BAMPFA partners with the Bay Area Book Festival to present films that celebrate, adapt, or creatively reinterpret the written word and its practitioners.
Read full descriptionFrom dutiful conservative Southern son to gay activist and San Francisco chronicler, Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin looks at his life with wry humor and some choice true tales.
Jennifer M. Kroot in Person
Pablo Larraín’s film “playfully and provocatively distorts the facts of an extraordinary year in the life of the Chilean Nobel prize–winning poet: Neruda is an anti-biopic” (The Guardian).
Introduction by Mark Eisner
We pay tribute to the late author Denis Johnson with the film adaptation of his classic short story collection Jesus’ Son. Three esteemed authors and friends of Johnson introduce the film and share stories.
Introduction by Jane Ciabattari, Christian Kiefer, and Tom Barbash
Maliglutit (Searchers) continues in the breathtaking vein of Canadian-Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s unforgettable Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner with a story of cruelty and cold revenge inspired by John Ford’s The Searchers and spoken entirely in Inuktitut.
Introduction by Shari Huhndorf
New Digital Restoration
“For those who know the final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Ruiz’s film sets off its own chain of memories and associations; for those who do not, it serves as a superb introduction to the shape and texture of the Proustian universe” (Dave Kehr).
Introduction by Steve Wasserman
Errol Morris’s acclaimed film, based on Stephen Hawking’s book, is a humanly scaled, biographical study of a singular mind navigating a very big universe.
Errol Morris and Edward Frenkel in Conversation
Czech animator Karel Zeman captures the wonder in Gustave Doré’s illustrations for a classic novel by using live action against a series of fairy-tale backgrounds and enchanting visual pyrotechnics. With Méliès/Jules Verne short Impossible Voyage.
James Mockoski in Person
File this sobering satire, starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, under “Brainwashing, fear of.” The film “takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a ‘classic’ but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released” (Roger Ebert).
Introduction by Greil Marcus