Welcome Spring At The BAMPFA

Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #s 12 & 35” and the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (hereafter “BAMPFA”) Spring 2026 schedule may not seem to make sense as a pairing.  But the connection becomes obvious once a reader starts taking a look at BAMPFA’s offerings this quarter while remembering this particular Dylan song had the notorious lyric “Everybody must get stoned.” 

BAMPFA’s curators are understandably not encouraging visitors to its film series “Psychedelia & Cinema (Now - May 10, 2026)” to be stoned when they catch such films in the series as “Altered States” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  But from this layperson’s viewpoint, maximizing the viewing experience of films where altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness play a big role would seem to call for ingesting recreational pharmaceuticals when the lights go down.  Just don’t be a tool who ruins other audience members’ enjoyment.

Two weird parties provide the basis for depicting non-ordinary consciousness in the “Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome and Luminous Procuress (3 PM on March 14, 2026)” program.  Footage from Renate Druks’ “come as your madness” Hollywood costume party provided the raw material for Kenneth Anger’s classic short.  Who could have expected the party Anger recorded to have taken place in right-wingers’ culturally virginal year of 1953?  Steven Arnold’s “Luminous Procuress” has a bit more of a plot: two handsome hippie lads are led by the mysterious Procuress on a mystical trip to a higher state of consciousness beyond gender and desire.  Watch out for appearances by The Cockettes and ruth weiss.

The consciousness raising that experimental jazz musician Sun Ra delivered did not involve using any drugs whatsoever.  As Christine Turner’s documentary “Sun Ra: Do The Impossible (4 PM on March 21, 2026)” shows, the interplanetary ambassador persona the musician adopted was more than just a gimmick for his act.  It provided a basis for getting his listeners to rethink what they knew about race, social norms, and even how to use music to blow peoples’ minds.

On the other hand, not everybody’s mind can be memorably blown by exposure to art.  Sometimes you need a stimulant such as khat.  Jessica Beshir’s “Faya Dayi (7 PM on April 8, 2026)” takes viewers to see how khat was used in the rural Ethiopian region the director grew up in.  For Sufi practitioners, the drug helps them achieve a religious dream state.  But for youths facing harsh social and economic conditions, the drug helps them cope with despair and hardship. Whatever the reason for ingesting khat, addiction to this stimulant has become a common problem.

“Faya Dayi” also happens to be one of the selections in this year’s “African Film Festival (March 8 - May 9, 2026).”  This selection may be a step away from this year’s general theme of “coming-of-age stories and portraits of dynamic cities in transition.”  Yet this film still falls within the festival’s larger remit of presenting visions from both Africa and the global diaspora.  Some of the titles to check out include:

Inspired by a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem with the same title, “Compensation (7 PM on March 12, 2026)” from director Zeinabu Irene Davis tells two love stories set nearly a century apart.  In 1910, deaf but educated seamstress Malindy falls in love with the hearing but illiterate migrant worker Arthur.  In the present day, artist Malaika and librarian Nico fall in love.  Both couples are played by the same pair of actors.  Both couples deal with opposition concerning a hearing person/deaf person relationship.  And the future of both relationships is threatened by a dreaded contemporary disease (tuberculosis in 1910, AIDS in the present).

Atou Cisse, daughter of the great director Souleymane Cisse, directs “Furu (4 PM on April 4, 2026),” a social drama about the impact of forced marriage on young Malian women.  The film’s built around the stories of two women: You, who’s forced to marry a much older man rather than carry the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock, and Ami, whose desire for independence means resisting village pressure to marry.  

Afolabi Olalekan makes his dramatic feature debut with “Freedom Way (7 PM on April 12, 2026).”  The ensemble drama begins when software developers Themba and Tayo finally launch their rideshare app Easy Go.  The software connects Lagos commercial motorcyclists with customers.  One such motorcyclist who hopes to benefit from Easy Go is family man Abiola.  But other characters and situations soon enter into the mix, such as a dirty cop, a righteous doctor, hostile government laws, personal greed, and police brutality.

Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s semi-autobiographical computer-animated film “Bouchra (4 PM on May 9, 2026)” is set on an Earth filled with anthropomorphic animals.  The title character is a queer filmmaker living in Brooklyn.  Creatively stuck, she decides to work on a semi-autobiographical film set in Morocco.  Along the way, she hopes to both explore her sexual identity and reconcile with her Casablanca-based mother Aicha. 

Sammy Baloji’s essay film “The Tree Of Authenticity (7 PM on April 1, 2026)” lays out the intersection of ecological devastation and the legacy of Belgian colonialism.  The film centers on the long-abandoned Yangambi INERA Research Station and two scientists who once worked there, Paul Panda Fernana and Abiron Beirnaert.  Fernana may have been the first Black Belgian colonial civil servant, but he continually struggled to have his substantial scientific talent recognized in the face of the period’s racism.

Baloji’s film along with Bashir’s “Faya Dayi” is also part of the Spring quarter’s segment of this year’s “Documentary Voices (Now To April 22, 2026)” film series.  The different impacts of colonialism happens to be one of this segment’s subjects, along with war and resistance, and social minorities using their voice.  An example of this last subject is Reid Davenport’s must-see “Life After,” which questions whether support for assisted suicide is actually a way for society to avoid helping the disabled live as fully as possible.  Here are some other films in the series worth your time:

The “Kill The Documentary (7 PM on March 11, 2026)” program is a tribute to late teacher, critic, and filmmaker Jill Godmilow.  It’s a collection of short films featuring Harun Farocki’s “Inextinguishable Fire” (a study of Dow Chemical’s development of napalm that also doubles as a capitalist critique), Godmilow’s “What Farocki Taught” (Godmilow’s shot-by-shot remake of Farocki’s film), and Joyce Wieland’s “Rat Life and Diet In North America” (a satirical account of a group of gerbils held as political prisoners by a cat).

Arthur Jafa’s documentary “Dreams Are Colder Than Death (7 PM on April 22, 2026)” is both a necessary film and one liable to depress viewers who already hate what the Orange Dementia Patient and his fellow goons are doing to America right now.  Made 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, such personages as Charles Burnett, Kathleen Cleaver, and Kara Walker reflect on both the aims of the Civil Rights Movement and how things stand for African-Americans at the time this film was made. 

Renowned director Lucrecia Martel makes her first foray into documentary filmmaking with “Our Land/Nuestra Tierra (7 PM on April 15, 2026).”  In 2009, Chuschagasta community leader Javier Chocobar was killed by three armed men who intended to evict the Chuschagasta folk living on what was allegedly the killers’ property.  Despite video records of the killing of Chocobar, it took nine years of protests before the perpetrators were brought to trial.  Even then, the three killers deny doing anything wrong as they claim the Chuschagasta don’t exist.  (Why does this writer hear echoes of certain Israelis saying the same thing about Palestine as a country?)

Viewers who have questions about Martel’s film will have the rare chance to ask the director in person.  BAMPFA’s “Lucrecia Martel: Un destino comun (April 4-19, 2026)” presents a retrospective of Martel’s films during the director’s UC Berkeley residency.  They range from her first film “La cienaga” to a selection of rarely seen (in the US) short films.  For those wanting to catch Martel’s in-person appearances, they should check out the shows screening between April 15-18.  Some Martel films to catch:

Teenage Amalia is “The Holy Girl (7 PM on April 9, 2026).”  She’s at the age where she can’t always tell the difference between her burgeoning sexual desire and her strong Catholic faith.  Middle-aged and married Dr. Jano is staying at Amalia’s mother’s hotel for a medical conference.  When the doctor gives the teen girl some unwanted lecherous body contact, Amalia feels God’s given her a mission to “save” the middle-aged lecher from his perverted behavior.

Did the bourgeois Veronica aka Vero hit a boy or a dog with her car when her cell phone momentarily distracted her?  She figuratively becomes “The Headless Woman (7 PM on April 18, 2026)” as she’s personally unsure if she’s guilty of that act.  Matters are not resolved as loved ones seem to actively erase any proof of Vero’s possible guilt.

Martel’s first historic dramatic feature is the acclaimed “Zama (7 PM on April 19, 2026).”  The title character is Don Diego de Zama, an 18th century Spanish magistrate who’s stuck in a backwater posting in Argentina.  He longs to be reassigned to a more civilized post in Lerma, but fate keeps on mocking his desires.  From a romantic rival to a hostile new Governor to an elusive bandit, nothing seems to go as planned for this magistrate.

The late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha may never have done a UC Berkeley residency.  On the other hand, she was a UC Berkeley student from 1969-1978 and worked at the University Art Museum after a year studying film theory in Paris.  In addition, she edited “Apparatus,” a renowned film theory anthology which brought together works examining cinema on an ideological basis.  The series “Sentimental Education: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at the Pacific Film Archive (April 2-19, 2026)” brings together works of global cinema that influenced Cha with examples of her own Structuralist cinematic work.  The influences featured in this series are the Carl Th. Dreyer classic “The Passion Of Joan Of Arc,” Yasujiro Ozu’s color remake of “Floating Weeds,” and films from Chantal Akerman and Mona Hatoum on epistolary relationships between mothers and daughters.  Cha’s own oeuvre is represented by both a screening of early short films and late work ranging from a short using the I Ching to an unfinished narrative work.    

A different sort of cinematic experimentation is recounted in the film series “Impulses And Abstractions: Sound And Music In 1960s French Cinema (March 14-29, 2026).”  Technological advancement of the early 1960s allowed for the creation of fragmented or even dissonant film soundtracks.  French film directors of the period would take this technological development and apply it in novel ways.  Viewers can hear the results in such well-known film classics as Alain Resnais’ “Last Year At Marienbad” (in 4K restoration), Agnes Varda’s “Cleo From 5 To 7,” and Chris Marker’s “La Jetee” (screening as part of a short film program).  Finally, Jacques Rivette’s feature debut “Paris Belongs To Us” may concern a search for a lost cassette tape of modernist guitar music.  But to this writer, the bigger question is whether the film's titular “us” refers to its Left Bank actor characters or members of a vague worldwide conspiracy.

There’s certainly little doubt Iran’s ruling mullahs would declare “Iran Belongs To Us.”  The film series “Iranian Cinema: From Aesthetics To Politics (March 7 - April 23, 2026),” running in conjunction with Professor Minoo Moallem’s spring semester course, may not feature films openly challenging the mullahs’ sentiments.  But it’s safe to say that at least in the restored Iranian New Wave films showing in the series this control by mullahs isn’t totally accepted as gospel.

Dariush Mehrjui followed up his legendary “The Cow” with the “Woyzeck” adaptation “The Postman (4:45 PM on March 7, 2026 and 3:30 PM on March 18, 2026).”  In contemporary Iran, postman Taghi works multiple jobs and leaves his beautiful wife Mounir sexually unsatisfied.  Unsurprisingly, Mounir cheats on her husband.  Taghi knows his wife’s being unfaithful, but what will he do when her lover turns out to be his landlord’s handsome nephew?

Bahram Beyzaie’s “Bashu, The Little Stranger (1 PM on March 29, 2026 and 3:30 PM on April 8, 2026)” is a must-see film admired by director Jafar Panahi (“It Was Just An Accident”).  During the Iran-Iraq War, young Bashu gets orphaned when his parents are killed in a bombing raid on his home village.  The Afro-Iranian boy manages to flee and eventually finds refuge with farm woman Na’i and her two children.  Despite initial suspicion and the language barrier, the farm woman and the boy refugee eventually manage to trust and help one another.  How long will their bond last given the open racist hostility of the other villagers and Bashu’s own PTSD?

Besides the restorations of the Mehrjui and Beyzaie films, another must-see is Sohrab Shahid Saless’ “Far From Home (3:30 PM on March 11, 2026 and 1 PM on March 15, 2026).”   Husseyin is a Turkish immigrant “guest worker” in 1970s West Berlin.  He lives in a small shared apartment and does factory work pressing machine parts.  His dream involves saving enough to marry and buy a house back home.  But the openly racist behavior of his coworkers and botched attempts at romantic intimacy make Husseyin’s dream seem farther away than ever.   

Saless’ film also appears in this quarter’s biggest series “Fassbinder And The New German Cinema (March 6 - May 17, 2026)” for a good reason.  The director fled the Shah’s regime for West Germany back in 1975.  He would become part of the New German Cinema cohort that would wow filmgoers worldwide.  

For newbies to this cinema movement and old cinephiles, this BAMPFA series is a chance to catch classic 1970s-era films from the likes of West German directors Werner Herzog, Volker Schlondorff, Wim Wenders, and Ulrike Ottinger.  Centering this series are the works of the prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made over 40 films before dying early at age 37.

Viewers sickened by the character assassination that’s the stock in trade of Faux News and other frothing right-wing “news” outlets will learn in Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s acerbic “The Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum (7 PM on March 27, 2026)” that the sickening closeness between law enforcement and right-wing media is an old phenomenon.  Katharina Blum is an ordinary maid whose one night stand with an army deserter turns into a nightmare.  When the deserter is fingered by police as a possible terrorist. Blum’s own life comes under withering scrutiny by both cops and news media.  

Alexander Kluge’s “Yesterday Girl (4:30 PM on April 3, 2026)” adapts his own short story “Anita G.” with his sister Alexandra playing the lead character.  Anita G. is a Jewish refugee from East Germany whose attempts to find a better life in West Germany are undermined by the country’s political system as well as social mores which prevent her from reinventing herself.  The deliberately stiff dialogue used in certain parts of the film is a commentary on Germany’s inability to reckon with its past.

One of the must-see series classics is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Marriage Of Maria Braun (7 PM on April 11, 2026),” the film which made Hanna Schygulla an international star.  Schygulla plays Maria Braun, a post-war German wife who’s constantly separated from her husband Hermann by fate.  But instead of waiting nobly and helplessly, she’s learning to build personal power and wealth (much like her devastated country) using any and all means at hand.

Seeing actor Klaus Kinski in unforgettable maniac mode is one of the seminal legacies of the New German Cinema.  Werner Herzog’s classically savage “Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (7 PM on May 6, 2026)” lets Kinski rip loose when his character becomes part of an exploratory group of Spanish conquistadors trying to find the fabled city of El Dorado.  History records that this Amazon River exploratory group was lost.  But Herzog’s tale suggests the reason for the loss of Don Lope de Aguirre’s (Kinski) group may have been the Spaniard’s insane power-hungry dreams of stealing the entire South American continent.   

A different sort of ordeal awaits in Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s “Our Hitler (Hitler: A Film From Germany) (1:30 PM on May 16, 2026).”  This is a nearly 7 ½-hour long film about HItler and Germany.  It’s more of an essay film than a plotted mini-series.  The topics considered include Hitler’s cult of personality, the ideology behind the Holocaust, and the links between Nazi propaganda and Germany’s spiritual and cultural heritage.  This is not a film for everyone, but for those who are willing to undergo the viewing experience, it is unforgettable.

If you thought Syberberg’s film sounds like an intimidating viewing experience, then you need to know about Robert Wilson and his proposed 12-hour opera.  The story of that ill-fated project is just one of this quarter’s “Special Screenings (Ongoing).”  

Howard Brookner’s documentary “Robert Wilson And The CIVIL warS (4:30 PM on May 10, 2026)” recounts how famed theater director Robert Wilson was commissioned by the 1984 Summer Olympic Games to create an epic opera for the event.  Using the theme of the American Civil War, Wilson would put together six different theatrical productions rehearsed in six different countries (Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the U.S.) for what would have been a holistic production…and his magnum opus.

A different sort of artistic production becomes a central component of Inna Sahakyan’s partly animated historical documentary “Aurora’s Sunrise (4 PM on April 16, 2026).”  Armenian teen Arshaluys Mardiganian may have been born into a wealthy family, but she would lose practically everything about her old life thanks to the Armenian genocide.  Fortunately, she would reach safety in the United States.  When she’s entrusted with the job of informing Americans what’s befallen her people, her story will eventually result in a film dramatizing that ordeal.

Finally, there’s a screening of the restoration of Satyajit Ray’s “Days And Nights In The Forest (4 PM on April 12, 2026 and 7 PM on May 9, 2026).”  A quartet of educated young men from different parts of Calcutta society decide to spend a few days in rural Jharkhand where they can escape civilization’s constraints.  But their attempts to impress two attractive ladies named Aparna and Jaya soon leads to the young men inadvertently making fools of themselves.