BAMPFA

Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof has rooted his remarkable career in a wide-ranging critique of censorship and authoritarian rule in his native Iran. Here, the filmmaker extends his uncompromising and diverse body of work with a taut, finely wove...

Iran | 127

In The Seventh Walk, celebrated Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta fuses painterly technique and cinematic vision to form an engrossing meditation on the artistic legacy of Northern India's lush Kangra Valley. Dutta masterfully illuminates the region's ...

India | 70

South Sudan may have declared its independence but that hasn't stopped multinationals and missionaries from laying claim to its natural resources and influencing its people's religious beliefs. Employing intrepid techniques and striking visuals, d...

France/Austria | 110

Recent college graduate Tamako does little more than sleep, eat and indifferently work in her father’s store. “Japan is hopeless,” she insists, but she seems pretty hopeless herself. When her dad makes a tentative stab at dating, it turns the numb...

Japan | 78

What's it like to be a 21st-century young adult—with access to gadgets, the Internet and other high-tech conveniences—within China's surveillance state? First-time writer-director Vivian Qu's taut, slow-building noir cleverly uses a simple boy-mee...

China | 94

Every September, over 200 seasonal workers, most of them Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, Mien and Thai, descend upon the tiny town of Chemult, Oregon, to search the woods for the rare Matsutake, a fungus highly prized in Japan. This documentary examines th...

USA | 78

Portuguese director Joaquim Pinto poetically, dynamically and candidly chronicles an entire year of his life as he undergoes experimental treatment for his longtime HIV and VHC infections in this truly epic yet personal documentary. The film takes...

Portugal | 164

Eleven experimental films take us on a journey through the looking glass—reflecting on the past, illuminating the present and imagining the future. Featuring new works by Su Friedrich, John Smith, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Basma Alsharif, Charlotte Pr...

77

Single and 40, Sandro has zero prospects for finding true love. Fate lends a hand when he runs into a hairdresser, but there’s a catch: Her husband is getting out of prison the next day. For those new to the Georgian New Wave, this low-key, comic ...

Georgia | 95

Eight-year-old Yerkin is an immensely resourceful third grader who proudly takes care of himself. He lives in Bulak, a small village on the steppes of Kazakhstan, where his keen observations are sometimes humorous and always honest. Director Seric...

Kazakhstan | 97

Continuing his very particular parsing of language and politics—here, the politics are cinematic— Corneliu Porumboiu tells the story of a film director rehearsing the details of a nude scene with his lead actress. Investigating the repetitive natu...

Romania/France | 89

This unique hybrid of documentary and narrative offers an evocative portrait of the quotidian lives of a devout young Christian goat farmer and the bull-riding cowboy who lives nearby. As much a portrait of the Eastern Texas town where they live, ...

USA/Belgium/Italy | 100

Bob Weir, “the other one,” steps into the spotlight and out of Grateful Dead band mate Jerry Garcia’s shadow in this expansive documentary in which Weir’s story unfolds through performance footage of him, with and without the Dead; home movies; in...

USA | 90

A poverty-stricken father and his two young children try to survive in modern-day Taipei in yet another remarkable piece of cinema from the great Tsai Ming-liang. Tsai's oblique approach to space and time renders Stray Dogs an often mysterious wor...

Taiwan/France | 138

In this erotically charged nail-biter, director Robin Campillo takes the audience on an unexpected ride when Daniel, a dapper, 50-something Parisian businessman, coyly cruises the Gare du Nord and awkwardly propositions an eastern European immigra...

France | 128

In a contemporary Ethiopian village, a 14-year-old girl is abducted from school. Her attempt to free herself from a future of forced marriage sets off a legal firestorm in this powerful drama inspired by a true story that pits the law against an e...

Ethiopia | 96

A student leader fighting against the bosses of striking packinghouse workers in 2002 Uruguay experiences a coming-of-age crisis when he inherits his father’s ranch. The radical becomes the boss and finds himself responsible for paying months of b...

Uruguay/Argentina | 121

High in the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, nine-year-old Peyangki would rather play outdoors than study in the monastery. A trip to the capital, and exposure to television and the modern world, opens his eyes to an enticing, complicated future i...

France/Finland | 80

Roy Scheider stands in for writer/director Bob Fosse in Fosse's dazzling, self-lacerating and clearly autobiographical musical, a Best Picture nominee about a celebrated choreographer/director who fantasizes about his mortality as he juggles his m...

USA | 123

Art-house favorite Lav Diaz's latest epic explores everything from the state of present-day rural Philippines by way of Dostoevsky (Diaz’s favorite writer) to the 1890s Philippine Revolution against the Spanish. Actor Sid Lucero gives a remarkable...

Philippines | 250

Luc Schaedler's latest work presents distinct and illuminating portraits of contemporary life in China. Attentively observing life on a parched farm, a grim industrial zone, a rural village and a booming megacity, the documentary expressively rev...

Switzerland | 80

John Wojtowicz, whose ill-fated 1972 robbery of a Brooklyn bank to pay for his transgender bride's sex-change operation inspired Sidney Lumet's 1975 classic Dog Day Afternoon, recalls both the heist and his years as a gay rights activist in an eng...

USA | 100

Armed with her inimitable insight and ability to find beauty where one least expects it, director Agnès Varda travels to various far-flung locales, interviewing artists, filmmakers and friends, in this puckish and profound five-part miniseries ori...

France | 225

Among cinema’s greatest humanists, Filipino director Lino Brocka made this masterpiece tale of displaced youth and corruption in the teeth of Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal dictatorship. Restored in 2013 by the World Cinema Foundation and the Film Dev...

Philippines | 124

Adapting his autobiographical novel, director Abdellah Taïa tells the story of a gay Moroccan boy finding self-realization and personal strength within a society that shuns him. Shot by the brilliant Agnès Godard, the film takes the form of a dipt...

France/Morocco/Switzerland | 82

From the first entrancing images of trees being cut down in a fog-filled forest to the later blues of sky and ocean fusing to erase the horizon, the always static frames of this documentary offer a meditative and prismatic view of Spain's much sto...

Spain | 81

What makes a masterpiece? This documentary examines the curious life of one of the most prolific art forgers in the United States, who—under the guise of philanthropy—deceived museums across the country with his ingenuously crafted counterfeits fo...

USA | 89

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance, this urgent dispatch from the besieged Syrian city of Homs is both an elegy and a call to action. Filmed between 2011 and 2013, it presents a visceral eyewitness account of t...

Syria/Germany | 87

An old man caught in the brutal 1992 conflict over the Abkhazia region of Georgia finds himself nursing two wounded soldiers from opposing sides in his small house. Zaza Urushadze’s intense and compelling antiwar drama provides discerning insight...

Estonia/Georgia | 84

A 10-year-old boy's desire to straighten his kinky hair causes outsized conflict with his unemployed, harassed single mother in Mariana Rondón's Caracas-set drama. Unexpected issues related to Venezuela’s volatile economic situation and the young ...

Venezuela/Peru | 93

Are strange occurrences in an affluent Buenos Aires suburb evidence that the skittish residents are actually being targeted? Paranoia runs rampant in this accomplished first feature, instilling a disorienting sense of dread in the viewer. The film...

Argentina/France/Germany/Qatar/Uruguay | 79

Delving into issues of identity and aging, this nuanced and touching relationship drama portrays the personal crises faced by an aging gay cop in France and a younger Israeli man who is found on the beach, mute and without any identification.

France/Israel | 87

Set in Guadalajara, The Amazing Catfish follows the quiet transformation of a solitary young woman informally adopted and absorbed into a rambunctious matriarchy in a state of crisis. Filmed by Claire Denis’ long-time cinematographer, Agnès Godard...

Mexico | 89

Filmmakers Les Blank and Richard Leacock were stubborn iconoclasts and kindred spirits. This disarming portrait captures Leacock’s wisdom and wit through conversations in his Normandy farmhouse and honors an intuitive, artful approach to nonfictio...

USA | 65

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, political upheaval wracked West Germany. The legacy of Nazi Germany caused a fervent youth movement to question the legitimacy of the State. From this resistance, rose the movement’s most lethal offshoot: the Baader-Meinhof, ...

France/Germany/Switzerland | 92

A thrillingly expansive portrait of China as observed in the cramped compartments of its trains, J.P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry is a vivid social document and a bold aesthetic work. Shot over three years and dozens of rides, the film seamlessl...

China/USA | 83

Both tense whodunnit and layered character study, Diao Yinan’s Berlin Golden Bear winner spans five years in the life of a troubled cop who can’t shake his experiences working a particularly gruesome serial-killer case. A carefully plotted film no...

China/Hong Kong | 106

Covering the origins, history, philosophy, business and maybe, but probably not, the identities of the world’s most famous anonymous band, San Francisco’s The Residents, Theory of Obscurity weaves wonderful archival artifacts, recordings of live s...

USA | 87

Challenging our ideas about connected story lines, H. envisions a world thrown out of balance by a possible astronomical event. When something falls from the sky and explodes over Troy, NY, there follows a rash of strange apparent effects. People ...

USA/Argentina | 97

Winner of a FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, Lisandro Alonso’s much anticipated follow-up to his “Lonely Man Trilogy” (La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool) is a sublime fantasy standing at the intersection of fairy tale and landscape art. Viggo Mortensen...

Denmark / USA/ Argentina / Mexico / Netherlands / Germany / France | 108

Postman Lyokha serves an aging community of island dwellers in a remote corner of northwestern Russia. Globetrotting veteran director Konchalovsky returns to his home turf for this humorous, rueful, occasionally surreal slice of rural life that ta...

Russia | 101

In this companion to The Act of Killing (SFIFF 2013), Joshua Oppenheimer widens his groundbreaking documentary examination of the political violence that roiled Indonesia in 1965. The film follows a gentle optometrist as he confronts perpetrators ...

Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/United Kingdom | 99

A treasure trove of audio tapes yields a unique autobiographical portrait of one of cinema’s greatest actors: Marlon Brando. Augmented by home movies, film clips and other archival materials, the recordings reveal a frank, self-aware man, by turns...

UK | 102

Deng, a retired widow, tries to care for her family, though her sons protest her “intrusions” into their personal lives. When mysterious phone calls and other strange occurrences disrupt her daily routine, she wonders, who—if anyone—might be comin...

China | 110

Argentine filmmaker and short story writer Martín Rejtman’s first feature in 10 years is a slyly funny low-key existential comedy for fans of films like Stranger than Paradise and Slacker. As the film’s ever-evolving story follows an intersecting ...

Argentina / Chile / Germany / Netherlands | 104

Just as the wife and four young daughters of a hard-driving beekeeper begin to chafe against their arduous, isolated life, a glitzy national TV show announces a contest for local farmers. Humor, conflict and the familiar pangs of early adolescence...

Italy/Switzerland/Germany | 110

Maidan is not a standard journalistic report about the civil riots in Kiev’s Maidan square challenging pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Structured solely through extended fixed shots filmed over a period of three months, the film tracks th...

Ukraine/Netherlands | 133

A team of forensic investigators in the Peruvian countryside digs up the remains of persons who were murdered during the brutal Fujimori Era of the 1980s and ’90s. The process of identifying one particular set of bones becomes an agonizing experie...

Peru/Colombia/Germany/France | 95

As the first Arab accepted to a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem, young Eyad struggles between two antagonistic worlds to secure an identity and a purpose for himself. Along the way, he encounters cultural prejudice, personal compro...

Israel/Germany/France | 104

Since 1995, the Patronas, a group of women in southern Mexico, prepare food and drinking water in large quantities to hand out as the train known as “The Beast” speeds by carrying men and boys from Central America to the US border. This deeply mov...

Mexico | 90

In this charming slice of magic realism, a quiet drifter finds a construction job in a small town and meets a friendly woman who lives nearby. Though he finally feels the urge to settle down, Vincent’s newfound life is thrown into jeopardy when hi...

France | 76

The fraught transition to democratic rule in Zimbabwe, while its autocratic dictator still rules, makes for riveting, stranger-than-fiction drama in this exceptional documentary that focuses on two leaders tasked with drafting a new constitution f...

Denmark | 100

This intimate, observational documentary portrait of the US-Mexico border focuses on two Eagle Pass, TX, residents—cattleman Martin Wall and Mayor Chad Foster—and follows the strains in the border town’s relationship to its sister city, Piedras Ne...

USA | 93

Grappling with the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, a formerly well-to-do husband and wife rent their crumbling house in a tony Port-au-Prince neighborhood to a European aid worker. When his brash young Haitian girlfriend shows up...

Haiti/France/Norway | 130

Bay Area poet Donté Clark's efforts to heal a community reeling from violence form the core of this inspiring documentary. With the help of teacher/mentor Molly Raynor, Clark collaborates with African American teenagers from the RAW (Richmond Arti...

USA | 93

Bay Area filmmaker Leah Wolchok’s highly entertaining behind-the-scenes documentary look at the world of The New Yorker’s cartoons and cartoonists brings to vivid life a beloved part of the magazine. Featuring insightful interviews with many of th...

USA | 86

In the impossible spaces and eerie places of these nine experimental films, birds fill the sky and then disappear, a parrot barks, people and animals are transformed. Color leaps from the frame—the glow of an ancient forest, the spectacle of firew...

75

Domingo is a devoted family man and Christian missionary gliding through a dutifully modest if unexceptional life. He’d happily keep it that way, too, but for the fact that a fatal accident leaves him, disturbingly, without a sense of guilt. Shot ...

Chile | 90

Filmed in the civil war-ravaged region between South and North Sudan, Beats of the Antonov paints an inspiring portrait of the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountain refugee communities and their reliance on music-making not only as a healing force in the fa...

Sudan/South Africa | 68

A young Albanian woman, chafing against her culture’s strictures on female behavior makes the decision to follow the local tradition of living as a man and takes the name Mark. Years later, questioning her choice, she leaves her remote village to ...

Italy / Switzerland / Germany / Albania / Kosovo | 84

This mesmerizing film captures the spirit of a championship soccer game between rival teams from Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished Sampaio neighborhood. More like a work of poetry than a traditional sports documentary, the film uses footage from vario...

Brazil | 70

Winner of the 2014 IDFA award for Best Feature Documentary, Of Men and War is director Laurent Bécue-Renard's multiyear account of the residents of The Pathway Home, an innovative treatment center for PTSD and related war traumas in Yountville, Ca...

France/Switzerland | 142

Chaitanya Tamhane’s gorgeously recorded debut unfolds almost in slow motion. The film—a prizewinner at the Venice International Film Festival—concerns a criminal case in Mumbai’s lower court, tracing the private and professional lives of the lawye...

India | 116

Featuring jaw-droppingly beautiful cinematography and photographed in one of the remotest places on earth, Meru is a hybrid of gorgeous nature photography and riveting nonfiction storytelling. With direct access to the trials, drive and anxieties ...

USA | 89

In the new Olympic sport of women’s boxing, 17-year-old Claressa Shields bursts out from the total obscurity of a small Flint, Michigan, gym to compete for a coveted gold medal. T-Rex beautifully captures her rapid ascent, her battle to overcome a...

USA | 87

Masterfully blending enchanting magic realism with piercing sociological insights, Philippe Lacôte's fleetly paced drama charts the unusual circumstances that set the seemingly directionless Run (Abdoul Karim Konate) on the path to becoming an ass...

Ivory Coast/France | 102

A middle-aged artist, a young ingénue, existential crises, romantic fumblings and confessional drinkathons—like Monet and his water lilies, Hong Sang-soo keeps returning to the same core material and refining his pitch-perfect preoccupations of wh...

South Korea | 121

After California voters reversed the state’s Three Strikes law, thousands of inmates became suddenly eligible for resentencing and release. This provocative and touching documentary chronicles what happened next. Filmmakers Kelly Duane de la Vega ...

USA | 81

Looking for a fresh start, perennial philosophy flunk-out and sexually frustrated Madrid 30-something Gonzalo (Álvaro Ogalla) demands the Catholic Church relinquish its symbolic hold on his misspent life by removing his name from the baptismal rec...

Spain/France/Uruguay | 80

In Counting, director Jem Cohen (POV Award, SFIFF 2013) brings his discerning camera eye to a series of international locales where his idiosyncratic vision coaxes meaning from the most ordinary details. From winter snows in Coney Island to a Sou...

USA | 110

When water becomes scarce due to drought, a laundress living in rural southwest Bulgaria with her husband and son invites a dowser and his spirited daughter onto their property to search for hidden springs. Wonderfully atmospheric, the film gracef...

Bulgaria | 90

Noted screenwriter Thomas Bidegain brings the tough, tense attitude of his earlier scripts for A Prophet and Rust and Bone to a contemporary adaptation of John Ford’s The Searchers. When Alain’s 16-year-old daughter Kelly disappears at a French co...

France/Belgium | 104

Strange and erotic, with an unexpected view of gender roles, this film is set in the macho world of bull wrangling yet its male protagonist is interested in fashion and designs dresses. When a handsome new worker comes to help, a hothouse atmosphe...

Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands | 101

Charming, young sociopath Edward Bare (Dirk Bogarde) gets off scot-free after he kills his dotty wife in this little-seen crime drama, presented in a new digital restoration. When his inheritance proves insufficient, the loathsome (if sexy) Lothar...

UK | 83

Du Haibin’s insightful documentary captures five years in the life of a young Maoist zealot in northern China and provides an unforgettable portrait of China in transition. As the tumult of the country’s recent history unfolds, cracks in the armor...

China/USA/France | 106

Eight artist-made films explore things that pass between us. Songs, stories and trinkets are handed down from one generation to the next. Ghosts of the past take shape in the present, haunting cityscapes and backyards. Friends and family come toge...

73

Sergei Loznitza (Maidan, SFIFF 2015) once again brings Eastern European history to vivid life with the inspired deployment of archival resources. In the summer of 1991, hardline members and supporters of the communist party attempted to seize cont...

Netherlands/Belgium | 74

A slow-burn satire dubbed “a buddy movie without the buddies,” Chevalier brilliantly mines the comedy of the modern male competitive spirit. Six well-to-do Greek men on a sailing vacation devise increasingly extreme competitions to determine, defi...

Greece | 104

Railway enthusiast Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) looks forward to a life of solitude and endless solo walks along the railroad tracks when he inherits an abandoned train station, only to find himself pulled into a group of new friends, who push ...

150

Director Johan Grimonprez provides powerful and sinister imagery to document journalist Andrew Feinstein’s ominous and important book on the global arms trade. The film examines the disturbing recent history of the business of war, providing dark ...

USA/ Belgium/ Denmark | 94

When a middle-aged single man, who cruises his Caracas neighborhood for rough trade, takes a tough young boy into his home, a gritty exploration ensues as these two angry men negotiate a relationship that resides somewhere between lover and friend...

Venezuela/Mexico | 93

A spectacular and celebratory investigation of a modern dancer’s creative process, this documentary tracks the four decades-long career of renowned choreographer Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company. Painstakingly...

Israel/Sweden/Germany/Netherlands | 100

Dedicated home-care nurse Vlasta (Karlovy Vary winner Alena Mihulová) traipses around the south Moravia countryside on bus and foot tending to (and bantering with) patients too infirm or elderly to travel. When she herself is diagnosed with a seri...

Czech Republic/Slovakia | 92

Chinese director Zhang Yang’s Paths of the Soul is a captivating and profound portrait of a small group of Tibetan villagers on an arduous, 1,000-mile pilgrimage to the holy city of Lhasa. With a graceful documentary style that makes full use of t...

China | 115

Hamid, the often exasperated program director of a Farsi-language radio station based in San Francisco, awaits a much-anticipated meeting between Metallica and real-life Afghani band Kabul Dreams at his studio. Meanwhile, he has to contend with th...

USA/Iran | 93

Sonita Alizadeh is like many teenagers—she loves hip-hop, argues with her mother and gossips with her friends. She is also an Afghan refugee living under the tenuous protection of a Tehran homeless shelter, where she contends with the imminent ri...

Germany/Switzerland/Iran | 91

Chantal Akerman’s final work epitomizes the late filmmaker’s intuitive sense of cinematic form, and reaffirms her inextricable relationship with her mother Natalia (Nelly). Edited from over 40 hours of footage captured during the last period of Ne...

Belgium/France | 115

A Paris-based art historian returns to her native town of Rennes to teach a class. There, she encounters a troubled male student who is contending with an itinerant mother as well as the demands of university life. Grounded in the terrain, music a...

France | 148

Penny Lane’s documentary—comprised of archival material, animated sequences and the occasional talking head—blooms into an incredible almanac of early 20th-century quackery and innovation as she focuses on JR Brinkley, an early broadcasting baron,...

USA | 79

Sixties pop-art heroines and DC comic-strip heroes are suffused with the passions of Greco-Roman gods in Lewis Klahr’s short film compilation spanning 14 years of filmmaking and chosen by the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis as one of the best films of 20...

USA | 90

Moises Chambi Yucra and his family stand at the crossroads of time. For generations, they have has made a humble living harvesting salt from Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, but beneath Uyuni sit massive amounts of lithium,...

USA/Bolivia | 76

In a small South Indian village, a cantankerous centenarian keels over and dies, setting the stage for a capricious comedy of errors among three generations of dissimilar sons. Conflict, confusion, corruption and a series of ill-conceived actions ...

India/USA | 123

A taped journal that theologian John Hull kept after the onset of blindness in 1980 forms the basis of this elegant and moving depiction of struggle and transcendence. Hull’s own voice provides the audio, though an actor plays the deceased writer,...

UK/France | 90

Filmmaker Moby Longinotto’s fascinating, thoroughly candid documentary invites audiences to pull up a chair at the never-dull family table in a Mississippi trailer park home. Everything is on the menu: dashed dreams, seething resentments, sexual a...

USA/UK | 80

Executive produced by Wim Wenders and Errol Morris, this elegant and chilling documentary provides a glimpse of what the US government doesn’t want you to know about drone warfare by focusing on three veterans whose service experience causes them ...

USA | 92

Yaelle Kayam’s debut feature is strikingly shot against the tombstones of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, where an Orthodox woman’s longing for her husband’s love sets in motion a transformational journey into a nocturnal world of pimps and prostitut...

Israel/Denmark | 83

The secret wounds of a marriage unfold gently but surely as a shy piano teacher embarks on a mythic journey with her husband, returned from the dead. As their quest takes them on visits to several couples who have similarly fraught relationships, ...

Japan/France | 128

Brilliant but largely unheralded Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) is featured in this rich documentary tribute. Interviews, readings of Kaufman’s poems, historical footage and experimental images blend into a unique portrait of an enigmatic artis...

USA/Portugal | 90