Series Site
Following this year’s collaboration on the Academy Museum’s Branch Selects screening series and The Wonders of Technicolor in New York screening series, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Paris Theater announce their next collaborative screening series for 2025—Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema.
Screenings will take place weekly from Sunday, August 10 until Wednesday, September 24, 2025.
Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, first appeared in the early 1980s and uniquely captured the anxieties of that decade. Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that resemble our own, cyberpunk stories juxtapose technological advances with social upheaval, ecological crisis, and urban decay. Central to these narratives are rebellious characters who fight against corrupt political systems, technology gone haywire, and global mega-corporations. Many draw from a vast body of 20th-century literature, comics, and manga, and the familiar yet fantastic settings of cyberpunk lend themselves to social commentary. Some filmmakers featured in this series use cyberpunk themes to center the perspectives of marginalized peoples and imagine more liberated futures. In doing so, they criticize existing inequalities and power structures, subverting legacies of oppression, colonization, and displacement.
This series was programmed to accompany the museum’s exhibition Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema.