The Mill Valley Film Festival once again reminds us of film’s boundless capacity to surprise, challenge, and move us.
Category Archives: BAMPFA
It’s a Noir, Noir, Noir, Noir World
By Meredith Brody (June 13, 2025)
There’s always room for more noir in my life.
“In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City” will help out this summer at BAMPFA.
What’s Screening in the Bay Area According to Bay Flicks
By Lincoln Spector. (April 4, 2024)
What’s Screening: April 5 – 11
For reasons that I prefer not to discuss, I’ve lost the Bayflicks blog…hopefully only for a while. Thankfully, Gary Meyer of Eat Drink Film has given me space for my newsletter. Continue reading
I Didn’t See You There
By C.J. Hirschfield
(Updated January 9, 2023)
A monument to circus showman P.T. Barnum stands in Reid Davenport’s hometown of Bethel, Connecticut. “He got a pedestal,” says the director of I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, the new documentary that premiered at the 65th SFFILM Festival, while the disabled filmmaker’s perspective is from the sidewalk. The film, a meditative and personal feature that invites the viewer to see the world through his eyes—and at his level– often refers to the corrosive legacy of Barnum’s freak shows and how society relates to those who are different.
FINALLY FEELING FESTIVE – Looking Forward to the 2022 Mill Valley Film Festival, October 6 through 16
By Meredith Brody
October 6, 2022
In the past I have written, once or twice, thinking it was something of a joke, that if you wanted to see a movie beautifully projected on huge big screens with a full attentive audience who were all watching the BIG screen instead of their little screens, you had to go to a film festival.
Sir Ian McKellen’s 2015 Tribute; Photo by Drew Altizer Photography
And now, after nearly three years of not going to movies, whether in theaters or at festivals, and becoming increasingly used to – but not happy about — seeing movies via streaming services at home, I find that my little joke rings increasingly true.
MR. BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS
By C.J. Hirschfield
March 14, 2022
Cinema junkies forgive iconic documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman for the length of some of his works that venture deep into American institutions; his most recent City Hall covering the government of Boston clocked in at four and a half hours. We absolve him because he is so good at taking us inside worlds that we don’t know, as his camera disappears and we learn so much by listening and observing, happy to have made the journey.
Comparisons to Wiseman’s work are inevitable as we describe the numerous joys of Maria Speth’s new documentary, Mr. Bachmann and his Class, the closing night film at Berlin & Beyond 2022, at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. It is now streaming on MUBI. Continue reading
FEAST WITH FELLINI- Recipes
FELLINI 100 is a feast of Fellini Films playing at the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive through May 14, 2022.
We present recipes from Bay Area chefs that honor Federico Fellini along with music and Fellini’s own thoughts on food. The restaurants are C’era Una Volta and Poesia.
FELLINI IN MOTION
We love Fellini and we love trailers that tease us to want to see the full features.
In March 2020 the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive was starting an extensive Fellini 100 series when Covid shut the Museum down. But the Fellini Celebration is back, playing through May 14, 2022.
We are pleased to present a collection of trailers, interviews and appreciations of Federico Fellini in honor of his belated 100th birthday.
FILM FESTIVALS ARE BACK BUT DIFFERENT
By Gary Meyer
This year the 44th Mill Valley Film Festival has created a true hybrid with a full schedule of movies showing at the Rafael in San Rafael, Sequoia in Mill Valley and BAMPFA in Berkeley through Sunday, October 17.
40 of the programs will be streaming in your home via several platforms.
Curating Films Year Around
A candid conversation with the film programmers at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
IRMI—An Interesting Life, Indeed
By C.J. Hirschfield
When the feature documentary Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives was released in 1977, it rocked my world. I already loved documentaries, but this one–widely considered to be the first feature film about lesbian and gay identity–by gay people, quickly became a symbol of the emerging gay rights movement. I was living in glorious San Francisco at the time, where the film premiered at the Castro Theater. Directed by six people collectively known as the Mariposa Group, it took five years, and over two hundred interviews with gays, to complete the historic project.
eatdrinkfilms.com 