Series Site
August 1–30, 2026
Home to the jazz and rock label Fantasy Records, headed by Saul Zaentz, Berkeley’s Fantasy Studios building was also, from the early 1970s, a storied site of filmmaking. Zaentz produced a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning literary adaptations, including a trio of Academy Award Best Picture winners: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, and The English Patient. In her recent cinematic memoir, Vivien’s Wild Ride, Vivien Hillgrove reflects on her experiences working on a number of Zaentz productions, including director Philip Kaufman’s film of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Along with Zaentz’s lauded fiction films, the studios serve as a vital resource for documentary filmmakers in the Bay Area and beyond.
Copresented with the Berkeley Film Foundation, this series presents—along with Vivien’s Wild Ride and The Unbearable Lightness of Being—a selection of exceptional documentaries made at the Fantasy building across four decades. Marlon Riggs’s innovative 1989 classic Tongues Untied merges poetry and polemic to assert “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act.” Denise Zmekhol’s 2023 Skin of Glass is an exploration of her overlapping history with a São Paulo skyscraper. Justine Shapiro, Carlos Bolado, and B.Z. Goldberg’s 2001 portrait of Palestinian and Israeli children, Promises, and Steven Okazaki’s 2007 White Light/Black Rain remain hauntingly relevant reminders of the incalculable costs of war, while Vivian Kleiman’s 2021 No Straight Lines and Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday’s The Barber of Birmingham (2011) celebrate resilience and creativity in the struggle for self-determination and human rights.
—Kate MacKay, Film Curator