Documentary Voices 2019

January 23–April 24, 2019

Our annual series of nonfiction films showcases inventive approaches to the documentary form.

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Minding the Gap
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Luz obscura

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Films
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Past Films

Luz obscura
- Wednesday, April 24 7 PM
Susana de Sousa Dias
Portugal, 2017
Susana de Sousa Dias continues her exploration of Portugal’s tragic past in this moving experimental essay film on political imprisonment, government oppression, and the families left behind in their wake.

Les Blank Lecture by Susana de Sousa Dias
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
- Wednesday, April 10 7 PM
RaMell Ross
United States, 2018
Award-winning photographer RaMell Ross’s inspired and intimate portrait of an African American community in rural Alabama captures small but precious moments in black lives with rapturous attention. The film was a nominee for this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Behemoth
- Wednesday, April 3 7 PM
Zhao Liang
China, France, 2015
This politicized examination of China’s war on its own environment is a visionary combination of observational documentary, experimental essay, and Workingman’s Death–like vision of hell on earth.
El Mar La Mar
- Wednesday, March 20 7 PM
Joshua Bonnetta, J. P. Sniadecki
United States, 2017
Weaving breathtaking footage of the Sonoran Desert with eerie off-camera interviews, this film captures the desperation and haunting beauty that the land between Mexico and the United States has come to represent.

Introduced by Diana Ruíz
Yours in Sisterhood
- Wednesday, March 13 7 PM
Irene Lusztig
United States, 2018
Lusztig unearthed letters to Ms. magazine—most of them never published—and asked women around the US to read them aloud, creating an extraordinary dialogue between the past and the future of feminism.

Irene Lusztig in Person
The Tiniest Place
- Wednesday, March 6 7 PM
Tatiana Huezo
Mexico, 2011
Soulful and beautifully rendered, this documentary on the scars of the Salvadoran civil war is an evocative testament to memory and the power of life to rebound after unspeakable tragedy.
Dusk Chorus
- Wednesday, February 20 7 PM
Nika Saravanja, Alessandro D’Emilia
Italy, 2016
This documentary follows eco-composer David Monacchi’s attempt to create a 3-D aural record of the vanishing sounds of the Amazon rainforests. With Richard Lerman’s short Arctic Transitions: In the Age of Carbon.

Introduction by Richard Lerman
Minding the Gap
- Wednesday, February 13 7 PM
Bing Liu
United States, 2018
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Bing Liu documents his skateboarding friends over ten years as they raise themselves on the streets of a rust belt town. “A rich, devastating essay on race, class, and manhood in 21st-century America” (New York Times). Nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Out on the Street
- Wednesday, January 30 7 PM
Jasmina Metwaly, Philip Rizk
Egypt, 2015
Ten Egyptian workers distill their experiences of injustice and exploitation at the hands of bosses, police, and the court system into a series of vignettes for this documentary that engages “ideas about labor, social justice, and the circulation of images” (MoMA).

Jasmina Metwaly in Person
One Way or Another
- Wednesday, January 23 7 PM
Sara Gómez
Cuba, 1974–77
Imported 35mm Print

This masterpiece of Cuban cinema integrates documentary and fiction to offer an unflinching analysis of the problems of urban life and conflicts of race, class, sex, and religion in Castro’s Cuba.

Documentary Voices 2019

January 23–April 24, 2019

Our annual series featuring recent and historical nonfiction films offers visions into history as its traces persist and as it is being made today. Subjects range from ecological destruction in the Amazon and in China, to the everyday lives of young people in a rural African American community and on the streets of a Rust Belt town; from scars still visible in a Salvadoran village years after the country’s civil war, to contemporary conditions along the US–Mexico border. The series opens with a 1970s landmark of Cuban cinema by Sara Gómez and a recent film from Egypt with codirector Jasmina Metwaly in person. It closes with a visit from the acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias, here to present the fourth annual Les Blank Lecture. She will discuss her most recent essay film, which draws on archival photographs to examine the devastating effects of the Portuguese dictatorship on the children of political prisoners.

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Of related interest, see our spotlight on Arthur Jafa; the Out of the Vault programs with The Black Aesthetic; and this season’s Limited Engagements, which include documentaries by Frederick Wiseman and others.

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Cocurated by Film Curator Kathy Geritz and Natalia Brizuela, in conjunction with Brizuela’s course on documentary film at UC Berkeley. Jasmina Metwaly’s visit is made possible by the Arts Research Center, the University of California Humanities Research Institute by way of its Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives funding, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Berkeley Film and Media Seminar Lecture Series. We are grateful for the support of the Les Blank Fund and the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center, which makes Susana de Sousa Dias’s visit possible.