Congratulations to the BAMPFA on their grand opening!

Film and Media professor Jeffrey Skoller and BAMPFA Film Curator Kathy Geritz have curated this season’s series on documentary film, in conjuction with our course on the History of Documentary Film. 

The opening film in the series will be shown Wednesday, February 10th, at 7 pm – Les Blank Lecteur, Alan Berliner, 2013

From the website: 

Each spring we highlight a selection of recent and historical documentaries that extend the form in provocative ways. Ed Pincus, who passed away in 2013, collaborated with Lucia Small to create a personal film from two points of view. Jane Gillooly’s collage film combines evocative images with intimate audio recordings. Alan Berliner will be our first Les Blank Lecturer; we’ve invited him to talk about his creative process, preceding a screening of an early collage short and his most recent film, a portrait of his cousin. From further afield, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s avant-garde documentary takes us to the frontline of history in the making, while Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán excavates his country’s past. We also pay tribute to recently deceased documentary legends Albert Maysles, Robert Drew, and Richard Leacock, with a screening of their film Primary.

Also of interest: As part of our Committed Cinema series local documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson will be in person to discuss three of his impeccably researched documentaries. We honor the great Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, who died in 2014, with a selection of what he called films-as- conversations. Our annual African Film Festival includes several powerful documentaries—the Brazilian Housemaids; The Longest Kiss, set in Sudan, prior to its splitting in two; and a selection of shorts exploring art in Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal.

Kathy Geritz, Film Curator