Los Angeles Filmforum is the longest-running organization in Southern California dedicated exclusively to the ongoing, non-commercial exhibition of independent, experimental, and progressive media art.

Filmforum is proud to be in the center of the cultural programming of a city with a rich history of avant-garde filmmaking and programming. Now in our 48th year, we celebrate personal, hand-crafted and non-commercial work. Read more about our various programs, purchase tickets for upcoming screenings, explore our archives, or learn more about volunteering or making a tax-deductible donation on our website!

Upcoming Screenings

The Tree House

Earthly Visions: The Tree House

Date: Dec 6, 2024 7:30PM
Location: The Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum

Part of Science Fiction Against the Margins. This program’s films are documents of the Earth at its current stage mixed with dystopian speculations on the future. Moving through green spaces, caves and mountains, they remind us of the fragile rock that houses us, and that we must tend to in order to avoid catastrophic consequences.

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Photo by Robert Mearns Yerkes of one of his experimental subjects

Experimentations 9: Should We Look at Animals?

Date: Dec 8, 2024 3:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 9. Should We Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films. Comparisons between humans and animals are foundational to the experimental branches of medicine and psychology. Often treated as purely transparent scientific recordings, the films produced out of animal research are in fact deeply formalist works that tested what film could capture through the image of an animal—variously proposing that they could visualize pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of the environment on an organism. With special guest Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa from Seattle.

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Last Things, by Deborah Stratman

Experimentations 10: The Crystalline Entities

Date: Dec 8, 2024 7:00PM
Location:

Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 10. Crystals are inherently beautiful. They form our world; they are part of chemical-based photography that images it. They take innumerable forms, their growth is hypnotic, the light they scatter creates amazing colors. Many filmmakers have looked at crystals in myriad ways, and this program strives to capture an element of how the filmic investigation of one subject results in a brilliant array of filmic forms. From a well-crafted educational film from the 1950s to a mysterious experimental film and one that positions crystals in a post-humanist world, the program highlights the range of scientific visions and the experimental reuse or repositioning of those visions.

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Nation Estate, by Larissa Sansour

An Evening with Larissa Sansour

Date: Dec 14, 2024 7:30PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum

Interdisciplinary artist Larissa Sansour creates works that examine the collective memory and trauma of the Palestinian people through allegorical and experimental science fiction films. The program includes the three films in Sansour’s science fiction trilogy — A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2013) and In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2015) — along with her follow-up science fiction film In Vitro (2019). Though varied in aesthetic and approach, the films relate to one another in their examination of inherited history and identity, trauma and resistance.

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What About China?

What About China? with Trinh T. Minh-ha in person

Date: Dec 15, 2024 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

Los Angeles Premiere, with Trinh T. Minh-ha in person! Low-res video footage shot 30 years ago of Chinese rural life centering on women, children, labor, and family is reanimated and reframed through photomontage, oral histories, travelogues, poetry, and folk songs in order to interrogate what China has been, is, and could be.

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