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 50th 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

Voices of Our Mothers: Transcending Time and Distance (2016)

FORMATIONS: Selected Works by Francis Almendárez, 2013-2025

Date: May 4, 2025 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

These selected works by Francis Almendárez delve into the everyday in distinct ways, displaying a Los Angeles hardly ever seen. Intimate and personal, yet abstract and poetic - Almendárez toggles between showing us reflections of his lived reality, and embodying the images and sounds of the lived reality as it is shown. Including the World Theatrical Premieres of six videos!

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How to Have an American Baby. Leslie Tai

How to Have an American Baby

Date: May 10, 2025 1:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

HOW TO HAVE AN AMERICAN BABY is a kaleidoscopic voyage into the once-booming shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists who travel to the U.S. to give birth in order to obtain American citizenship for their babies. Director Leslie Tai and professor Michael Berry in conversation after the film!

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Sarah Maldoror

Sarah Maldoror: Through a Lens of Resistance and Rebellion

Date: May 10, 2025 7:30PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum

On April 13, 2020, 90-year-old filmmaker, theater artist and mother Sarah Maldoror passed away due to complications from the coronavirus. The Archive is honored to screen three of Sarah Maldoror’s markedly distinct works created for cinema and broadcast television. Presented in dialogue with each other, the three works construct a nuanced portrait of Maldoror’s unique formal, social and political concerns.

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Sanctuary Station

Sanctuary Station, by Brigid McCaffrey

Date: May 22, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

Sanctuary Station traces a series of encounters with women and youth who have cultivated intrinsic attachments to the various life forms inhabiting the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. In person discussion following the screening with director Brigid McCaffrey.

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