Exploring the Cinematic Treasures of the Spring Quarter at BAMPFA

Contrary to the cynics or the more freaked out among us, talking about foreign and independent film is not an attempt to deflect from the U.S.’ slow sinking into billionaire-sponsored fascism.  As UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler pointed out recently, the humanities (e.g. film) offer the space to imagine possibilities beyond the restriction of the political and cultural imagination that’s a core part of the fascist endeavor.   

While the offerings for the Spring 2025 quarter of the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (hereafter “BAMPFA”) may not mention either the Orange Fascist or the Swasticar Mogul by name, the creative possibilities presented in this quarter’s program are their own rebuke to the crabbed and constricted thinking that overrated power couple publicly pass off as genius. 

BAMPFA’s big Spring quarter event is of course the “68th San Francisco International Film Festival At BAMPFA (April 18-27, 2025).”  However, as of this writing, details have not yet been released.

Until viewers are allowed to learn more about SFFILM’s plans, the Special Screenings 2025 section this quarter can partially whet viewers’ film festival-going appetites with either a chance to catch one of 2024’s outstanding films or first looks at possible future filmmakers of tomorrow.

The 2024 film is Payal Kapadia’s justly acclaimed “All We Imagine As Light (3:30 PM on March 1, 2025; 5:00 PM on March 23, 2025; 6:00 PM on April 13, 2025).”  It follows three women who work in the same Mumbai hospital as their efforts to deal with such challenges as a long-absent husband and a relationship between people of different religions run into the shortcomings of tradition.

See the early work of a possible future filmmaker or two at the other Special Screenings this quarter.  The “BAMPFA Student Committee Film Festival (7:00 PM on April 4, 2025)” presents a collection of short films of various lengths and genres made by student filmmakers from around the Bay Area.  By contrast, “Film And Video Makers At Cal: Works From The Eisner Competition (2:00 PM on May 18, 2025)” features short films made by UC Berkeley students which won either a prize or an honorable mention in the Eisner Prize competition.  The Eisner is UC Berkeley’s highest honor for creativity.  Both of these events are free to the public. 

The “African Film Festival 2025 (March 6 – April 6, 2025)” series is definitely not free to the public.  But it offers some intriguing selections from the titular New York festival, including a title likely to give the vapors to a certain powerful South African bigot associated with the Orange Felon’s administration.

Osvalde Levat’s “MK: Mandela’s Secret Army (5:00 PM on April 6, 2025)” gives a fuller history of Nelson Mandela.   More than just a pacifist, Mandela was also a freedom fighter.  The MK (short for uMkhonto we Sizwe) was the African National Congress’ armed revolutionary wing, and Mandela was heavily involved with the MK.  The colonialists will complain, but keep in mind living under apartheid was far more brutal than people today realize and the regime’s crackdowns on dissidents were definitely not pretty.

Jose Miguel Ribeiro’s powerful animated film “Nayola (4:00 PM on April 5, 2025)” recounts Angola’s twenty-five-year-long civil war through the stories of three generations of women.  Based on a play written by playwright Jose Eduardo Agualusa and novelist Mia Couto, the film recounts both the war and the scars left behind in both the revolutionary jungle outposts and contemporary urban settings.

Despite winning a major prize at the Venice Film Festival, “Camp de Thiaroye (The Camp At Thiaroye) (6:30 PM on March 18, 2025)” wound up being banned in France for a decade and was completely censored in Senegal.  Now Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow’s classic historic drama gets a digital restoration.  It’s the end of World War II, and surviving Senegalese troops are returning home from Europe.  The French authorities created the titular “temporary transit spot” until the soldiers can be officially discharged.  But some of these returning soldiers are coming back after being imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.  And the racist attitudes displayed by their former Nazi captors sound an awful lot like the attitudes displayed by the French personnel running this “transit spot.”    

Speaking of concentration camps and persecuted minorities, undocumented immigrants are bearing the brunt of the Orange Fascist’s racist persecution despite the fact that this country was built by migrants of various ethnicities.  “Media And Migration On Screen (April 16-18, 2025)” presents three programs of films that creatively show the histories, causes, and effects of global migration.  Needless to say, job stealing ranks far lower on the forces spurring migration scale than such problems as war and climate change.  

“Media And Migration (April 16, 2025)” presents a collection of short films from such places as Lebanon, Palestine, and The Philippines by using narrative to look at the effects of borders and displacement on those who would make the long trek to a different country.  “The Avalanche (April 17, 2025)” sees director Pinar Ogrenci return to her father’s mountainous Turkish hometown of Mukus (located near the Iranian border), which sports a huge community of Kurdish speakers under constant danger from both snow avalanches and changing political winds.  Finally, the “Two Films By Pinar Ogrenci (7:00 PM on April 18, 2025)” program presents the short films “Turkish Delight” (the history of the titular sweet and its connections to nationalism, war, and migration) and “Gurbet Is A Home Now” (guest workers and their families, who were photographed for Esra Akcan’s book “Open Architecture,” talk about their experiences growing up in the Berlin urban renewal project International Bauausstellung).

Equally engaging if less controversial viewpoints can be found in the concluding half of the “Documentary Voices (March 5 – April 30, 2025)” film series.  From an unexpected audience for 1980s New Wave music to a decades-old massacre recounted in part via clay miniatures, the curated films for this series provide thought-provoking material.

Elizabeth Ai’s documentary “New Wave (7:00 PM on April 9, 2025)” is much more than a nostalgic trip to the 1980s’ days of synth music and the punk/goth subculture.  For Vietnamese-American teens, this music scene provided a space for dealing with the Vietnam War’s impact on their parents.

Another film about the intersection between politics and family history uses miniature clay figurines as a key tool of investigation.  Asmae El Moudir’s “The Mother Of All Lies (7:00 PM on March 19, 2025)” centers on a street in Casablanca’s Sebata district recreated with cardboard backdrops and clay figurines.  Such a recreation is necessary because the director’s grandmother Zahra forbade the family to create personal images or photographs.  How is that edict connected to the bloody suppression of the 1981 Casablanca bread riots?

Ibrahim Nash’at”s “Hollywoodgate (7:00 P M on March 12, 2025)” has absolutely nothing to do with the Los Angeles dream factory and everything to do with Afghanistan.  For its setting is one of the American military bases abandoned in the U.S. withdrawal from that country.  However, in the withdrawal, a lot of still working military weaponry was left behind…and the Taliban now has possession of that weapons cache.

A different sort of American withdrawal is taking place in Ukraine courtesy of the Orange Fascist’s determination to stand with Russian good buddy Vladimir Putin aka the leader of the country which militarily invaded Ukraine.  For those who want to see the Ukrainians as much more than a geopolitical bargaining chip, the BAMPFA film series “Ukrainian Cinema: Poetry And Resistance (March 21 – April 13, 2025)” can provide cinematic clue train tickets.  The country may have a history as a “bloodland” occupied by totalitarians throughout the 20th century.  Yet as striking images from these films show, it’s still populated by resilient people connected to the land. 

If you liked Mikhail Kaufman’s camera work on “The Man With A Movie Camera,” then you need to see Kaufman’s own documentary “In Spring (7:00 PM on March 28, 2025).”  It shows how life in 1920s Kyiv changes with the arrival of Spring.  From houses getting flooded by the Dnipro River to teens dating on Kyiv’s hills, the film shows the director’s love for the “natural vibrations of trees, animals, and humans.”

Banned for 22 years until the arrival of Perestroika, Yurii Illienko’s surreal near-silent masterpiece “A Spring For The Thirsty (5:00 PM on April 11, 2025)” follows elderly peasant Levko Serdyuk as he awaits death.  Serdyuk lives alone on the edge of a desert, and his memories drift over the deaths of his wife and eldest son as well as his laments over the incursion of metropolitan ways. 

Mark Donskoi’s “At Great Cost (2:30 PM on March 30, 2025)” is an adaptation of a story written by Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi (“Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors”).  In the 1830s, lovers Solomiia and Ostap are forcibly separated: Ostap becomes an army conscript while Solomiia is to be married to a man she doesn’t love.  The two lovers’ attempt to run away from their expected fates towards freedom are complicated by such dangers as Ostap being gravely wounded by a border guard’s bullet.

A lifelong quest for artistic freedom could describe the career of actress turned director Mai Zetterling.  Pursuing that quest often made Zetterling feel like a Swedish outsider in such places as London and Hollywood.  That sobriquet provides the title of the film series celebrating the centenary of the actress/director’s birth “Swedish Outsider: The Films Of Mai Zetterling (March 1 – May 8, 2025).”

The series kicks off with one of its must-sees, “Torment (6:30 PM on March 1, 2025).” It’s bursting with talent in the form of Ingmar Bergman’s first produced screenplay, direction by great Swedish director Alf Sjoberg, and a performance by Zetterling which propelled her to international fame.  It’s the story of a youth and a shopgirl (Zetterling) whose hopes that their love will shield them from the evils they face in their lives prove tragically mistaken.

Zetterling stars in and directs the semi-autobiographical drama “We Have Many Names  (3:00 PM on March 16, 2025).”  The director draws on her feelings during the collapse of her marriage to English novelist David Hughes to tell the story of a woman reeling from being abandoned by her husband despite her own personal sacrifices.  It’s the highlight of a program of short films which includes “Of Seals And Men,” which might trigger animal lovers with its pro-seal hunting stance.

Speaking of triggering, John Waters aka the glorious “Prince Of Puke” calls Zetterling’s “Night Games (7:00 PM on March 13, 2025 and 7:00 PM on May 3, 2025) his favorite film.  This controversial film concerns the soon-to-be-wed Jan, whose sexual inhibitions are connected to his Oedipal longings and the sexual games his depraved mother (Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin) played on him as a child.  Further street cred for the film is given by that paragon of cloying sentimentality, former child star Shirley Temple.  The San Francisco International Film Festival’s decision to show Zetterling’s film caused her to publicly denounce the film as “pornography for profit” and to resign from the festival.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the Christian Nationalist crowd also use the “pornography for profit” condemnation against the very queer-friendly work of director Todd Haynes.  For the rest of us totally into celebrating the joy and diversity of the LGBTQIA+ communities, the film series “Todd Haynes: Far From Safe (March 8 – April 12, 2025)” will be your must-see series of the quarter.  The series features all of Haynes’ feature films to date plus a program of his shorter, earlier works.  

It should be noted that four films in the series (“Safe,” “Velvet Goldmine,” “I’m Not There,” and “Far From Heaven”) have already sold out of advance tickets.  This is probably due to these screenings having Haynes appear in person for conversations about these films.

If you could only see one of the remaining films in the series, first choice should go to Haynes’ only documentary to date “The Velvet Underground (7:00 PM on April 11, 2025).”  As the title suggests, its subject is the seminal house band from Andy Warhol’s Factory days.  Not only does it feature the Underground’s incredible music, but the film gives those who weren’t there an idea of the incredible avant garde scene the band was a part of, thanks to excerpts from films by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, and Warhol himself among others.

Another sure thing to catch is the romance “Carol (7:00 PM on March 26, 2025).”  In this stunning adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price Of Salt,” department store shopgirl and aspiring photographer Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) becomes fascinated and more by the glamorous Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett).  Over time, their relationship changes from business to something a lot more intimate.  However, the two women have met each other during the homophobic 1950s, and Carol’s husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) is using Carol’s sexual orientation as a threat to keep her permanently separated from her daughter Rindi.

Finally, Haynes’ “Poison (6:30 PM on April 5, 2025)” was the film that kicked off what became known as the New Queer Cinema movement.  It consists of adaptations of a triptych of Jean Genet stories: “Horror” (when Doctor Grave creates and drinks the elixir of human sexuality, he transforms into a murderous leper), “Hero” (a reporter investigates whether 7-year-old Richie fatally shot his father), and “Homo” (two male prisoners engage in a violent sado-masochistic relationship).  However, each story is not told straight from beginning to end, but is intercut with the other stories in the film.

Artistically revolutionary in a far different way is legendary director John Cassavetes, who took a far different approach to directing actors than many of his contemporaries.  Last but not least, the series “Love Streams, Gena Rowlands & John Cassavetes (May 2-14, 2025)” presents half a dozen films made by Cassavetes in conjunction with his best actor/collaborator Gena Rowlands.  

One of Rowlands’ must-see performances is as Mabel Longhetti in “A Woman Under The Influence (7:00 PM on May 2, 2025).”  Mabel may be the wife of construction foreman Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) and the mother of three children.  Yet her constant attempts to please Nick fall flat, and the continual usurpation of her own personal space to meet others’ needs first begin to mentally wear on Mabel’s psyche.

“Minnie & Moskowitz (7:00 PM on May 7, 2025)” turns out to be Cassavetes’ take on the screwball romantic comedy.  It sees Rowlands playing Minnie, a Los Angeles museum employee who continually strikes out at finding love.  When she accidentally catches the eye of parking lot attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel), the man’s determined to win Minnie’s heart.

In “Gloria (6:00 PM on May 11, 2025),” Rowlands plays the title character Gloria Swenson.  She’s a former mobster’s moll who as a favor agrees to protect her neighbor’s children after the neighbor and her husband are targeted for a mob hit.  The trouble is, such protection means shooting people Gloria used to know in the mob.