Series Site
February 7–April 24, 2024
Every year BAMPFA presents a selection of compelling contemporary and historical nonfiction films and innovative documentaries from around the world. This February we are thrilled to welcome back Santa Cruz–based documentary filmmaker Irene Lusztig—whose documentary Yours in Sisterhood screened in 2019—with a very different but equally impressive film. Richland explores the impact and legacy of the production of weapons-grade plutonium at the Hanford site in the eponymous Washington town.
Documentary Voices 2024 intersects with our focus on the films of Black American cinematographer Skip Norman with a program of films made by members of the inaugural cohort of the DFFB Film School in Berlin. Photographed by Norman, the politically committed and formally inventive films range from the feminist perspective of Helke Sander’s Subjectitude to Harun Farocki’s anti–Vietnam War White Christmas to the rarely seen Berlin – 2. Juni 67, documenting the epoch-defining mass protest at which student Benno Ohnesorg was shot.
We are also delighted to screen a new restoration of Dick Fontaine’s long unavailable I Heard It Through the Grapevine in James Baldwin’s centenary year. The beautifully constructed chronicle of Baldwin’s 1980 journey through the American South combines his reflections and conversations with fellow survivors of the civil rights movement on their work in the 1960s and how much remained to be accomplished twenty years later. Finally, Mexico City–based artist Naomi Uman relocated to the Albanian highlands to make three sparks, a personal portrait of rural life, in which she shares her camera with the villagers, becoming a protagonist as well as an observer of daily life.
—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator