News

Here is the link for the Rhetoric and Film + Media commencement livestream.

Please note, this is only available today, Tuesday, May 20 at 7pm. 

Rachel Kushner is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, the short story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K, and a book of essays, The Hard Crowd. Her new novel, Creation Lake, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the Carol Shields Award.

A warm and enthusiastic welcome to the exceptional individuals joining our newest cohort of Film & Media Ph.D. students this fall! We’re excited to have you bring your unique voices, talents, and ambitions to our vibrant community at Cal. Your presence promises to deepen and energize our shared intellectual environment. Here's to a rewarding and inspiring journey ahead - full of discovery, creativity, and academic achievement!

Mark Sandberg (Professor of Film & Media and Scandinavian Studies) is one of five UC Berkeley faculty to have been selected as recipients of the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’s most prestigious honor for teaching. The award recognizes teaching that incites intellectual curiosity in students, engages them thoroughly in the enterprise of learning, and has a lifelong impact. 

Commencement FAQ for Students

Tuesday, May 20 | 7PM | Zellerbach Auditorium

The Film & Media department commencement ceremony

The ceremony starts promptly at 7pm and lasts approximately 2 hours. 

ASAMST 171: Asian Americans in Film and Video 

Chicano 135B: Latino Narrative Film since 1990

Chinese 157: Contemporary Chinese Literature

The Division of Arts and Humanites recently featured an interview with re-entry undergraduate student and Film & Media major Orestes Sophocleous on the their website: Between theory and practice: A Re-Entry Student's Experience with Film and Media.

In Memoriam

Melc 157: Reel Arabs: Film and Fiction in the Middle East

English 176-002: Literature and Popular Culture - Literature in the Century of Film

Rizvana Bradley's book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press) was shortlisted for the 31st Annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. The prize is awarded for an outstanding literary or linguistic study that is the first book-length publication by a member of the association. Information about the 2024 MLA Prizes can be found on the Modern Language Association website. 

The documentary Parole (25 min.), directed by Cuban filmmaker Lázaro J. González, has won the Best Short Film award at the 2024 Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY), which took place from November 4-10. The jury praised the film for its poignant use of documentary cinema as a tool for self-discovery, stating: "This film weaves together lost family encounters, crosses verbal messages, and reveals a city that remains hidden, reflecting the vital tensions of the immigrant experience."

COMLIT 171: Topics in Modern Greek Literature - Children During Times War and Crisis: Modern Greek Literature and Film

ENGLISH C136: Topics in American Studies - Classical Hollywood Cinema

ETHSTD 122AC 001 : Ethnicity and Race in Contemporary American Films

Parole, a short film by Lázaro González, a doctoral candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Film & Media, will be screened at BAMPFA on November 2, 2024 as part of the series Cuban Contemporary Short Films II: Voices of Displacement. 

The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and Alfreda's Cinema present Netherworld: The Anteaesthetic Experiments of Black Women in New York City on September 26, 2024. In this unique, one night only program, Rizvana Bradley (Associate Professor of Film and Media, UC Berkeley) offers a defining philosophy on Black art's vexed emergence from a netherworld.

Faith Enemark, Department Manager & Academic HR Analyst for the Departments of Rhetoric, Film & Media Studies, has received the 2023–24 Golden Bear Staff Achievement Award in the Letters and Science Division. 

It was the opening days of 2022, in the aftermath of a huge volcanic eruption, when Tonga went dark. The underwater eruption – 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima – sent tsunami waves across Tonga’s nearby archipelago and blanketed the island’s white coral sands in ash.

The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope, is a disturbing one:Two men in their shared apartment strangle a former classmate to death. Then, they host guests — including the victim’s family — at a dinner party. It’s an attempt to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect murder.”  

Although the killers — Brandon and Phillip — live together, it’s never acknowledged openly that they’re a couple. (At the time, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited the depiction of “sex perversion,” which included homosexuality, on the big screen.)