BAM/PFA is the place for UC Berkeley students and the Bay Area community to explore cinema from every film-producing country in the world and from the entire history of film. In over 480 different programs offered each year, we present rare and rediscovered prints of movie classics, new and historic works by the world's great film directors, restored silent films with live musical accompaniment, thematic retrospectives, and exciting experiments by today's film and video artists, including provocative, independently made fiction and documentary films. Film screenings are often enlivened by in-person appearances by filmmakers, authors, critics, and scholars, who engage in discussion with audiences.
Past series have included Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chronicles of Inferno: Japan's Art Theater Guild, Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism, Isabelle Huppert: Passion and Contradiction, Castles in the Sky: Masterful Anime from Studio Ghibli, Grand Illusions: French Cinema Classics, 1928–1960, Women's Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran, and Gregory Peck: An Agreeable Gentleman; and we have featured retrospectives of filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni, Stan Brakhage, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Demy, Claire Denis, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, George and Mike Kuchar, Akira Kurosawa, Ida Lupino, Guy Maddin, Chris Marker, Nagisa Oshima, Marcel Pagnol, Satyajit Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Raúl Ruiz, Kidlat Tahimik, Agnès Varda, Dziga Vertov, and numerous others. BAM/PFA is also the exclusive East Bay venue for the San Francisco International Film Festival and CAAMFest, a festival of Asian American film.
