Spring-Summer 2025
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Palestine Blues
Date: Apr 26, 2025 7:30PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer MuseumThis urgent, poetic documentary captures the resistance of Palestinian farmers in the village of Jayyous as Israel’s separation wall threatens their survival. Director Nida Sinnokrot in person. Free screening.
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Vatican to Vegas: Director's Cut
Vatican to Vegas: Director’s Cut - A live presentation by Norman Klein
Start Date: Apr 27, 2025 3:00PM
End Date: Apr 27, 2025 5:15PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesCritic, urban and media historian and novelist Norman Klein excavates cinema’s architecturally engineered illusions, historic CGI effects. Norman Klein’s live narrative mines the links between techno illusion and power within Hollywood's dark noir and blockbuster classics such as scenes from the 1995 BBC-TV special The Mall, Killer of Sheep, Kiss Me Deadly, The Crowd, Ko-Ko’s Earth Control, Punch and Judy, and many more. Followed by a conversation between Klein and Tom Leeser.
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Pasadena Freeway Stills, by Gary Beydler
Memory, FX, and the City
Date: Apr 27, 2025 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesThis series of shorts is a meditation on Baroque optics today, in how evacuated memory resembles special effects. The series even captures how we misremember history. More precisely, these films highlight various psychic layers of the city, where distorted memory, and the decay of our nation state, are extremely evident. In person discussion following the screening with Norman Klein, Courtney Stephens, Chris Peters, moderated by SeeVa Kitslis.
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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 + ArchivesThese 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 + ArchivesHOW 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 MuseumOn 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 + ArchivesSanctuary 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.