Spring-Summer 2025
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik's Satellite Spectaculars
Date: May 25, 2025 7:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research Society7th House and Los Angeles Filmforum are proud to co-present an evening of video art pioneer and avant-garde visionary Nam June Paik’s rarely screened, groundbreaking satellite link-up installations – elaborate internationally produced video spectaculars that were recorded, edited, and broadcast live around the world, featuring performances by David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Gabriel, Ryuichi Sakamoto and many more!
-
Turang
Turang, by Bachtiar Siagian - U.S. Premiere!
Date: Jun 1, 2025 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesDiscover a landmark of Indonesian cinema, recently restored and screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Barbican in London. In 1958, Turang screened to wide acclaim at the Afro-Asian Film Festival—a space created to foster cinematic collaboration among newly independent and decolonizing nations across Africa and Asia. Tragically, just a few years later, it was destroyed during the wave of anti-communist violence that swept through Indonesia, erasing a vital piece of the country’s cinematic memory. Today, we are privileged to witness its restoration—as a powerful act of narrative reclamation. US Premiere of a classic film from 1958 (as far as we can tell)!
-
Gate of the Sun (Bab El Shams)
Gate of the Sun (Bab El Shams)
Date: Jun 8, 2025 1:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts & ArchivesDon’t miss this rare screening of the poignant Palestinian epic as it chronicles a history of many dimensions through captivating character and layered narratives. Rather than focusing on the suffering, Gate of the Sun (Bab El Shams) reflects the absurdity of life under the harshest conditions, recounting days not unfamiliar to the ones we are currently witnessing.
-
Skin, Inscribed: Contemporary Brazilian Hand-Processed Film
Date: Jun 14, 2025 8:00PM
Location: Whammy! AnalogJoin us for Skin, inscribed - contemporary Brazilian hand-processed films, curated by visiting artist Tetsuya Maruyama, co-presented by TAPE LA and LA Filmforum. This group of works, far from commercial “movies", emerge from the personal interests of each artist without expecting anything in return.
-
Water and Power
Pat O’Neill’s WATER & POWER + Gary Beydler’s VENICE PIER
Date: Jun 15, 2025 7:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyThe Philosophical Research Society and Los Angeles Filmforum present Pat O’Neill’s masterpiece — a complex, avant garde LA city symphony, alongside an underseen experimental gem, Venice Pier, both presented on 16mm! Pat O' Neill in person!
-
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Thom Andersen's LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
Date: Jun 22, 2025 6:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyPerhaps the most essential exploration of our city's mythos, examining the tangled relationship between the movies and their fabled hometown. Thom Andersen in person!
-
Flaherty LA Finale: Program VI, Surprises in Time
Date: Jun 29, 2025 7:00PM
Location: The Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108, George Lucas BuildingEntering its 70th year, the Flaherty Film Seminar is revered as one of the most significant convenings around non-fiction cinema. Each year filmmakers, scholars, students, curators, critics, archivists, and cinephiles gather for an immersive, week-long program of film screenings, in-depth discussions, artist talks, installations, and/or performances around a theme. Held in collaboration with Los Angeles Filmforum, for this program, Flaherty LA opens the seminar experience to the wider public. Curated by CEMA’s Stephanie Spray and SCA’s Michael Renov (Flaherty curator, 2005), with special guests James Benning, Rebecca Baron, and more.
-
Collective Monologue (Monólogo Colectivo)
Collective Monologue
Date: Jul 8, 2025 8:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesAcropolis Cinema and Filmforum present Collective Monologue (Monólogo Colectivo), directed by Jessica Sarah Rinland (2024), in person for the screening. At the film’s core are the animals and staff in various Argentinian zoos and shelters—including the Buenos Aires Ecopark, established as a zoo in the late 19th century—capturing not just tender moments of interspecies interaction but also administrative and infrastructural details.
-
Chris & Heather’s Big Screen Blowout
Date: Jul 16, 2025 8:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesArtist/filmmaker Heather McAdams and songwriter husband Chris Ligon have assembled one of the most impressive, private collections of short-form 16mm films we know of, focusing on music films, commercials, movie previews and other true oddities which usually fall through the cracks at large, institutional film archives. For this special event, Chris and Heather present some of the very best of their 16mm film collection for a unique and inspiring evening of nonstop laughs and entertainment in their inimitable style.
-
Spring Night Summer Night, with Ross Lipman
Date: Jul 19, 2025 4:00PM
Location: Los Feliz TheatreBook signing with archivist, author and filmmaker Ross Lipman for his new book The Archival Impermanence Project prior to the screening at 3:30pm at the Los Feliz 3, in partnership with Skylight Books! Italian neorealism meets the coal-mining country of southeast Ohio in this little-seen wonder of 1960s, American independent cinema.
-
The Book of Paradise Has No Author
The Book of Paradise Has No Author, with Ross Lipman
Date: Jul 19, 2025 7:00PM
Location: Los Feliz TheatreIn this eclectic spin on the concert film, Ross Lipman transforms footage of one of his celebrated live documentary performances into a new video essay that’s at once an archeological dig and a riveting history. Its underlying subject is the origin of civilization – as comprised entirely of media clips. Book signing with archivist, author and filmmaker Ross Lipman for his new book The Archival Impermanence Project prior to the screening at 6:30pm at the Los Feliz 3, in partnership with Skylight Books. Film introduction & Q&A with Lipman, moderated by David Marriott.
-
Inauguration
Developing China: Films from the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Program 1
Date: Jul 20, 2025 5:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesBeijing International Short Film Festival and Filmforum present Developing China, two programs showcasing eight works from the festival between 2020 and 2024. Program 1 centers on “searching” as a gesture that crosses temporal boundaries. The program will be followed by a conversation with filmmakers Zhang Wenqian and Liu Guangli with curators Iris Sang and Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu.
-
Birthday Cakes From China / 生日蛋糕恭祝你福寿与天齐 By Zhang Shengjia
Developing China: Films from the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Program 2
Date: Jul 20, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesProgram 2 showcases diverse filmmaking styles, including ethnographic essay, experimental animation, political film-poem, and documentary. The critical and aesthetic explorations of these Chinese (or Chinese-identifying) filmmakers extend from their homeland to abroad and back to their homeland. Four filmmakers will join in a post-screening conversation with Iris Sang, curator of BISFF, and Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, curator from Los Angeles Filmforum.
-
Victim of Circumstance, By Kalil Haddad
He Never Dies: The Films of Kalil Haddad
Date: Jul 27, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesThe work of Kalil Haddad is radical in form and provocation. His work blends archival, experimental, documentary, and narrative elements that allow for a making and remaking of archival text, adding to a wave of experimental queer filmmakers who are using the cinematic archive to inspire new meditations on genre, politics, and art. He is a part of an increasingly loud and radical queer left that is revolting against assimilationist identity politics.
-
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Stills © Kenneth Anger Estate. No reproduction without permission.
Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome on 16mm, w/ Brian Butler
Date: Aug 1, 2025 7:30PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyAn extraordinary and rare presentation of Kenneth Anger’s experimental occult classic on vibrant 16mm film!
-
¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! Mexico will no longer exist!
Date: Aug 3, 2025 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesA Contemporary Mexico City City Symphony, like chapters in a book, plunges our senses into a bubbling city scape, a historical kaleidoscope shuddering and ushering in the megalopolis’ breath and figures populating its landscape frame by frame. Filmmaker Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco in person!
-
The Shadow Lands Yonder | 虛無鄉遠 by Lee Kai-Chung
Restoring Memory: East Asian Narratives in Non-Fiction Shorts
Date: Aug 10, 2025 1:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesMarking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the program, Restoring Memory: East Asian Narratives in Non-Fiction Shorts, showcases three non-fiction essay films by Changmin Lee, Kyuri Jeon, and Lee Kai-Chung that explore the layered interplay of history, memory, and identity in East Asia’s wartime legacies.
-
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980) + Spaceways (1968)
Date: Aug 10, 2025 7:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyThe great interstellar visionary SUN RA and his Arkestra on film in Robert Mugge's remarkable 1980 doc + a rare experimental 1968 short film. Note the change in location.
-
The Inheritance, by Ephraim Asili
The Inheritance, with filmmaker Ephraim Asili
Date: Aug 17, 2025 7:00PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater, Courtyard Level, Hammer MuseumAfter nearly a decade exploring the African diaspora, Ephraim Asili makes his feature debut with this vibrant ensemble film, set almost entirely in a West Philadelphia rowhome where young Black artists and activists form a collective. “‘The Inheritance’ feels like poetry visualized,” writes Lovia Gyarkye in The New York Times. Blending scripted drama with documentary reflection on the 1985 MOVE bombing, the film reimagines home as a political and spiritual inheritance. Part of the series (Dis)placement: Fluctuations of Home at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
-
"Brilliant Noise" by Semiconductor
Envisioning the Skies: A Short History of Astronomical Films
Date: Aug 23, 2025 3:00PM
Location: Mt. Wilson Observatory AuditoriumSome highlights from the visual history of astronomy and ideas of the planets and stars, from the 1874 transit of Venus by Pierre Jules César Janssen and a 1900 solar eclipse by Nevil Maskelyne, through the Eames Studio "Powers of Ten" excerpts from other films, and recent digital work by NASA, all in a most appropriate location, at the Mt. Wilson Observatory!
-
"Tabula Rasa" by Vincent Grenier
Vincent Grenier: In Focus (Program 2)
Date: Sep 7, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesOver his fifty-year career, Vincent Grenier created a body of work unlike any other in contemporary experimental cinema. Utilizing many approaches, his 16mm films and videos move fluidly between modes of abstraction and documentary, sound and silence, spectral superimposition and stark clarity. The second of two tribute programs.
-
Still from “CORAL” (2024) by Matt Town, 16mm film, black & white, silent, 11 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York
Coral & Florida-Structuralism: New Works by Matt Town
Date: Sep 14, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesLos Angeles Filmforum welcomes local artist & experimental filmmaker Matt Town to screen films and videos from his latest show “Coral”, as well as select older works. Town, who frequently addresses social issues in his work, turns his attention in “Coral” to themes of chemical addiction in the US, drawing upon the experiences of and at times collaborating with his family members. His new 16mm and video works form a strikingly intense, poetic, and personal response to the opioid epidemic, alcoholism, and methods of addiction treatment.
-
Gibson + Recoder performing Backlight
Gibson + Recoder: Projection Performance for Single and Dual 16mm Film Projection
Date: Sep 21, 2025 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesSandra Gibson and Luis Recoder return to Filmforum for a special evening of projection performances. In this program of 16mm film performances for single and dual projection, film is not the exclusive object of attraction but the occasion for potentially disclosing the art of projection. The “performance” in our title refers to the success or failure of the film to articulate the beauty of projected light on a screen.
-
Look Then Below, by Ben RIvers
Urthworks: 3 Films by Ben Rivers
Date: Sep 28, 2025 1:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesThe first of two screenings with Ben Rivers in person, Urthworks is a trilogy of short films by Rivers imagining the future of a planet at three stages after environmental collapse. Working with 16mm film and digital imaging technology, Rivers captures extraordinary real locations in Japan, Tuvalu, Lanzarote, Arizona, the Mendip Hills, and Somerset as well as fabricated environments.
-
Jake Williams, the subject of Bogancloch, and filmmaker Ben RIvers
Bogancloch, by Ben Rivers, Los Angeles Premiere
Date: Sep 30, 2025 8:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesBen Rivers returns to present the LA Premiere of Bogancloch. Bogancloch is where modern day hermit Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world.