Age Now
Directed by: Daniel Talbott
Runtime: 15 min

Synopsis: On a Sunday that is a brief respite from everyday life, a young man is haunted by a final voice message, a break up, and a ‘goodbye’ he can’t take back.

Paint and Leather
Directed by: Ian Michael McDonald
Runtime: 10 min

Synopsis: A silent queer romantic fantasy that follows Paint, a lonely Pierrot clown who finds an unexpected connection with Leather, a mysterious biker, after a chance encounter in a dive bar. Drawn together through glances, movement, and desire, the two men go on an erotic journey through a city that never sleeps.

Redlining
Directed by: Jason Stuart
Runtime: 18 min

Synopsis: A black & white family lives on the same property during the 1970s in the Georgia REDLINING era. The film explores the themes of generational wealth, prejudice, homosexuality, women’s rights and the legacy of discrimination in the American South.

Your Cookie
Directed by: Ryan Harman
Runtime: 10 min

Synopsis: A young fashion stylist treats a friend to lunch with his boss’s credit card. The rest of the day does not go as planned.

Cockroach
Directed by: Justice Maya Singleton & Liliana Padilla
Runtime: 22 min

Synopsis: A black transgender man plans to exchange sex for top surgery money with an older gay man until his night hook up turns into a hunt for a cockroach who inspires him to open his heart and conquer his fears.

I Came Back to Life
Directed by: Amina Shareef Ali & Hilda Schmelling
Runtime: 20 min

Synopsis: An aging trans woman strives to heal her broken heart on a DIY folk punk tour with her long lost ex.

Jacob in Texas
Directed by:  Rebecca Adler
Runtime: 10 min

Synopsis: After undergoing conversion therapy as a teen, Jacob must flee Texas’ anti-trans climate.

Not Exactly Strangers
Directed by: Ryan Rox
Runtime: 15 min

Synopsis: A tipsy hookup between a Latine trans woman and a rough-edged skater boy from her past becomes a comedic, yet intimate deep-dive into post-surgical sex, lingering history, and a body she’s still learning to celebrate.

Top
Directed by: Jake & Danielle Morgan-Scharhon
Runtime: 16 min

Synopsis: Finally at the hospital for his long awaited gender affirming top surgery, Matt Levit, with lively girlfriend Leisha Meyer by his side, navigates the bureaucracy of the top surgery process. But once Matt is thrown deep into surgery day, he suddenly finds his present intertwining with his past self, Kimberly. 

The story of photographer/director James Bidgood whose 1960’s beefcake photographs were unlike any others. Depicting elaborate fantasy scenarios drenched in lush color they transcended the genre. His film Pink Narcissus was initially credited to ‘Anonymous’ on its 1971 release date shrouding it in mystery. Falsely attributed to Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol, among others, it wasn’t until almost twenty years later that it was revealed to be Jim’s work.

Co-presented by The National AIDS Memorial & Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
Panel Discussion moderated by Sister Roma after the screening!

Stories from the early days of the AIDS crisis: When most people fled from the epidemic or ignored it altogether, a few brave folks ran towards it. Hear from the doctors, nurses, friends, families and partners who took care of their loved ones dying from AIDS related complications while the rest of the world abandoned them.

When Michael is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at 43, his world begins to unravel. Searching for meaning, he finds healing in the wisdom of a Cherokee spiritual guide and the unwavering love of James, the man who becomes his husband. As memories slip away, Michael discovers that love is the one thing time cannot erase.

A Handsome Man
Directed by: Marcelo Núñez
Runtime: 8 min

Synopsis: To be called handsome is such a weird thing, especially after being left many times before by different men. The handsome promised he will never allow to be hurt again, even after the right one just appeared in his life. Can the promise of true love overcome the fear of pain? Is it a risk worth taking?

Double Booked
Directed by: Star Abdul Karim, Piper Kinion, Inigo Sherwani
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: Cursed by a witch as children, Leslie and Jordan are shapeshifters trading off time in human versus animal form, never able to both be human at once. When Leslie's date is accidentally scheduled at the same time as Jordan's job interview, they resort to "stealing" humanity back and forth from each other in order to look normal to their potential suitor and boss, respectively. Eventually, the two realize they are being selfish and compromise.

La Cosas Que Brillan
Directed by: Kristal Sotomayor
Runtime: 11 min

Synopsis: A curious trans mermaid defies her mother’s warnings to venture up to the surface, only to discover the world above is not what she dreamt. Las Cosas Que Brillan explores the impacts of environmental destruction, and the danger of being desired in a postcolonial world.

Birds Nest
Directed by: Leo Pickard
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: An animated retelling of the director’s personal journey with his body as a transgender man from Texas.

Medieval Wound Man
Directed by: Piper Kinion
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: Freshly-spawned, an artificial human flees an anatomical theater—with medical students in hot pursuit. 

Equinoccio
Directed by Naomi Pasmanick
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: Equinoccio is a Bolero that features the sacred Santeria drum Batá and a soaring string arrangement by an all-female, San Francisco-based string section. Equinoccio paints the picture of two star-crossed lovers caught in the vice-grip of a love that endures the change of the seasons, and enormous distance.

Remember You Got Me
Directed by Janet Van Ham
Runtime: 5 min

Synopsis: Romance and friendship transcend stark differences as a woman reassures her lover and community of dance friends offering a hand in the darkness when the burden is too much to bear. 

Heart Wide Open
Directed by: Lauren Luxenberg
Runtime: 5 min

Synopsis: In Madame Gandhi’s “Heart Wide Open,” a group of Black and Brown femmes and queer dancers move through a landscape of raw, rhythmic expression. Their movements—grounded, passionate, and tribal in energy—pulse in conversation with Gandhi’s vocals and an instrumental swell of drums, saxophone, and bass. 

Nocturnal Animals
Directed by Eryn Wilson
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: A lonely, emo werewolf finds self acceptance through a community of strange werewolves.

Good Stuff
Directed by: Edwin Lai
Runtime: 4 min

Synopsis: The Official music video starring Joya and Cinzia Lau

The Narcissist
Directed by: Earl Gantner
Runtime: 3 min

Synopsis: Bored with everyday life, the narcissist (Benjamin Tanner) lubes up and embarks on a journey in search of the perfect fantasy. 

Smells Like Soap
Directed by: Indica Marley DeRose
Runtime: 6 min

After their recent marriage, Vela and Charlie live together for the first time. As Vela's proclamations of love become increasingly intense, Charlie realizes she doesn't know the person she married. Vela starts to suspect that Charlie is being unfaithful and decides to save her from her sins.

Players
Directed by: Francesca Burrani
Runtime: 11 min

Synopsis: A fetish film exploring BDSM, pleasure and body positivity.  

Chimera
Directed by: Marlow Magdalene
Runtime: 13 min

Synopsis: Isabel's world shatters when she realizes her brief relationship with the volatile, magnetic couple, Amelia and Theo, entangled her in Theo’s growing web of violence. Part dance film, part cheeky thriller, we follow Isabel’s internal and interpersonal duet with revenge as she heals from betrayal. 

Kansas, 1989
Directed by: Clayton Dean Smith
Runtime: 13 min

Synopsis: The story of a Midwestern teen in the 80s on the verge of coming out, and the night of danger that changes the course of his life.

Plaything
Directed by: A.B. Allen
Runtime: 14 min

Synopsis: An innocent 20-something Clem is courted by charming Kevin, but as Clem falls deeper, he begins to realize their relationship isn't just imperfect, but something far more sinister.

Glimmer
Directed by: Vicente Garcia
Runtime: 12 min

Synopsis: After losing a career-making deal, a queer Latinx fashion designer discovers the power of "glimmers" small, magic-like moments that lead him to take an unexpected leap of faith in his life.

Fighting Spaces
Directed by: Patricio Matos
Runtime: 17 min

Synopsis: Fighting Spaces is a short documentary about Doc — a semi-professional boxer from the Bronx, a military veteran, and founder of the ONYX Brooklyn chapter, a leather organization that offers membership, education, and support for Black and Brown people within the kink and BDSM community.

The Roommate
Directed by: Whitney Bryan
Runtime: 15 min

Synopsis: Kirsten has recently moved to a new city and is consumed by depression and loneliness, listlessly moving through her days. Her dreary reality is disrupted when Sharon, the ghost of the former tenant in Kirsten’s apartment, appears to her repeatedly.

Pismo Beach
Directed by: Christian Tucci
Runtime: 15 min

Synopsis: At a gig, a drag performer is confronted by a lonely stranger with an eerie coincidence to share.

Grace
Directed by: Jana Kealohaokeakua Park
Runtime: 13 min

Synopsis: Honolulu, 1959: Over a family dinner, two women hide their forbidden love—one resisting the pressure to marry, the other her nation's admission to the United States.

Sequoia
Directed by: Hazel Merrell
Runtime: 10 min

Synopsis: A drama with fantasy elements in which an immortal woman and her reincarnating firefighter girlfriend fight over her future in the career after a coworker is hospitalized.

Fish & Chips
Directed by: Macadie Amoroso
Runtime: 13 min

Synopsis: Fab plans a surprise for Cassie on their first anniversary, but Cassie's rough day, coupled with a party popper mishap, leads to a heated argument over dinner options. What starts as a takeaway tiff over Caribbean or pizza spirals into an identity battle, revealing deep-seated resentments about their racial and queer identities.

Birds of Paradise
Directed by: Ira Irvani
Runtime: 13 min

Synopsis: In 1930s Hollywood, a lesbian director’s film battles the Motion Picture Production Code Administration to protect her queer film, risking her career - and the loyalty of her cast - to maintain the homosexual themes in her film.

About Face
Directed by: Robin Cloud
Runtime: 12 min

Synopsis: The category is: freedom. After getting kicked out of an elite boarding school, a young Black lesbian finds herself — and her stage — in the small-town Ball culture of Hartford, Connecticut.

Lesbians in Boystown
Directed by: Betsy Kalin
Runtime: 27 min

Synopsis: Forgotten history of lesbians and queer women in West Hollywood, the first “gay city” in the U.S. The documentary honors lesbian activism through Dyke Marches, the AIDS crisis, nonprofit organizing, and grassroots work ensuring that this legacy is remembered despite our culture’s predilection towards lesbian invisibility.

The New Gardener
Directed by: Ryan Parma
Runtime: 16 min

Synopsis: Larry and Leo's long-term relationship is put to the ultimate test by the arrival of a very sexy, very criminal young man posing as their new gardener. Shot on location and set in Palm Springs, California, this comedic tale of sex, robbery, and remarriage stars Guy Branum and Johnny Sibilly.

Only Bears
Directed by: Billy Clift
Runtime: 16 min

Synopsis: Over the course of one wildly unpredictable day, two married bears attempt to rekindle their romance-but between traffic, screenings, queer social chaos, and a stranger handing them used Pizza, life keeps acting like the pushy “third” in their relationship.

Encuerados
Directed by: Orlando Bedolla
Runtime: 60 min

Synopsis: Encuerados chronicles the year-long involvement of nine Latino men in the leather scene, primarily focusing on the historical attainment of the first Latino man winning the title of Mr. Los Angeles Leather, Leo Iriarte.

After a betrayal shatters their marriage, a Filipino American writer and his husband must navigate guilt, grief, and the quiet labor of care as they face the long road back to one another, one fractured moment at a time.

The story of Elaine Hamilton, a timid woman nearing her 30th birthday who must make the difficult choice between motherhood and medically induced photosynthesis. In a world that is quite literally suffocating, society has become dependent on the oxygen-producing Sunshine Girls to sustain life.

Filmmaker Poh Si Teng IN PERSON with film subjects Dr. Thaer Ahmad and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa Mon 8/24 (Don Young moderating) & Tue 8/25 (Pam Grady moderating)!

Co-presented by the Arab Film & Media Institute (AFMI) and the Jewish Film Institute

From Oscar®-nominated and Emmy® Award-winning filmmaker Poh Si Teng, American Doctor follows three American physicians— Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian—united by a single oath to save lives. After volunteering in besieged hospitals in Gaza, they return home determined to fight for the patients and colleagues they left behind, taking their battle from the front lines of war to the halls of Congress.

Few animated films conjure worlds as strange, beautiful, and mysterious as The Time Masters. This visionary collaboration between René Laloux and Mœbius is a landmark of European science-fiction animation.

After his parents are killed on the dangerous planet Perdide, young Piel (voiced by Frédéric Legros) survives by maintaining radio contact with Jaffar (Jean Valmont), a pilot transporting the exiled Prince Matton (Yves-Marie Maurin) and Princess Belle (Monique Thierry) from their former kingdom. Jaffar seeks the help of Silbad (Michel Elias), a cheerful old-timer who knows how to circumvent Perdide’s hazards, including brain-devouring insects and watery graves. Along the way, Jaffar and company encounter a pair of impish homunculi stowaways, identity-less angels controlled by an amorphous hive mind, and the Masters of Time, mysterious beings who can bend reality and perhaps reveal to the heroes their secret origins and destinies. Based on the 1958 science fiction novel L'Orphelin de Perdide (The Orphan of Perdide) by Stefan Wul.

Part of Laloux's Worlds, a celebration of René Laloux's visionary science-fiction animation in honor of the new 4K restoration of Gandahar.

For its 25th Anniversary, GYPSY 83 has been completely reimagined as a brand-new Director’s Cut, restored in 4K from the 35mm camera negative. Now featuring over 40 minutes of never-before-seen footage and containing more legendary goth songs from bands like The Cure, Cocteau Twins and Echo and the Bunnymen, the Director’s Cut is sure to satiate longtime fans and create a generation of new ones.

With Filmmakers Q&A after the Sunday, August 30th screening!

First Looks, the Roxie’s Oscar-Qualifying Theatrical Release program, supports filmmakers in their Academy Award quest. We put together a unique lineup of shorts (with running times of 40 minutes and under) from any genre (documentary, narrative, and animation) to serve as the film’s Academy qualifying run. 

Filmmakers interested in participating can check out more info here.

Good Boy
Documentary (10:20 minutes)
Director: Shannon Kring

Synopsis: Terrorized by the ICE raids tearing through Los Angeles, an undocumented dog walkersays goodbye to the unlikely love of his life: a mini doodle named Sir Lewis.

You Could've Been A Nurse
Narrative (12:20 minutes)
Director: Meg Mateo

Synopsis: When a routine dialysis session fails, Gwen finds out her mother has only days to live—but it's their mismatched expectations that creates unforeseen heartbreak.

There's a Robbery in Progress
Animation (4 minutes)
Director: Morgan Miller

Synopsis: A British policeman (voiced by Brian Croucher) experiences a meta mishap during a bank
robbery.

Something Pointless
Narrative (14:20 minutes)
Director: Asa Bailey

Synopsis: When an unhappy young boy discovers an older man quietly affixing painted eggshells to a disused wall in their neighbourhood, he begins to understand how even the smallest, strangest acts can leave behind something lasting.

The Coral Rescuers
Documentary (39 minutes)
Director: Jason Spingarn-Koff

Synopsis: It’s all hands on deck to rescue Florida’s last remaining corals, as a community of scientists and reef guardians unites against climate change and ongoing destruction.

Fresh from its Cannes Midnight world premiere and Korea’s biggest local opening of the year, Colony marks Yeon Sang-ho’s return to the territory he radically transformed with Train to Busan and brings with it a nastier species of panic. Inside a Seoul high-rise, a biotech conference becomes ground zero for a fast-mutating virus. The authorities seal the building, turning its glass-and-steel corporate order into a slaughterhouse where every floor brings fresh betrayals, brutal calculations, and new ways to die. Gianna Jun stars as a biotech professor trapped in the outbreak, alongside Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been, Kim Shin-rok, Go Soo, and Koo Kyo-hwan as the scientist at the center of the disaster. Colony is a zombie movie for the AI age: system-based, smart, hungry for more, and moving too fast to contain.

"Yeon clearly still knows how to play with genre to inventive, crowd-pleasing effect." - Screen International

Catch the film that started it all when Train to Busan returns to the Roxie for its 10th anniversary, screening August 14, 16 & 18.

More showtimes for Colony coming soon!

35th ANNIVERSARY 4K RESTORATION

International superstar Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love) embodies tragic screen siren Ruan Lingyu, known as the "Greta Garbo of China," in this unconventional biopic by Hong Kong New Wave master Stanley Kwan (Rouge). Praised for her moving and emotive onscreen presence, Ruan’s private life, which was frequent fodder for the vicious Shanghai tabloids, began to mirror the melodramas which brought her fame, culminating in her suicide at age 24. Kwan and Cheung paint a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the ill-fated actress, deftly blending lush period drama, archival footage, and metatextual documentary sequences of Cheung reflecting on Ruan’s legacy. The result is, much like the films of Ruan Lingyu themselves, “tender, vivid and almost overwhelmingly moving” (Time Out).

Presented by Fortune Star Media Limited, the restoration of the film was carried out from the original 35mm picture and optical soundtrack negative. The prints were repaired, cleaned and scanned in Hong Kong, then digitally restored in 4K resolution in Bologna, Italy by L'Immagine Ritrovata. Endorsed by the director, Stanley Kwan, the color correction was completed by Interface Video Production Ltd in Hong Kong.

Live screening w/ a presentation by The Professors Of Urgh: Chaki & Chris Slusarenko
(the hosts of A Very Opinionated Look At Urgh! podcast)

East Bay Ray of The Dead Kennedys IN PERSON!

The screening will feature a presentation by The Professors Of Urgh!, Chaki & Chris Slusarenko, who have amassed over 55 episodes about the wheres, whys, and hows of the epic 80s concert film, URGH! A MUSIC WAR, coming to light. Speaking with guests such as Lesley Woods of Au Pairs, Hugo Burnham of Gang Of Four, Stan Ridgway of Wall Of Voodoo & Steve Bartek of Oingo Boingo, they have gotten the history of this film and its artists firsthand. Plus, they will unlock the jaw-dropping secrets of the incredible ingontio, head-scratching band, Invisible Sex (HEAR INVISIBLE SEX SPEAK TO YOU!!!!).

About URGH! A MUSIC WAR: Considered one of the most ground zero documents of the late 70s/early 80s New Music Scene, URGH! A MUSIC WAR has rarely been seen on the big screen. Featuring 34 bands ranging from the well-known (The Police, Devo, X, Joan Jett, XTC, The Go-Gos & Gary Numan) to the true underground (Dead Kennedys, Magazine, The Cramps, Pere Ubu, Au Pairs, Klaus Nomi), the film is beautifully shot and recorded, allowing each band to sound and perform completely authentically.

About THE PROFESSORS OF URGH!:

Chaki is a Los Angeles-based electro-funk artist, performer, and underground culture instigator blending heavy bass, synth-driven grooves, and a surreal, offbeat stage presence. He has toured with El Vez and Fishbone and opened for Parliament Funkadelic, as well as opening multiple dates on tour for Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s Remain in Light touring band. His latest release, From L.A. to the Bay on High Occulture Records, is a career-spanning 12" featuring classic bangers and three new cuts.

Beyond music, Chaki is the creator of the Punk Rock Graveyard Tour at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a cult-favorite experience exploring the resting places and stories of punk and underground icons. He is also a recurring guest on The Best Show with Tom Scharpling, hosted by Tom Scharpling.

Chris Slusarenko is the host of the top ten Apple Music Interview podcast, Revolutions Per Movie— a guest-driven podcast about music films with guests such as Peter Buck of R.E.M., icon Paul Williams, Spiral Stairs of Pavement, Ann Magnuson & Kevin McDonald of Kids In The Hall. A lifelong musician with albums on Sub Pop & Rough Trade, he has been a member of Guided By Voices and Eyelids, and has also been an independent video store owner for over 20 years.

Action superstar Yash (K.G.F. franchise, Ramayana) delivers a commanding performance in the highly anticipated international thriller TOXIC: A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWN-UPS. Helmed by Sundance award-winning director Geetu Mohandas (Moothon, Liar’s Dice), this high-octane saga delves into the complexities of loyalty, morality, and the struggle for redemption in a world where violence and jealousy reign.

Independence has swept across India, but Goa still answers to the Portuguese. In the uneasy years before liberation, in a city where power, betrayal, and violence collide, Raya (Yash), must navigate the complexities of loyalty and morality. Boasting a massive cinematic scale and hard-hitting, stylized action from legendary stunt designer J.J. Perry (John Wick), TOXIC masterfully charts Raya’s rise through deceit and bloodshed to claim the city’s underworld, only to learn that power always demands a price.

With Yash, Nayanthara, Kiara Advani, Tara Sutaria, Rukmini Vasanth, and Huma Qureshi.

Directed by Geetu Mohandas. Written by Geetu Mohandas & Yash. Produced by Yash & Venkat K. Narayana.

This screening features a 10-minute intermission for a total running of 200 minutes.

With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czech New Wave. Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. Along with visceral camera work by Jaroslav Kučera and Miroslav Ondříček—two of Czechoslovak cinema’s most influential cinematographers—Němec makes inventive use of fractured editing, elliptical storytelling, and flights of surrealism as he strips context away from this bare-bones tale, evoking the panicked delirium of consciousness lost in night and fog.

A landmark of adult animation and one of the most influential animated science-fiction films ever made, Fantastic Planet remains as visually astonishing and intellectually daring today as it was upon its release.

Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.

Part of Laloux's Worlds, a celebration of René Laloux's visionary science-fiction animation in honor of the new 4K restoration of Gandahar.

Presented by FiliKula

Amid stifling heat and pervasive drought, Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a 17-year-old Ilokana from the rural north, works at a posh country club outside Manila, lining up golf balls for powerful men to drive into the verdant horizon. New to the job, she wanders the immaculate grounds sampling its luxuries as members, including an industrialist and his expatriate niece, the club president and his pampered wife, and a slew of Chinese tourists, engage in a complex dance with the club’s doting and subservient staff. But something is rotting beneath the pristine fairways of the elite resort, as Isabel discovers when she tries to return a mislaid golf club to its patriarchal director, Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman). The deeper she journeys into its most exclusive corners, the closer she gets to the violent truths of the club, her native Philippines, and her own past..

“A masterwork…with Filipiñana, Manuel opens new vistas in the future of the cinema.” – The New Yorker

“An invigorating dose of arch formalism in a sea of mainstream sincerity, this is the kind of movie that asks for the viewer’s attention…the angle of a golf club can evoke suspense, a piece of fruit on the ground can feel like a tragedy, and a casual glance can take your breath away.” – Vulture

Set on the eve of the 21st century, Tsai Ming-liang’s fourth feature turns a crumbling Taipei apartment block into one of cinema’s strangest and most tender end-of-the-world romances. Perennial muse Lee Kang-sheng (“the man upstairs”) and Yang Kuei-mei (“the woman downstairs”) are among the building’s last holdouts, refusing evacuation as a mysterious epidemic spreads outside and rain batters the city without end. When a plumber leaves behind an unfinished repair, the man’s floor opens into an accidental passage between two sealed-off lives, turning leaks, trash, pesticide, and petty territorial warfare into a strange form of courtship. Among the most disarmingly funny and cathartic entries in Tsai’s filmography, The Hole finds hope in a world that seems to be falling apart, breaking its deadpan plague scenario open with splendorous Grace Chang musical numbers and poker-faced slapstick.

"Impressive A Quarter Century Ago, It Seems Even More So Today." — The New York Times

Visionary director Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) presents a new kind of horror remake in TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. Bursting with imagination and surreal wit, their latest genre-bending wonder affirms there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.

After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is due for resurrection. And one young director (Hannah Einbinder) is more than up to the task. But when she visits the original's star, a now-reclusive actress (Gillian Anderson), the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, delirium — under threat from the spear-wielding Little Death.

Winner of the Queer Palm, this transformative Cannes favorite leads its protagonists to true fulfillment, encouraging us to ask how we can reach our own.

Something huge is on the horizon. Hogarth Hughes just rescued an enormous robot that fell from the stars to Earth. Now young Hogarth has one very big friend and an even bigger problem: how do you keep at 50-foot-tall, steel-eating, giant a secret?

Roxie Kids Matinee Tickets: $5 Kids 17 & under – $5 SNAP/EBT – $11 Adult/Senior – $5 for Members

Part of Roxie Kids.

Co-Presented by 3rd i

Conceived as the biggest action-adventure film ever made in India, Ramesh Sippy’s deeply influential 1975 “Curry Western” remains a towering landmark in film history. Written by the legendary screenwriting duo Salim–Javid, the film stars Sanjeev Kumar as a retired cop who, in seeking revenge against a nihilistic dacoit leader (Amjad Khan), enlists the help of two slick, charismatic crooks whom he put behind bars (unforgettably portrayed by Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra). Naturally, the criminal duo soon fall in love with two local village girls, but danger remains on the horizon. A delirious four-course meal of action, musical numbers, ultramagnetic performances from Indian cinema’s most iconic actors, and jaw-dropping wide-screen 70mm cinematography, Sholay is here presented in its recently completed director’s cut, the most faithful approximation of Sippy’s original ending before it was censored by the Indian Censor Board.

Restored by Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Sippy Films. Funding provided by Sippy Films. Sholay was restored using the best surviving elements: an interpositive and two-color reversal intermediates found in a warehouse in the UK and a second interpositive dating from 1978 deposited by Sippy Films and preserved by Film Heritage Foundation. The sound was restored using the original sound negative, and the magnetic soundtrack preserved by Film Heritage Foundation. The film was originally shot on 35mm and blown up to 70mm for release. No 70mm prints of the film survive. The original camera negative was severely damaged due to heavy vinegar syndrome with coil adhesion and halos, overcoat deterioration both on the base side and emulsion side, and base distortion. This restoration of the film in 4K includes the original ending as well as two deleted scenes and with the original 70mm aspect ratio of 2.2:1.   

"Rude in the way the truth is rude -- only funnier. The movie seduces with its humor, all the while presenting a realized vision of a harsh, absurd world."— Mick LaSalle, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Reese Witherspoon as potty-mouthed white trash Vanessa Lutz is among her most underrated roles. In this modern take on Little Red Riding Hood, Kiefer Sutherland plays the not subtly named Bob Wolverton, a serial killer who meets his match in Vanessa, a fifteen year old on her way to her grandmother’s after her parents are both arrested. Bob picks her up hitchhiking, gains her trust and then reveals himself - but Vanessa is sharp and quick, shooting him and leaving him for dead. Trouble is, he doesn’t die, and instead she finds herself on trial. Can this bad behaving juvenile delinquent win against a well-respected school counselor? You better believe she won’t go down without a fight! Written and directed by Matthew Bright, best known as the screenwriter for FORBIDDEN ZONE, FREEWAY is impressive and often hilarious with a great support cast including Brooke Shields, Amanda Plummer and Dan Hedaya. (Cristina Cacciopo)

When no one in the industry would touch the pitch-black comedy out of Sundance, Bill Banning’s Roxie Releasing rolled the dice, with the help of Oliver Stone, and a hard-working, cheerfully-game Reese Witherspoon, sitting for interviews while breaking for a nap in the office corner. As a reward, Roxie drove her around town looking for second-hand shops.

Part of our Arthouse 50: Celebrating our 50th anniversary as an Arthouse

The long-awaited 4K restoration of René Laloux's final masterpiece reveals one of animation's most astonishing science-fiction visions.

An entire civilization must confront its destiny in alternative-animation pioneer René Laloux’s final feature, a cult classic of mind-bending science fiction. In a distant world, a merciless army of automata attacks Gandahar, turning its peace-loving people to stone. Hoping to discover the source of these Men of Metal, a council of matriarchs enlists the brave yet inexperienced warrior Sylvain (Pierre-Marie Escourro), who, while journeying through his planet’s outer regions, teams up with the Deformed, a race cast out from Gandahar after failed science experiments rendered them mutants. Soon, Sylvain learns that a gargantuan brain called Metamorphis (Georges Wilson) is responsible for his utopian society’s strife and—together with the beautiful Airelle (Catherine Chevallier)—travels through time to defeat him, in the process risking their lives and Gandahar’s very existence. Featuring stunningly surreal creatures and wondrously bizarre environments designed by renowned comic-book artist Caza, Gandahar is a visceral, visionary head-trip in which animation opens a gateway to the furthest reaches of the imagination.

Presented in a stunning new 4K restoration as the culmination of Laloux’s Worlds, our celebration of René Laloux's visionary cinema.

More showtimes coming soon

After the screening, there will be an IN PERSON Q&A with filmmakers Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre and protagonists Lourdes Luján and Yesenia Palomares, moderated by Ximena Briceño, Stanford University.

MAQUILÁPOLIS [city of factories]

Celebrating a 20-Year Legacy

A piercing look at globalization through the eyes of women workers in Tijuana’s assembly plants, the maquiladoras.

“Making explicit the slogan ‘knowledge equals power,’ MAQUILÁPOLIS is the rare activist documentary that really does empower the individual women at the heart of its story.” –VARIETY

2006 marked the premiere of an innovative, impact-driven documentary that uplifted the work of women on the U.S. - Mexico border.  These factory workers sustained a globalized economy that changed both nations and rapidly changed their lives. Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre’s groundbreaking film MAQUILÁPOLIS prioritized artful imagemaking and co-creative, community-based filmmaking. In the process, the promotoras whose stories are told in the film found new pathways for their activism and for telling their own stories. Twenty years later, we are celebrating the legacy of MAQUILÁPOLIS with screenings, events, and talks throughout 2026.

This screening is a benefit for Refugee and Immigrant Transitions (RIT), a Bay Area non-profit that partners with people who have sought refuge in the U.S. RIT employs strengths-based educational approaches and community support so newcomers may thrive in our shared communities. The MAQUILÁPOLIS team and RIT share a vision:  We celebrate the power of community action, the importance of human agency, and our ability to create positive change for our futures, even in the face of all the forces working to enclose us in precarity, isolation, and invisibility. ¡Sí se puede! Please consider supporting RIT by purchasing your ticket for this screening at the benefit level.

Virtually unseen for over 90 years, in a sparkling new 4K restoration from Warner Bros!

Joan Crawford gives a striking performance as Letty Lynton, a young woman caught in a web of love, betrayal, and resilience. In the high-stakes world of the 1930s social elite, Letty Lynton (Crawford) is a woman seeking an escape from a toxic, suffocating life in South America. Haunted by a volatile affair with the possessive Emile Renaul (Nils Asther), she flees toward New York, finding a chance at redemption—and true love—in the arms of the wealthy, earnest Jerry Darrow (Robert Montgomery) during a glamorous transatlantic crossing. But the past refuses to stay buried. When the ship docks, Emile is waiting with a blackmail scheme designed to destroy Letty’s future, forcing her to take matters into her own hands.

Directed by Clarence Brown with style and substance, critics and audiences embraced the film, which gave Crawford the opportunity to take advantage of sleek gowns provided by MGM’s famed designer Adrian. The acclaim for Letty Lynton, released only weeks before another impressive star turn in the studio’s Grand Hotel, firmly established Crawford status as a screen superstar.

"MGM based the film on a 1931 novel, Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Letty Lynton, but the writers of a play that focused on the same case claimed that the film had too many similarities to their work, made claims for copyright infringement, and as a result the film was pulled from circulation in 1936. While the film was a critical and financial success upon release, those legal complications precluded further distribution for over 90 years. Now with all legal impediments extinguished and the film meticulously restored, Letty Lynton finally returns to the screen, showcasing Crawford at her most glamorous." - TCM Classic Film Festival

25th Anniversary of the Sundance-destroying Cult Classic

"Emphatically perverse, a salute to the Midnight Movie, a cultural land mass that spawned John Waters and David Lynch." - Elvis Mitchell, NY Times.

Space travel has become a dirty way of life dominated by derelicts, grease monkeys, and hard-boiled interplanetary traders such as Samuel Curtis. Written, directed, and starring Cory McAbee of the legendary cult band The Billy Nayer Show, this sci-fi, musical-western uses flinty black and white photography, rugged Lo-Fi sets and the spirit of the final frontier. We follow Curtis on his Homeric journey to provide the all-female planet of Venus with a suitable male, while pursued by an enigmatic killer, Professor Hess. The film features music by The Billy Nayer Show and some of the most original rock n’ roll scenes ever committed to film.

Director: Cory McAbee. Writer: Cory McAbee. Cinematographer: W. Mott Hupfel III. Music by The Billy Nayer Show  Starring: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden & James Ransone.

"This musical epic is unlike anything I (or anyone I know) have ever laid eyes on." - Film Threat.

"A sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism." - LA Weekly.

"Movies don't get much more homemade or endearingly eccentric." - Dallas Morning News.

"It's a terrifically enjoyable piece of filmmaking that demands that you laugh while your jaw drops …Evocative of the disconcerting hybrid of musicals & crime fiction in Dennis Potter's "Pennies From Heaven"… it has moments of inspired dementia…. Emphatically perverse, a salute to the Midnight Movie, a cultural land mass that spawned John Waters and David Lynch." - Elvis Mitchell, NY Times.

Co-presented by Zyzzyva Magazine and Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival

This year’s Litquake festival will take place October 8th-24th! For more information about Litquake’s festival and year-round programs, visit litquake.org.

The series wherein famous authors choose a film that intersects with their artistic obsessions

Rebecca Solnit is a writer whose stunning breadth of spirit and mind has inspired and enlightened generations. As part of the Roxie’s Fiftieth Anniversary, Solnit, who has been coming to the Roxie for its whole life, calls herself such a rare thing as a longtime fan. For Movie Night, Solnit introduces Songs of Earth, a poetic, unspeakably beautiful film by director Margreth Olin, executive produced by Liv Ullman and Wim Wenders.

On the screen, the great scale of majestic fjord rural landscape, which Olin’s father sets to love deeply through all seasons, is interwoven with the minute scale of human history—the tale of impoverished, rugged farmers in the region and the couple’s own marriage.

In Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, the author plays with timescale in similar ways. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit writes into the macro-scale of the last 65 years of social progress, and what this progress means now. “In her telling,” says the New York Times, “the current rise of authoritarianism is the dying gasp of an old world order, and we are on the precipice of living in a multicultural and interconnected world.”

Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Show starts promptly at 6:00 pm.
Q&A with the author follows the movie.
Book signing and a chance to shop Rebecca Solnit’s recommended reading list (courtesy of Dog Eared Books) will be available both before and after the show.

Zyzzyva Movie Night was created and is produced by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Solnit has won numerous awards, including Yale’s Windham Campbell Literature Prize and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won a California Book Award. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a National Bestseller, and a recipient of a California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY KRISTEN STEWART

WINNER, TEDDY AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY, 2026 BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL  

Director Brydie O'Connor IN PERSON for Q&A on Friday, September 18!

Pioneering queer avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) broke barriers by centering frank lesbian sexuality and pleasure in an expansive body of beautiful, poetic, personal work. In BARBARA FOREVER—constructed largely from Hammer’s own archive spanning five decades, alongside audio diaries and present-day conversations with her longtime partner, Florrie Burke—director Brydie O’Connor crafts a loving portrait of a force of nature while accompanying her through her final years and creative processes. 

This curated program of short films made from San Francisco-centric footage focuses on Chinatown, one of our city’s most beloved and documented neighborhoods. Program includes famous neon-lit scenes from feature films, home movie clips, and archival footage of the glowing neon nightscape of the mid-century nightlife. A featured presentation will be the backstory of the restoration of the Golden Star Radio neon sign and broadcast pioneers May Chin and Tommy Tong. An official event of the Neon Speaks Festival, produced and hosted by Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan of SFNeon.org.

Every year, the best under-18 braille readers and writers in the English-speaking world come to Los Angeles to compete in the Braille Challenge. For one weekend, these blind and low-vision kids aren’t the minority in the room as they make new friends, go head-to-head against old rivals, and strive for the rare opportunity to be recognized for something beyond their disability. Empowering them to become filmmakers, BRAILLED IT gives these kids cameras and has them document the event on their own. Their often-disorienting cinematography challenges sighted audiences to follow the action on their terms, with audio description and binaural sound helping audiences understand this unique cinematic world through non-visual cues. Ultimately, the kids’ honest, personal, and emotional footage makes the human drama of their experience—and the true power of literacy—accessible for all.

Filmmaker Sam Green will be in attendance for a post screening Q&A.

A decade-long global journey chronicles the ever-changing record holders of the title of oldest person alive. What begins as a portrait of longevity becomes a meditation on the passage of time, the randomness of fate, and the joy and profound human experience of being alive.

The oldest human being on the planet is not someone you encounter suddenly, nor someone you know for long. As the years go by, and Sam Green meets the next, and the next, oldest person in the world, his personal fascination with what the title means becomes entangled with his own experience of time, and the joys and pains of his own life. Green’s work has been a cornerstone of documentary filmmaking for a generation of artists. In The Oldest Person in the World, the profound and silly experience of being alive is articulated in a way only film can do.

"Takes a rewardingly personal turn...Gleans a real poignancy...A heartfelt, wistful, and aggressively poignant collection of interviews...An affecting watch...Green is such an open-hearted and genuine searcher...Time is reframed less as something to resist (or defy) than as something to embrace." – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

"Existential questions arise concerning the human condition, the swift sands of time, and the unique privilege (or perhaps great cost?) of living a long, long life. Arriving after the sonic meditation of 32 Sounds, which won acclaim at Sundance back in 2023, The Oldest Person in the World promises an equally ruminative approach, this time concerning human longevity." – Natalia Keogan, Filmmaker Magazine

Presented by FiliKula.

Freshman Sid Lucero (Mark Gil, in his breakout performance), desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over the course of a gruelling initiation process, he goes through every humiliation to please his “masters” — even as their treatment veers into increasingly fascistic, cult-like territory. Overt echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter abound in De Leon’s claustrophobic college drama: a film that subverts expectation by casting college life in a sinister blood-red light. An urgent reaction to Ferdinand Marcos’ rule through Martial Law at the time, Batch ’81 burns bright today as De Leon’s angriest and most direct film — asking hard questions about masculinity, indoctrination, free will and the banality of evil, most insidious when disguised as brotherhood, responsibility or duty. Raising uncomfortable truths about class aspirations and privilege in the Philippines — and the world at large — Batch ’81 is as timely and necessary as it has ever been, presented in its 4K restoration commissioned by the Asian Film Archive and L'Immagine Ritrovata.

Co-presented by National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA).

NaFFAA promotes the welfare and well-being of Filipinos and Filipino Americans throughout the United States by amplifying their voices, advocating on behalf of their interests, and providing resources to facilitate their empowerment.

Co-presented by Frameline

In My Name Ain't Suzie, Angie Chen offers a powerful rebuke to the colonial imagination of films such as The World of Suzie Wong (1960), bringing post-war Hong Kong to life on her own terms. Shui-Mei (Patricia Ha), a “salt water girl” from the outskirts of the city, finds a way out of poverty in the Red Light district of Wan Chai. Over the years, she rises through the ranks, discovering a world of equal hardship and sisterly camaraderie, where colorful characters abound – among them Jimmy (Anthony Wong, in his debut role), a mixed-race kid looking for his father in the crowd of thirsty American sailors.

Penned by John Chan Koon Chung (My Heart Is That Eternal Rose), My Name Ain’t Suzie brings a New Wave sensibility to the waning years of the Shaw Brothers Studio with a decade-spanning epic that resourcefully reconstructs a bygone era of Cantonese cinema. A rags-to-riches story blending romance and brothel drama, Chen’s film is above all a tale of feminine resilience at the nexus of historical events and shifting colonial powers. — Kani Releasing

Restored in 2026 by Kani Releasing at L’Immagine Ritrovata Asia laboratory, from the original 35mm camera negative and a 35mm print with burnt-in bilingual subtitles. Grading finalized at qooop laboratory. DCP provided by Kani Releasing. Courtesy of Celestial Pictures Ltd.

My Name Ain't Suzie will screen with the following short:

SHE SAID WHY ME (May Fung, Hong Kong, 1989) 7m, DCP
In She Said Why Me, a blindfolded woman feels her way along the facades of late colonial Hong Kong architecture, anxiously journeying between historical trauma and personal identification in this pioneering video artwork. The video was shot in 1989, not long after the deadly massacre at Tiananmen Square and is situated within Hong Kong’s passage from the hands of one colonial power to another. Fung was interested in the way that women were framed in archival footage, in flashes of protest and in the shapes of everyday walks in the city. Her selections center on the risks taken by these women, who include picketers in the 1967 uprisings and the Chinese political figure Soong Ching-ling. — Elise Schierbeek

Digitized in 2011 by Videotage from VHS.

This screening will open with Len Lye's animated short film RAINBOW DANCE. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen's multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

While his name lacks the recognition of other Eastern European filmmakers, writer / director / occasional actor František Vláčil could be considered among the greatest motion picture practitioners on the strength of his adaptation of Marketa Lazarová alone. Yet his follow-up, The Valley of the Bees [Údolí včel], is a similarly stunning period-piece of archetypal drama (and, like its predecessor and other works by the filmmaker, features an extraordinary score by Zdeněk Liška).

In the thirteenth century, a young man reluctantly joins the Teutonic order at the behest of his father. During his travels, he fraternizes with a former combatant of the Crusades. However, life as a member of the order is not quite as it is popularly portrayed and the young knight opts to escape. His devoutly religious friend, however, wants him to return and will see to it that he does. Nothing good can come from these disagreements. — Jonathan Marlow

For decades, The Valley of the Bees has only been available in faded prints or unsatisfactory transfers. The 2025 digital restoration was sourced from the original sound and image negatives preserved by the Národní filmový archiv in Prague.

Valley of the Bees will screen with the following short:

ATOM OF ETERNITY [ATOM VECNOSTI] (Cenek Zahradnícek and Vladimír Šmejkal, Czechoslovakia, 1934) 6m, DCP
A beautiful brevity—a tone poem, of a sort—in stark black, grey and sparingly white from Cenek Zahradnícek and Vladimír Šmejkal chronicling the oldest story of them all: two people meet, they fall for each other and then, inevitably, they're pulled apart. — Jonathan Marlow

Digitally restored in 2025 by the Národní filmový archiv as a selection from a collection of Czechian experimental shorts of the early-1930s.

Co-presented by Frameline

Dakan follows two young men, Manga and Sori, as they navigate young love of a kind their families cannot abide. Seen by Manga’s mother as a mental illness, and Sori’s father as a weakness to overcome, both men struggle to live the “right way”. Self-denial, tradition and superstition merge in attempts to rid the young lovers of their passions.

This careful exploration of the realities of gay love in 1997’s Guinea depicts a milieu in which Manga and Sori’s contemporaries seem to understand and accept their gayness, while the older generation cannot, will not explore the possibility that their offspring might live lives outside of the ones set forth for them by their parents. Manga and Sori’s longing for each other, and pain at their separation, is depicted physically, making manifest the deep ache of young lovers wrested apart. Dakan is considered the first West African film to tackle the topic of homosexuality. It screened at Frameline in 1998, and won the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Foreign Narrative Feature at L.A. Outfest the same year.— Kathy Rose O'Regan

Copy courtesy of California Newsreel.

Dakan will screen with the following short:

NANCY, HENRI, AND ELIZABETH (Lynn Fagan and Bob Aibel, United States, 1973) 17m, DCP
Nancy, Henri, and Elizabeth (1973) is a 17-minute student documentary from the University of Pennsylvania interposing vignettes of the lived perspectives of two trans women and a bisexual drag queen. Long unavailable, the film is an important piece of LGBTQ film recovery. Ostensibly a time capsule of discussions around gender and sexual fluidity in 1970s America from within the gay, lesbian, and transgender community, the film ends up being a very personal triptych of transformational wisdom and matter-of-fact poise from those who find themselves in-between.

Nancy, Henri, and Elizabeth candidly reflect on pleasant and unpleasant ambiguities alike — essence, appearance, gender neutrality, a lover’s perception, or the brutality of surgical transition. They also meditate on certitude — social pasts, authentic desires, and inner motivations. Henri offers the profound lesson, dressed up as a casual exhortation: “There’s only one sin you can commit — only one — and that’s to die without living.” — Elise Schierbeek

Restored in 2025 by USC’s Hugh M. Hefner Foundation Moving Image Archive from original 16mm A-B negative rolls and 16mm optical track negative.

This screening will open with Len Lye's animated short film COLOUR BOX. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen's multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

Co-presented by National Film Preservation Foundation

Written and directed by Robert Wynne-Simmons (writer of folk-horror masterpiece Blood on Satan's Claw), and starring legendary Irish actors Cyril Cusack and Mick Lally, The Outcasts was the first major feature film funded in Ireland in forty years. Set in the earlier 1800s, an era of great poverty and no little superstition in pre-Famine Ireland, The Outcasts centers Maura (Mary Ryan), one of three daughters, a peculiar young woman largely ostracized by her rural Irish community due to her "abnormal" behavior. In great need of an ally, Maura aligns herself with the much feared Scarf Michael, whose power over the locals seems to tap into a world beyond our own.

The greens and greys and weighty clouds of the Irish countryside are evocatively captured by cinematographer Seamus Corcoran, and the destitution of the characters is made palpable by Consolata Boyle's costume design. Rife with nods to myth and oral storytelling tradition, in The Outcasts stones rain, curses come true, and goats are not to be trusted! While set in a very particular time and place, the film's depiction of man's innate savagery is all too universal. When unfathomable misfortune strikes, the urge to blame the weak was then and is now far too quick an instinct. In The Outcasts, Maura is a likely victim for such impulses, but is she as powerless as she seems? — Kathy Rose O'Regan

The Outcasts was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm for its original release. This 2K digital restoration was created from 35mm sound and picture negatives preserved at the IFI Irish Film Archive. Restored by the IFI and Fís Éireann.

The Outcasts will screen with the following short:

WITCH (Karen Loveland Adey, United States, 1973) 5m
Among the many achievements in her remarkable life, Karen Loveland Adey founded the Exhibits Motion Picture Unit at the Smithsonian Institution and produced and/or directed over one hundred films during her time there. Unique to her filmography is the astonishing Witch, created for the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic—later renamed World of the Unexplainable Museum—in Gatlinburg, Tennessee (with a satellite site in San Francisco). The looping Witch was intended to be projected on a blank bust as part of a permanent installation in the museum. — Jonathan Marlow

Current personnel at the Smithsonian restored Witch from the surviving 16mm materials earlier this year.
Preserved through National Film Preservation Foundation funding.

This screening will open with Len Lye's animated short film SWINGING THE LAMBETH WALK. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen's multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

Two legendary Thai actors, Sombat Methanee and Sorapong Chatree, form an unlikely duo of a wanderer on the run and reluctant monk, facing danger at every turn. Khom Akadet’s 1980s actioner is thrilling not only in its fight scenes, but also in the careful registers between.

The 1970s and 1980s were Golden Decades for Thai action cinema, which found its very own niche somewhere between Hong Kong’s martial arts films and the actioners shot in the Philippines and Indonesia. I Am with a Monk is among the outstanding examples for that era’s art of mayhem, featuring two of its greatest stars: Sorapong Chatree and Sombat Metanee, under the guidance of madness- and excess-prone maestro Khom Akadet.

In contrast to some of Akadet’s earlier films like Phai Kam Plerng (1977) and Maha Hin (1978) which are fondly remembered for their nonchalant attitude towards narrative storytelling in favour of relentless, non-stop fighting, I Am with a Monk operates in a more relaxed register, with the characters spending quite some time setting up their moves and countermoves, often lending the action scenes an air of set piece glory. The story of a runaway who finds shelter with a monk sports the kind of sharpness that made Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) a genre watershed. Entertainment at its purest! – Olaf Möller, International Film Festival Rotterdam

Restored in 2024 by the Thai Film Archive from the original 35mm negative.

I Am With A Monk will screen with the following short:

MOBILE MEN (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2008) 4m, DCP
Contagious mirth widens to a roar in Mobile Men (2008) as a dignified relay of expression and mimicry. Two young men — carefree migrant workers — and the filmmaker — unhampered and absorbed — get to know one another from the windy corners of a speeding pickup truck in Northern Thailand. The trio seem to have just met, but to “get” each other nonetheless, invisible imprints received against glints of sunshine and a wordless permission to show off. The camera shuffles hand-to-hand between them and across various binding lavaliers — smiles, pendants, shoelaces, tattoos, and indeed microphones. Shot on a mobile phone and under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, this short form commission subverts its assumed gesture. Portraiture becomes play, rehearsal, celebration. As in most of Weerasethakul’s films, the virtual and the actual perform a secret handshake. — Elise Schierbeek

DCP provided by Kick the Machine.

Co-presented by SF IndieFest

Margot Benacerraf's extraordinary Araya, from the moment of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 (where it shared the FIPRESCI award with Hiroshima mon amour), was immediately heralded as one of the most visually stunning documentaries ever produced. The titular Venezuelan peninsula is known, if at all, for its desolate remoteness and its ample salt marshes. The salineros [salt workers] work there by hand, as they have for centuries. Little has changed since the Spaniards first arrived in the 1500s.

Araya captures nearly five-hundred years of history condensed into a speculative single day (albeit filmed with her cinematographer Giuseppe Nisoli over four weeks, from September to October), with a tripartite structure following the lives of three families in three nearby villages.

In addition to her filmmaking, Margot Benacerraf was the founder of the Cineteca Nacional de Venezuela and, with Gabriel Garcia Márquez, created the Latin Fundavisual to promote Latin American moving image art. On the occasion of Benacerraf's centenary, we present an opportunity to revisit one of only two films she completed in her lifetime. — Jonathan Marlow

Restored in 2009 from the French internegative by Scott MacQueen and Dennis Doros for Milestone Films in collaboration with Fotokem and Modern Videofilm. Audio restoration for 3-track mag tracks and the Spanish optical track by John Polito at Audio Mechanics.

Araya will screen with the following short:

SURFARARA (Vittoria de Seta, Italy, 1955) 12m, DCP
500 meters below Sicily, sulfur miners pick and drill and hammer in the dark. Vittorio de Seta’s camera captures their descent and their work, then jolts the viewer with shocking cuts to the sun-drenched world above. De Seta shot in a French widescreen process called Cinépanoramic, and rendered his work in strikingly painterly Ferraniacolor. — Kathy Rose O'Regan

Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna The Film Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata in 2019. DCP provided by Cineteca di Bologna. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Co-presented by SF IndieFest

In The Dislocation of Amber, director Hussein Shariffe uses abandoned areas of the Sudanese city of Suakin to stage abstracted, ambiguous performances. His actors move through corners, windows, doorways like shadows of this once thriving port, now fallen to ruin. Lacerating sunshine and intense color dominate the frame, while musician Abdel-Aziz Dawoud chants the words of the Sufi poem “The Wine Ode” by Ibn Al-Faridh. Shariffe himself said this about Suakin in 1974 — “Only faint traces of its ancient affluence are apparent today … a dimmed reflection in a cracked mirror; empty eyes with the stars in a different house, laughter in another room.”

Restored at the Digital Film Restoration Unit of Cimatheque - Alternative Film Centre in 2025 using a 16mm positive print provided by Cinémathèque suisse. The restoration process was part of REMASTERED | The Digital Film Restoration Training Program. DCP provided by Arsenal Filminstitut e.V.

The Dislocation of Amber will screen with the following short:

YOU HIDE ME (Nii Kwate Owoo, Ghana and United Kingdom, 1970) 17m, DCP
In 1970, 26-year-old Ghanian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo gained entry to the vaults of the British Musuem (a privilege that cost him no less that 500 pounds sterling!) Shot in just one day, You Hide Me is a scathing indictment of colonial plunder, and the legitimacy given these crimes by the museum system. Highly controversial on its release, You Hide Me highlighted the hoarding of African art by the West decades before this topic began to be addressed in any concrete fashion by the institutions holding stolen works. — Kathy Rose O'Regan

This DCP copy is based on the original 16mm picture negative and was made possible by a collaboration between Arsenal Filminstitut e.V., the BFI (British Film Institute), and Owoo. DCP provided by Arsenal Filminstitut e.V.

This screening will open with Len Lye's animated short film COLOUR FLIGHT. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen's multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

Sumitra Peries’s Gehenu Lamai [The Girls] —the first feature directed by a woman in Sri Lanka—is a close observation of a life shrinking. So much weight is placed on girls worldwide, and the girls of Gehenu Lamai are no different. Expected to care-give, earn, and behave respectably no matter the cost, the central girls of the film, sisters Kusum and Soma, bear much responsibility. Despite very different approaches to their constraints, some outcomes cannot be avoided.

In the starring role of Kusum, Vasanthi Chathurani’s debut performance is almost painfully tender. Peries’s camera frames/jails her young face in a variety of beautiful close-ups as we watch Kusum’s stunning resolve slowly hobble her over the course of the film.

Beyond the delicate, doomed love story at the heart of the film, this tale of girls focuses on the intensity and challenges of deep sisterly and schoolmate bonds. Love in this film can be found all around, but sometimes love is not enough when classism and familial expectations come to bear on young lives. — Kathy Rose O'Regan

Restored by Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with the Lester James Peries and Sumitra Peries Foundation. Restoration was based on a combined dupe negative and 2 distribution prints preserved at the National Film Corporation of Sri Lanka. DCP provided by Film Heritage Foundation.

Gehenu Lamai [The Girls] will screen with the following short:

TWO (Satyajit Ray, India, 1964) 12m, DCP
Along with The Girls, we have the boys: Two, in particular. One well-to-do, one less-so. One indoors, the other outside. Called a "film fable" by legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the dialogue-free short was commissioned by the Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S. and aired on PBS as part of a Esso World Theater trilogy in the mid-1960s. — Jonathan Marlow

The Academy Film Archive restored Two in 2016, one of many preservations and restorations of Ray's work since his honorary Lifetime Achievement award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1992.

This screening will open with Len Lye's animated short film THE BIRTH OF THE ROBOT. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen's multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

Mexico’s legendary Calderon film empire's most famous and longest-running series was that of El Santo, the silver-masked wrestling hero (Rodolfo Guzman), who starred in some 50-odd productions from 1959 to the mid-1980s. But one of the most gonzo – and seldom seen – entries in the series is Los Leprosos y el Sexo with our hero battling a murderous mob of escaped lepers in a small town, resulting in a Western-cum-horror-cum-action picture, but with a twist.

Calderon cranked out a handful of alternate “international” (read: sexy) versions of their popular films, generally an excuse for nude inserts to be shown in more permissive film markets, much to the chagrin of Guzman himself (who, along with his wrestling son, often denied they even existed). Los Leprosos y el Sexo became the stuff of legend, as it was rumored to exist but entirely unavailable and, indeed, was evidently never actually released in that form – until the keeper of the Calderon flame, Viviana Garcia-Besné, discovered the original negative for the surprisingly explicit insert sequences in the mid-2010s. The original “sexy” version was finally reconstructed by Cinema Preservation Alliance and Permanencia Voluntaria in 2022, and screens theatrically in San Francisco for the very first time. – Peter Conheim

Reconstructed and restored by Cinema Preservation Alliance and Permanencia Voluntaria in 2022. Courtesy of Permanencia Voluntaria.

Lepers & Sex AKA Santo vs The Riders of Terror will screen with the following short:

PTERYPHLEGIA (Louis Smits, Netherlands, 1986) 7m, DCP
Sci-fi flourishes in Louis Smits’ stunning Pteryphlegia (1986), a minimalist epic of primordial collisions wherein alien lifeforms molt and take flight, facing off with a cyborgian harvester on an unfamiliar planet. The animation is soundtracked and inspired by the symphonic rock group Yes. — Elise Schierbeek

DCP provided by The Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision.

A landmark from the golden age of New Yugoslav Film (1963-1973), a compelling and under appreciated (at least in America) chapter in global film history. Aleksandar Petrović’s gripping Tri [Three] showcases the horror and absurdity of war through three interconnected tales, each examining moral choices under extreme pressure. Nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture (1966) and listed by the Yugoslav Film Institute as The Best Film in the history of the Yugoslav Cinema.

Featuring searingly unforgettable black and white cinematography by Tomislav Pinter, Tri is structured as a triptych with stories set at the beginning, middle and end of the Second World War in Yugoslavia (1941-1944). The protagonist is a partisan portrayed by Velimir Bata Živojinović though according to the director, “The real protagonist of this film is death. In this film, it appears in three forms - as punishment, as victim, and as an expression of the senselessness of war. One needs to be against war, but one needs to be against war as a matter of principle, against anybody who wages war, and also against those who create reasons for war.” — Robert Byrne

Restored in 2019 at Delta Video laboratory from a 35mm negative preserved by Jugoslovenska Kinoteka.

Tri will screen with the following short:

LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE [CHILDREN OF WAR] (Jocelyn Saab, Lebanon, 1976) 11m, DCP
Karantina was a Muslim-inhabited district of Beirut inhabited by Palestinians, Kurds, Armenians, Syrians, and Lebanese Muslims. On 18 January 1976, early in the Lebanese Civil War, the district was overrun by militias of the right-wing and mostly Christian Lebanese Front, resulting in the deaths of approximately 600-1,500 people. According to then-Washington Post-correspondent Jonathan Randal: "Many Muslim men and boys were rounded up and separated from the women and children and massacred; while many of the women and young girls were violently raped and murdered."

In the days following the massacre, filmmaker Jocelyne Saab found and met children who escaped, deeply traumatized by the horrors they had witnessed. The filmmaker gave the children crayons and encouraged them to draw. The process revealed that the only “play” the children engaged in were war games.

Jocelyn Saab was born in 1948 and grew up in Beirut. In 1973, she became a war reporter in the Middle East, covering the October War for a television channel in France. In 1975, she directed her first feature-length documentary, Lebanon in Turmoil. She went on to cover the Lebanese Civil War for fifteen years, during which time she directed almost thirty films, including Les enfants de la guerre. — Robert Byrne

This restoration is based on a 2K scan of Jocelyne Saab’s original 16mm reversal work print and the 16mm magnetic sound element preserved at the Archives françaises du film. The restoration was led by l’Association Jocelyne Saab in partnership with Polygone étoile/Film Flamme (Marseille) and ThePostOffice (Beirut).

Co-presented by BAVC Media, Canyon Cinema, and San Francisco Cinematheque

Filmmaker Karen Sperling writes, directs, produces, and stars in The Waiting Room (1973), a groundbreaking film created by a 35-woman film crew working in the deserted wing of a psychiatric facility on Manhattan’s Ward Island. This renegade psychodrama captures the depths of feminine ambivalence in the shadow of a looming specter — compulsory domesticity. The ‘waiting room’ manifests as quotidian and institutional anterooms in which a young woman mulls over a marriage proposal. Belonging squarely to the quasi Brechtian feminist avant-garde forged by Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, and Cecelia Condit, The Waiting Room has remarkably gone unseen for 50 years.

A masterclass in off-kilter existentialism, the film moves in constant flux through elliptical camerawork, tonal ambiguity, and genre-agnosticism. Against drab interiors, women share profound dreams with blasé serenity, dissecting the chameleon processes by which they protect or share their energies with men. Contemplating the many relational prerequisites for life fulfillment, The Waiting Room accumulates dread in murmurs and non sequiturs on a path toward non-arrival. The film is punctuated by ringing phones, disquieting tableaus, and abiding humor. — Elise Schierbeek

Digitally preserved in 2025 by Block Cinema at The Block Museum of Art. Digital transfers of first-generation ¾” U-matic and a small sequence of second-generation VHS were performed by Bay Area Video Coalition and The Block Museum of Art. Shot on 35mm film in 1973 and transferred to ¾” U-matic video in the early 1980s from a 35mm release print.

The Waiting Room will screen with the following short:

ROSEBLOOD (Sharon Couzin, United States, 1974) 7m, DCP
In Roseblood (1974), legendary Chicago experimental filmmaker Sharon Couzin superimposes dancer Carolyn Chave Kaplan in a cresting wave of cities, gardens, and beachcomber treasure. Roseblood is a choppy symphony of exposure and knifework, a run with scissors toward feminine epiphany. Drama plays out as sliced interiority, stabbed worlds, and the frenzied suture of filmmaking. The film image convulses as fish-eye expansion and kaleidoscopic crushing while the music of Stockhausen and Enesco soundtracks glimmering gestures. — Elise Schierbeek

2025 digitization initiated by Gradiva Couzin and Odilon Couzin and undertaken by Negativeland from the original 1974 color reversal print. DCP courtesy of Canyon Cinema.

Co-presented by National Film Preservation Foundation and Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

Live musical accompaniment by the Club Foot Quintet.

Lewis Milestone’s extensive career was already at his peak when he directed The Garden of Eden in 1928. One year earlier he directed what would win the first Academy award for best comedy director Two Arabian Knights and in 1930 received a the Best Picture award for his all-time masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. In between he created the delightful The Garden of Eden, featuring the sparkling Corrinne Griffith as Toni, the niece of Viennese pretzel bakers who runs away to Budapest to seek fame as an opera singer.

The Garden of Eden is best described as either a pre-pre-code or a proto-screwball comedy. Technically it is a silent film, but skimpy costumes, gender play, and sexual innuendo undeniably identify it as a film confidently striding headlong into the early 1930s. Further evidence is provided by the Film Daily reviewer who complained at the time, “It is utterly absurd and cheap pandering to dirty-minded people who gloat over an undressed woman” and by Montreal censors that demanded the last reel be eliminated entirely. Fortunately, the archived prints at George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress, which form the basis of this restoration, eluded the censors' wrath and you will have the pleasure of seeing the scandalous footage that Canadian audiences were denied. — Robert Byrne

Restored in 2025 by the San Francisco Film Preserve in collaboration with George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress.

The Garden of Eden will screen with the following short:

WEAK BUT WILLING (William Watson, United States, 1929) 18m, 35mm
This delightful short film, written by and starring lauded vaudevillian Will King, features a notable uncredited performer—an as-yet-unknown Jean Harlow! Barely a year into her Hollywood career, Harlow puts in a truly scene-stealing turn as the “Blonde Night Club Patron” who compares pronunciations with a bewitched King. This centerpiece nightclub scene also features roller-skating dancers, sharp dialogue-based jokes (even at this early point in the development of sound-on-film technology), prohibition high-jinx, and a gruff and hungry bulldog!

Will King only appeared on screen in two films, making Weak But Willing a crucial window into a rapidly disappearing art form. The script is generously peppered with Yiddish, with an increasingly irritated King lapsing into his native tongue. Dot Farley endlessly chastises King throughout the film in the role of his wife. Farley had over three hundred and seventy screen credits over the course of her forty-year career, and her presence in Weak But Willing is a powerful one. — Kathy Rose O'Regan

Restored in 2026 by the San Francisco Film Preserve in collaboration with the Library of Congress.
Preserved through National Film Preservation Foundation funding.

Co-presented by National Film Preservation Foundation

At an all-girls school in Switzerland, Christa Storm (Dorothy Wilson) is a star pupil and stroke seat on the rowing team, but her clandestine affair with a young chemist from another college leads her into trouble when she discovers she’s pregnant. As Christa’s attention in school slips, she incurs the discipline of the team’s steely coach, Hannah (Kay Johnson), who removes her from the boat and threatens expulsion. Worse, Christa’s businessman father (Walter Connelly) objects to marriage between Christa and David over concerns that David’s studies doom him to a life of poverty. How will Christa and her coming baby keep an even keel through all this choppy water?

This pre-Code film was a remake of a 1932 German original (Acht Mädels im Boot) and billed as “America’s daring reply to Mädchen in Uniform (1931)”. Paramount’s advertising played up the salacious suggestion of a female-only school where men are forbidden. Most of the cast members were selected through a nationwide beauty contest aimed at filling out the ensemble with new faces to Hollywood, including Jean Rogers of Flash Gordon (1936). Silent child star Peggy-Jean “Baby Peggy” Montgomery (also known as Diana Serra Cary), now a teenager, appears as one of the students. — Brian Belak

Restored in 2026 by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Packard Humanities Institute at The PHI Stoa Film Lab, Audio Mechanics and Simon Daniel Sound laboratories, from the 35mm original nitrate picture negative, a 35mm acetate composite fine-grain positive and a 35mm nitrate print.

8 Girls in a Boat will screen with the following short:

TRIBUNE-AMERICAN DREAM PICTURE (United States, 1924) 8m, DCP
This 1920s silent film produced by the Oakland Tribune is a documentary reenactment of a humorous nightmare sourced from a written description by a local woman. Mrs. L.L. Nicholson stars in this on-screen depiction of her own anxiety dream, one in which her baby boy goes entirely missing in the bustle of a ferry ride to San Francisco. Cars veer erratically and rowboats loop in a time-lapse while the vessel of Mrs. L.L. Nicholson’s imagination overflows. — Elise Schierbeek

Restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress.

This screening will open with Len Lye's animated short film KALEIDOSCOPE. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen's multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

Filmed in 1944 during Nazi occupation of Denmark, Mordets Melodi [Melody of Murder] explores the darker crevices of our world during a time of incalculable darkness. Directed by Bodil Ipsen — making her part of the small cadre of women credited with directing a film noir — the film follows the trail of a serial killer on the streets of Copenhagen, targeting women named Sonja. Due to a specific song always heard when the murders occur, suspicion falls on cabaret singer Odette Margot (Gull-Maj Norin), and she becomes unsure of her own role in these deaths. The rainswept, narrow streets of Copenhagen make for a perfect noir backdrop, depicting a labyrinthine underworld where a killer stalks their prey.

Restored by Det Danske Filminstitut at Johan Ankerstjerne A/S laboratory, from the original 35mm negative nitrate and the 35mm sound negative nitrate. DCP provided by Det Daske Filminstitut. Courtesy of Nordisk Film.

Melody of Murder will screen with the following short:

OUTTAKES FROM THE PRELINGER COLLECTION
Rick Prelinger has had an outsized effect on the world of film archiving for many decades, amassing a truly astonishing collection of moving image works spanning sponsored films, home movies… and outtakes! This program will showcase outtakes from films shot right here in our city by the Bay.

25th Anniversary of Coffee & Language!

JP Allen, writers and cast members IN PERSON

Best known for his "audacious and skillful" (SF Chronicle) independent films, SF writer/director JP Allen, and his company Coffee and Language Productions, begin their 25th Anniversary celebration with their 11th feature film, MEMORIZING ALISON. Are you sure you know her? This slow-burn thriller starring Allison Ewing and JP Allen, explores the uncertainty of love and memory as a man questions everything he knows about his partner. This "romantic and mysterious" (SF Mission Local) film also stars Chopper Bernet, Janet Lynn Saunders, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, and Jon Bowden, story by Cathy Montosa andJP Allen. Filmed in San Francisco, Olema and Point Reyes.

Coffee and Language Productions recent films include Girl in Golden Gate Park, The Filmmaker, Love and Demons, Revisions and Centaur. Allen wrote, produced and acted a lead role in the film Stephanie's Image starring Academy Award Winner Melissa Leo. His first feature film, Coffee and Language, premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival where it was nominated for the Golden Starfish Award, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.

More films from the Coffee an Language catalog will be screening throughout the Bay Area this fall. Titles, dates & venues, and much more info can be found at:
25th Anniversary of Coffee & Language!

Isabel's Staff Pick!

Ernest (Simon Farrell) is a wayward twenty-something living in Vancouver. Stuck in a rut after a breakup and grieving a recent family tragedy, he does whatever he can to avoid reconnecting with his family. He visits his dealer, who is concerned he’s self-medicating. His sister drops in, begging him to call his mom. Then, while hiking, he meets Mallory (Madison Isolina), who persuades him to join her group, led by a spiritual leader who claims to hear sounds from the Earth. A cult in the Pacific Northwest makes for a great place to hide from your problems, but as the seasons change, Ernest finds space within himself to heal.

The need for connection and a sense of place takes centre stage in Brian Daniel Johnson’s debut feature — a sprawling character study that unfolds over a year. Vancouver plays itself, lensed with warmth and familiarity by Andriy Lyskov, in a story that should be relatable to anyone who has felt lost and alone in the city. -- Taylor Bishop, Vancouver International Film Festival.

Sapphic Cinema Social Club at The Roxie. A Quarterly Showcase of Classic + New Queer Cinema, Culture, and Community.

Sapphic Cinema Social Club is a high-energy, quarterly event series designed to bring the Bay’s vibrant queer community together at the intersection of cinema and socializing. This inclusive film club is a space to decompress, connect, and celebrate queer culture, while raising vital funds for local queer orgs.

• 5:00 PM | The Pre-Show Mixer at 518 Valencia 
• 6:00 PM | D.E.B.S. Screening 
• After-Party at Mother Bar

A percentage of ticket sales will benefit Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project.

Sultry crime boss Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster, The Fast and the Furious) is back in the states and the D.E.B.S.- an elite team of paramilitary college co-ed superspies- are hot on her trail. But when their top agent, gorgeous Amy Bradshaw (Sara Foster, The Big Bounce), mysteriously disappears after coming face to face with the attractive young villainess, the D.E.B.S. begin a full-scale search for Lucy's secret lair, never suspecting that Amy may not want to be rescued after all, in this smart and sexy spy spoof about love at first gun sight.

Presented in partnership with Frankly Speaking Films.

Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins (Design for Living) star in Robert Lewis Stevenson's classic horror tale of a kind and gentle doctor looking for a way to purge men of the evil in their nature . .. but who releases the monster within himself instead. Frederic March won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance.