Series Site
September 3–November 19, 2025
This fall, BAMPFA’s long-running annual series of historical and contemporary experimental film includes the work of more than twenty filmmakers across twelve programs. The style, character, and subject matter of the films range from poetic to polemical to personal, and from the creative documentation of performance to an array of cinematic meditations on place, time, and identity. This year, Alternative Visions includes work from one hundred years of cinema history—from Sergei Eisenstein’s breathtaking agitprop first feature Strike (1925) to Kahlil Joseph’s time-traveling cinematic encyclopedia BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025). Opening with recent restorations of Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, the series also features works of American surrealism, including Sidney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Another kind of cinematic poetry is manifest in Marie Menken’s and Jonas Mekas’s cinematic snapshots of everyday life, which, in turn, inspired the filmmakers Mako Idemitsu and Ute Aurand.
Humor and critique feature in several of the programs this fall, including Cheryl Dunye’s form-bending, truth-telling Black queer DIY shorts, and Idemitsu’s feminist videos. Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s Schmeerguntz screens as part of a focus on Nelson’s work. Writer J. Hoberman presents a program of films that are illustrative of the avant-garde scene in 1960s New York, the subject of his book Everything Is Now. The revolutionary artistic zeitgeist of the 1960s reverberated well beyond New York, as is evident in Michio Okabe’s Crazy Love, an epic experimental document of artists, activists, and performers in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Also screening this fall are Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, Kazuo Hara’s radically intimate collaborative portrait of his iconoclastic former partner Miyuki Takeda, and the dazzlingly inventive 16mm films of Tomonari Nishikawa.
—Kate MacKay, Film Curator