Presented in association with the Roxie Theater Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members Event tickets here* SOLD OUT *
For nearly 50 years, the Bay Area filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin has been an inspiring figure in contemporary media arts. His acerbic, densely-packed found footage films have traveled the globe, encouraging scores of nascent collage-essayists, culture jammers, and mockumentarians to action. […] Ever seeking to revise and hybridize existing modes and genres, and invent and name new ones, Baldwin’s filmmaking amalgamates cinephilic literacy and voraciousness, a sharp understanding of political and cultural history, and a sly critical polemics. His films are further energized by an encyclopedic knowledge of his own sprawling collection of cast-off educational films and B-grade features and a perverse proclivity for sourcing surreally sublime moments from industrial film effluvia. Informed by left politics, cult cinemas, agit-prop activism, structural film, the Situationists, the Yippies, Arte Povera, media archeology, compilation documentary, and other found footage forms, Baldwin’s praxis is bound by a dual commitment to materiality and aesthetics on the one hand, and disruptive action and fervent, antagonal rhetoric on the other; all the while articulating a contrarian (and at times utopian) sense of apocalyptic historiography. (Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)
Resonating with Craig Baldwin: Ephemera Unearthed!—on view at the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive through May 29—Cinematheque, the Roxie and the SFAI Legacy Foundation welcome King of Found Footage Craig Baldwin to present a personal guided tour through fifty years of radical filmmaking, from the mid-70s/mid-Market San Francisco cinema-scape Stolen Movie (1976) to the recent 3-D short Communique for the Cube (2023) and points in between. More than just a movie show, this evening’s overview will present highlights of the maestro’s oeuvre replete with personal reminisces and war stories with Baldwin in conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs and Cinematheque’s Steve Polta.
SCREENING: Stolen Movie (1976, excerpt); Wild Gunman (1978) RocketKitKongoKit (1986, excerpt); Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991, excerpt); ¡O No Coronado! (1992) Sonic Outlaws (1995, excerpt); Spectres of the Spectrum (1999, excerpt); Mock Up On Mu (2008, excerpt); Bulletin (2015); Communique for the Cube (2023)
Baldwin’s radical fusion of form and content is on display throughout his body of work, and is unified by an unabashed embrace of marginality and cultural abjection, and by his faithful adherence to the twin tenets of “availablism” and “artifactuality.” Availablism, simply put, is the edict that the artist make do with what is at hand and not let the lack of resources—lack of “perfect” footage, lack of filmmaking equipment, or lack of funding— stand in the way of completing a project. Artifactuality, a related idea, rests in the belief that archival source materials are permeated with industrial and cultural histories which invariably contribute meaning. Part of Baldwinian filmmaking is to allow these meanings to resonate as part of the completed work. This latter concept also applies to Baldwin’s use, in his “collage-narrative” films, of underground and B-movie filmmaking methods which, in the spirit of Jack Smith, George and Mike Kuchar, Doris Wishman, and Ed Wood, revel in their poverty, placing their bargain basement budgets proudly on display, and thereby allow their “amateurish” appearances to manifest as inspirational art. (Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)
Body Atlas maps the shifting relation between bodies and the worlds they move through.
Surfaces become passages. Boundaries soften. Organs echo territories, tissues suggest terrain, and gestures trace invisible routes through lived space. Across these works, scales collapse and expand—what is held within begins to mirror what surrounds. This is not a fixed map, but an unfolding cartography—where bodies and environments continuously inscribe one another.
The body as map. Organs become territories, tissues become terrain, cells become constellations. We are looking for films, images, sounds, texts, and fragments that chart the body as landscape, ecosystem, border, memory, architecture, or unknown geography.
Prismatic Ground is a film festival I have been attending in-person for nearly three years, and while my streak of such attendance unfortunately ended this year, I have continued to watch and cover since its inaugural edition in 2021. Prismatic Ground remains so special because it maintains the tenets of its conception, which founder and director Inney Prakash explained as an attempt to fill the void of festivals dedicated to experimental cinema and a festival that doesn’t treat the COVID pandemic’s shift to online-accessible film-viewing as merely a “stopgap,” but an actual “effort to rethink the experience” of a festival.
The radical shift and change to the festival circuit for both cinema viewers and filmmakers—which includes actually paying the filmmakers for their work to be presented and removing geo-blocking so as many people as possible who can’t attend in-person screenings can still see some films online from anywhere—ties nicely to this year’s closing film, Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism. Always a self-assured and divisive artist, especially post-Inventing the Future, Medina, in his latest, is both his most combative and self-reflexive. Gangsterism is combative for how it seems to deconstruct the criticisms leveled at Medina’s previous films, such as their supposed obtuseness or the heavily academic framework for theorizing things like theft of art and liberation of technology that seems removed from material reality. Its self-reflection emerges from a major topic of discussion: that the central character, Clem, considers it insulting that potential financiers find his movies difficult to understand. Medina’s style is as distinct as ever. The patterns of repetition, sound, and image interrupting each other are contrasted through drawn-out sequences of characters forming arguments on the current economy of cinema, the financing of being a filmmaker, the social responsibilities and roles of academia, and, central to its plot, the proliferation of film via digital piracy.
The festival gives out only one prize per year: the Ground Glass prize, a career-achievement award. In its inaugural year, it went to Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs, and this year it went to Japanese experimental artist Kohei Ando. Sachs also has a film this year, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, which pairs well with Ando’s work. Sachs’ film is a self-insert documentary where the filmmaker looks back to remember and re-encounter people with whom she shared and kept business cards. These encounters vary from friendly to awkward to uncomfortable, both in the memories they bring back and the inherent ideas that shoving a camera into someone’s face might elicit. Considerations of “performance,” “simulation,” and “vulnerability” seep into the forefront through the lens. Sachs considers aloud, while shuffling through the business cards, which of these people would be welcoming to meeting her again. A German festival director named Angela, whom Sachs met 30 years ago, recounts post-war Germany and the history of the Holocaust in people’s collective memory as another genocide in Gaza is unfolding today. Experimental filmmaker Lawrence Brose speaks about the persecution he faced as a gay artist while scenes from his film play in montage over conversation.
Like Sachs’ film, Kohei Ando’s cinema is very much tussling with ideas of time, memory, and connection to people. The most direct work that mirrors Sachs is the fun short My Friends in My Address Book, which goes through a montage of Ando’s friends smiling for the camera and holding up pieces of paper with their names. Other shorts, like his Passing Train series, exhibit time as something continuous and through multiple angles—intimate and unrelenting rather than something that creates distance. There is a sense of sentimentality that warmly lingers throughout these movies—especially On the Far Side of Twilight, which uses a saccharine piano score and cute narration that highlights his memories from childhood to old age. The image composition is immaculate, distinct in its bright coloration, and imaginative for how it breaks the fourth wall of the film plane, burning it, cutting it out, and transforming it into various shapes while moving it at different speeds.
It’s worth highlighting a number of shorts that bring forth examination and consideration for where experimental cinema is today. Rajee Samarasinghe’s A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth comprises excerpts and outtakes from the filmmaker’s remarkable feature documentary Your Touch Makes Others Invisible on missing children in Sri Lanka. The recontextualization of these outtakes from interviews—many of which feature the imperfections of sound, framing, and focus—confront us with how the difficult and traumatic experiences of real people cannot be decontextualized from the filmmaking process. Eislow Johnson’s Injured? is the most “action-packed” and funny of the shorts—a rapid-fire montage of a drive on a highway focusing on the litany of billboards for law firms for car accidents. It is ironic in its clear connection between America’s obsession with cars and suing people, but also fashioned as a sort of intense action film, mimicking the volume and ferocity of one of cinema’s great entertainments: the high-speed chase.
Yusuf Demiror’s Archura Leaves the City Forever is a beautiful, hypnotic fable. Its warm lighting and cold urban exteriors, mixed with fantastical costumes and lush natural highlights, make for a transportive work reminiscent of a mix between Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Emotion. Michael Barwise’s That Sanity Be Kept is a melancholy and nostalgic film, but also terrifyingly contemporary in its depiction of surveillance and the destruction of privacy as government agencies track the movements, faces, and clothing of various young people during a ceasefire amidst The Troubles.
Finally, three phenomenal and rare treasures by Iraqi filmmaker Parine Jaddo––Atash, Aisha, and Teyh––all highlight the artist’s conflicts (or false conflicts) of sexuality with religion, and modern discourses of fiction and the roles of men and women in Iraqi society in a rapidly westernizing world. All this occurs amid constant reminders of bombs and how post-war existence for the Middle East is always a pre-war state.
Trying to capture reality in my work means dealing with other people’s lives. Sometimes I yearn for something else, less interpersonal. I have a dear friend who’s been making films almost as long as I have. A few weeks ago, I started to vent (or dare I say hyperventilate?) with him about all the complex relationships that have emerged from my particular filmmaking practice. He said he understood completely, and that he’d decided to now only make archival films, no living people involved. The emotional toll was just too much.
Perhaps it would be better to bring people into my films through a more contractual or transparent arrangement where everything was laid out clearly. Then the people in front of my camera would have clear-cut roles. They could anticipate what I would be saying and how they were going to respond. This way, there might be fewer regrets, less instances of someone saying something they wished they hadn’t.
About 10 years ago, I started to ask people to sign film releases that would ostensibly clarify all of the potential problems that might arise. I try to convince myself that I am doing my professional best to acknowledge the rights of the person who signed on the proverbial dotted line, and theoretically, such documents also protect me. Unfortunately, their existence does nothing to relieve my anxiety, as asking people to “perform their lives” in front of my camera necessitates creating a fraught, sometimes unresolved arrangement that I find deeply intimidating.
Facing these haunting dynamics was fundamental to my impulse to make my latest feature, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, an essay film that examines the nature of all sorts of fleeting relationships I’ve had over the course of life. For the past 40 years, I’ve collected business cards given to me by strangers. Now in this digital era, these names, numbers and addresses, stored in a box in my house, have taken on an uncanny resonance. The first step in this 10-year filmmaking journey involved choosing seven cards out of the hundreds. I needed to find out why meeting the people who gave them to me had left such an imprint on my consciousness.
Before I committed to using this cache of cards, I grappled with their legacy as material objects. I learned that the standard size for a business card is 3.5 inches by 2 inches; almost every card is the same, in this way. It’s the people “behind” the cards who are so distinct. I also learned as much as I could about the social provenance of the cards themselves. In Japan, for example, the manner by which a recipient (me!) treats the presenter’s card is indicative of how the recipient will treat the presenter. Actions such as folding the card, or placing the card in one’s back pocket are considered disrespectful. Perhaps how I “treated” the card could tell me something about my relationship to its original owner.
For me, the cards were simply a jumping off point for thinking about what French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari envisioned as “the body without organs,” a swirling storm of psychic energy that creates an affect that I could not ignore. What I wanted to explore was how these cards illuminated and obscured the essence of a human being – semiotically and interpersonally. I was deeply interested in working with the trajectories that transpired between us, both in our initial meetings and later, far later, as I restaged our interactions in my memory.
Each of the cards presented something challenging – an awkwardness or ambivalence that forced me to think more deeply about documentary subjects, participants, informants … or whatever term you might use to refer to the people in front of the camera. The messier the production of the film became, the more I learned about the process.
Here are a few of the people who “made the cut”:
A retired German film festival programmer. While I am filming with her, this woman – born in the early 1940s – recounts the war she experienced and somehow misunderstood as a child. In our recorded conversation, she remembers, “The Jewish girls one day weren’t there any longer. You didn’t see the action, but you saw the results. How is that possible?” Now more than three quarters of a century after the end of World War II, our conversation opens up my own thinking, as an American Jew, about the genocide in Gaza today. Reckoning with these issues in my own life as I make public my own criticisms of the Israeli government adds another layer to my professional interactions with German film organizations. I worry for almost a year about how my friend will feel about being in a film that makes clear my own politics.
A gay artist who faced censorship and persecution from Homeland Security during and after a specious and controversial conviction for having child pornography in his computer. I ask myself if I should reach out to someone I met more than 30 years ago who was involved in such a fraught situation. In making documentary films, does establishing a commitment to a subject necessarily announce our positionality? I wonder if I need to know the truth about what actually happened. I wonder if it matters. After an extensive period of indecision, my own internal confusion forces me to seek him out for a conversation and perhaps a filmmaking relationship. What happens is beyond what I could ever have imagined. We spend more than a year in constant conversation, developing an interwoven series of scenes that articulate his painful story. Through my work with my editor Emily Packer, we develop a story that parallels Oscar Wilde’s 1895 conviction for sodomy, his banishment to a work camp, and his early death. All of this comes through in my voiceover, uncomfortably and, I hope, with transparence.
A Syrian chef and mother I met on a documentary film set. I make a date to shoot with her, but she cancels just hours before our appointment. She tells me that there was an emergency and that she needed to go to Michigan right away. I am not interested in the truth, but rather the fact that she has taken control. Something tells me that she is not scared of me per se, but of what I would extract from her through the apparatus of the camera. Extraction has become the geological trope for something we all do in documentary films. Her refusal to engage with my camera forces me to think about the inherent power imbalance between a director and her subject. Ultimately, her only presence in the film comes through when I cook a traditional Syrian dinner and “think out loud,” through voice-over narration, about her absence. Her existence is only articulated in the minds of my audience, never before their eyes.
A former therapist whose advice changed my life. For two years, I look for her and fail. Luckily, my enthusiasm for hybrid cinematic inventions provides the opportunity to create a kind of speculative staging of what could have happened but never did. Once I realize that the search for my subject is not as intriguing to me as the staging of it in my imagination, I release myself to an extraordinarily generative interaction with a New York City actress who takes on the challenge of becoming my long-lost therapist. We spend a summer role-playing and filming our evolving discoveries of each other. I am working with an actress, and there is no need for her to reveal anything real about herself. Our interactions are closer to those of a narrative film. The social contract is clear
In her book Suite for Barbara Loden, author Nathalie Léger wonders if she really wants to learn anything about Loden, the beloved and complicated actor-director of Wanda: “I find myself wavering between wanting to know nothing and wanting to know everything, writing only on condition that I know nothing, or writing only on condition that I omit nothing.” Reading these words from one of the most introspective and uncanny film writers I have ever encountered supports my desire to be released from the rigidity of the documentary paradigm. I take a fluid, hybrid approach to the making of my films and allow myself to confront the two extremes of my practice as an artist. I embrace the uncompromising strictures of the real and the unformed, ever-expanding space of the imagined.
Tomorrow night at BAM Rose Cinemas, Ka Ki Wong’s I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore (2026) will initiate the first wave of programming for the sixth edition of Prismatic Ground. Following the romantic misadventures of two couples across Taipei, the film’s dreamy sequences are punctuated by a vivid orange pincushion flower, which one of the protagonists, Melih, receives from his object of affection, the alcoholic Yu-Ping. Melih owns a noodle shop frequented by the eccentric Tao, whose infatuation with Shin drives her to physical antagonism, including stalking him and sending gangs to beat him up in cartoonish fight sequences. We intermittently view the lovers through the POV of Melih’s flower, which becomes a metaphor for longing and memory as both he and Tao grapple with their doomed romances in yearning monologues interspersed with listless wanderings across the city and its surrounding ruins.
Wong’s film will be followed by Nicolás Pereda’s Cobre (2025), an enigmatic portrait of Lázaro, a worker at a copper mine in a remote region of Mexico who stumbles upon a dead body on his way to work one day. Already on bad terms with the mine’s management for seeking sick leave for a respiratory illness contested by the mine’s on-staff doctor, Lázaro is closest to his aunt, who supports his recovery while he struggles to maintain his health and innocence. Conducive to suggestions of intrigue and desire, Cobre explores the limits of trust in the relationship between viewer, filmmaker, and protagonist.
Prismatic Ground is a film festival curated by Inney Prakash that showcases experimental works in short and feature formats. Grounded in a postcolonial perspective, the festival provides a space for a diverse range of filmmakers to exhibit their work, which ranges from technically innovative structuralist works, to dramatic features, to historically resonant documentarian efforts. This year’s selection includes a focus on avant-garde works from Asia and celebrations of queer life from across the globe. As with past iterations of the festival, a common invocation across films of wildly differing approaches and subjects is the fight for Palestinian liberation from the American-backed occupation by Israel. Further highlights include a celebration of June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive in conjunction with the launch of Onyeka Igwe’s book on Givanni at Anthology Film Archives, which will be followed by an evening of poetry and film curated by Shiv Kotecha and Courtney Stephens. Anthology will also host the festival’s presentation of the Ground Glass Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of experimental media, to Kohei Ando alongside a screening of six of his films.
“A mandala for opening the மனசு (manasu meaning heart and mind in Tamil) to the frequency of love in revolt” is the subtitle to Karthik Pandian’s Surrendur (2026), a vertiginous montage of footage documenting the political upheavals of 2020 in Minnesota, including the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue orchestrated by American Indian Movement activist Mike Forcia (Bad River Anishinaabe). Forcia serves as a guide through the film’s interwoven networks of people and actions related to the George Floyd Uprising, the Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy, and the Dakota 38+2 Memorial Ride. A recurring formal motif in Surrendur is a circle centered in the square of the frame, embodying the awakening to the colonial violence of American life experienced by so many in that period, including Ta Pe’juta Wičháȟpi Win (Hunkpati Dakota Oyate), whose political consciousness was sparked as she danced around the fallen statue of Columbus. At one point Forcia describes a fiber optic cable connected to our third eye, through which the light of a future free of the imperialist project in which we currently live may reach us, if only we can get on its wavelength.
The American Midwest is also the setting for Eislow Johnson’s short film Injured? (2026), which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of attorney ads being legalized by looking to the future of American grift: manifestation influencers, numerology divinationists, and proprietors of the Marvel cinematic universe. The shorts in this year’s festival constitute some of the most powerful moments of its lineup, such as Anthony Banua-Simon’s WORLD ENTERPRISES (2026), a collage film composed of excerpts from the films available via mail-order from the distributor World Enterprises that were screened in 1940 for the workers of the Kekaha Sugar Company in O’ahu on their days off. Presented at an inflection point in the labor movement led by Filipino immigrant workers, the films depict the American settler project as an inevitable result of forward progress. Through Banua-Simon’s reconfiguration, the films reveal the cracks in the façade of capitalist omnipresence and the power of community-based political action.
Among the rich selection of films exploring queer life and history is the visually and audibly stunning Joy Boy: A Tribute to Julius Eastman (2026) by the Collectif Faire-Part. Divided into four distinct sequences, the film embodies the revolutionary nature of Eastman’s music in form and concept. Angelo Madsen’s My Structuralist Film (2026) is a smart reinvention of the genre suited to the exploration of the trials of trans visibility and disclosure within the body politic.
In the final wave of programming, Lynne Sach’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2025) presents a feature-length essay documentary structured by her investigation into seven people selected from the expansive collection of business cards she has accumulated over the last 40 years. What begins as an investigation into the impact of each encounter on the trajectory of both peoples’ lives eventually opens onto the legacies of broader geopolitical developments and the subjective nature of memory, both personal and collective. The festival concludes with a standout group of Chinese avant-garde shorts curated by Tone Glow, including Branches from Concrete (2026) by Zhou Zhenyu, a film shot in an abandoned shopping complex in the filmmaker’s hometown of Hengshui that has been taken over by nature and local residents who have repurposed certain spaces for community activities. Following the movement of gleaming humanoid metallic beings throughout the structure, the film’s juxtaposition of technology and ruin feels quite apt for our present age.
Prismatic Groundruns April 29-May 3 across BAM, DCTV, Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Metrograph, and online with wave ∞, a virtual selection free to watch at prismaticground.com.
When Inney Prakash, now the Curator of Film at Asia Society in New York, issued an open call for experimental documentaries at the end of 2020, “a programmer directly engaging with his community of filmmakers with an open-hearted all-points-bulletin was the antithesis of conventional festival gatekeeping,” wrote Caroline Golum for Notebook. By April 2021, the first edition of Prismatic Ground was up and running, albeit as a primarily virtual festival. At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was still very much a thing.
Copresented with Screen Slate and no longer strictly confined to nonfiction, the sixth edition will roll out from Wednesday through Sunday in five “waves” across five New York venues. On opening night, Ka Ki Wong will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to present her debut feature, I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore. Stories of requited and unrequited love are intertwined in the labyrinthine streets of Taipei, and when I Heard premiered at CPH:DOX in March, Wendy Ide, writing for Screen, called it an “uninhibited and wildly original picture which deals with pain, guilt, loneliness, and romantic disappointment in the most joyful and playful way imaginable.”
Among the highlights of wave 1 are Nicolás Pereda’s Cobre and Kevin B. Lee’s Afterlives. “A wry thriller of bureaucracy that started after Pereda learned about the suspicious death of an activist protesting labor conditions in a mining town, Cobre begins as Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) finds a dead body on his way to work at the mines,” writes Cici Peng for Filmmaker. “As always, Pereda turns seemingly banal interactions into sly displays of power.”
Afterlives carries forward Lee’s exploration of the potential for the desktop documentary, which he calls “an emerging form of film and media making that presents the world as it is experienced through computer screens and networked interfaces.” With this one, he delves into the history of extremist propaganda and probes its possible futures, most of them likely involving a heavy reliance on AI.
“Afterlives insists on its own ambiguous relationship to visuals,” writes Savina Petkova at the Film Stage. “Perhaps this is why you will see Lee ‘leaving’ the desktop space and actually appearing in the flesh as a sort of exposure out of respectful necessity. Whatever cinematic form it inhabits, Afterlives is a dedicated, reflective documentary, the bell of its urgency ringing far into the past and into the futures of images.”
Screening as part of wave 2, Dane Komljen’s Desire Lines is “a spectral and hallucinatory landscape of bodies, which eat and gaze and desire but are also found to be frighteningly, or freeingly, insubstantial by those who inhabit them, as they shape-shift, merge, or even melt through walls,” writes Carmen Gray at the Film Verdict. Komljen’s film is “a poetic, unrushed but endlessly surprising vision, which operates according to a certain dream logic of echoing images rather than a traditional plot. Nonetheless, it has an unforced, intuitive coherence and affinity with nature (in keeping with his previous features including 2022’s Afterwater and 2024’s The Garden Cadences) that mesmerizes.”
In Isabelle Kalandar’s Another Birth, eight-year-old Parastu (Shukrona Navruzbekova) is encouraged by her mother (Kalandar) to memorize poems by Forugh Farrokhzad (The House Is Black), whose lines are recited both on-screen and off. “Saddened by her mother’s pain and the constant craving of her grandfather (Niezmamad Navruzbekov) for a missing son,” writes Clarence Tsui at the Film Verdict, “Parastu roams the land and sets off with her best friend Guliston (Shoira Abdulgaezkhonova) to look for a mythical spirit that could rejuvenate her loved ones. Through their small expeditions, the world opens up for them and for the viewers: Janis Brod’s camerawork (with additional input from Vladimir Usoltsev) presents Tajikistan’s Shakhdara Valley in the most lyrical of ways.”
On Saturday at Anthology Film Archives, the festival will celebrate the publication of June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive with author Onyeka Igwe and then throw a spotlight on the work of Kohei Ando—a pioneer of video art and experimental media and this year’s recipient of the Ground Glass Award—with the first retrospective of his work in the U.S. Ando’s 1974 short My Friends in My Address Book will screen on Sunday, preceding Every Contact Leaves a Trace, the latest feature from filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. In 2021, Sachs received the first Ground Glass Award, and this year, on Wednesday, she will be honored at the San Francisco Film Festival with the Persistence of Vision Award.
The title of Every Contact Leaves a Trace refers to a principle of forensic science that Sachs reinterprets as the marks the many strangers she has befriended or forgotten have left on her life. The starting point is a stack of around six hundred business cards she’s collected over the years.
As Sachs sifts through them, “narrating associations or confronting blank spots in her recollection, the cards’ standardized form gives way to the unruliness of relation,” writes Delaney Holton for Screen Slate. “Sachs layers a restless flow of images, animations, and superimpositions over a diaristic voiceover, while frequent collaborator Stephen Vitiello’s omnipresent score hums beneath. She stages new encounters with select figures represented in her collection: a textile artist, a therapist, a refugee and mother who once cooked for her. Conversations always seem to turn toward days gone by, though the governing insight is less about recovering evidence of what ‘really’ happened than observing how the past is continually remediated through its recounting and the subtle gravity people exert upon one another’s lives across space and time.”
A 35 mm print of Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (2013), shot on analog video with three Sony AVC 3260s, will screen with Blair Barnes’s sitrep (2026), a twenty-minute short which “uses the 3250 as its foremost camera, with the Sony FX6 as the digital intermediary,” as Barnes explains. “The common denominator is the two-thirds-inch tube.”
Further Prismatic Ground 2026 highlights include several short film programs; three newly restored films by Iraqi Lebanese filmmaker Parine Jaddo; Adam and Zack Khalil’s Aanikoobijigan, the winner of an audience award at Sundance; “Horror, or the Splendour Of,” an evening of film and poetry; Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor, fresh from its screening in Los Angeles; and a program of contemporary Chinese experimental films.
The festival will wrap at Metrograph on Sunday with Gangsterism, the latest feature from Isiah Medina, who will deliver a lecture, “From ‘Images and Sounds’ to ‘Frames and Cuts,’” on Friday at Light Industry. In Gangsterism, film director Clem (Mark Bacolcol) sends his cinephilic associates looking for the culprit who has been leaking his work.
Writing for In Review Online,Dylan Adamson senses in Gangsterism “a certain family resemblance with the Godard of the 1980s, but a point of origin for the spirit of the work might rather be In Praise of Love (2001), a framed poster for which sits prominently in many of Gangsterism’s sets. With that film’s abrupt cut from celluloid to blown-out miniDV colors for its final thirty minutes, Godard asserted that a new digital cinema had arrived, whether we were ready for it or not. Medina accepts this as a challenge, developing a cinematic idiom that shirks all debts to the dominant twentieth-century modes.”
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by G. Allen Johnson, Staff Writer San Francisco Chronicle April 17, 2026
Persistence of Vision Award: Lynne Sachs and ‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace’The prolific experimental poet and filmmaker may be a resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., but she has deep ties to the Bay Area as an alumna of San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute and a longtime board member of avant-garde collective Canyon Cinema Foundation. In her latest film, “Every Contact Leaves a Trace,” Sachs examines her own life and biases through the 600-plus business cards she has amassed over the decades.
7 p.m. April 29, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive
It’s April and the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF) is back, just five months after its last iteration, running April 8-12. This is time of year when the fest has traditionally been held (more or less), so in a world of rapid change, some things are returning to normal. As always, the programming is strong, with shorts, features, and immersive art experiences on offer for a variety of tastes. All information about all screenings (and how to get tickets) is available on the MdFF website. Below, I offer my recommendations of five films to see.
Barbara Forever (Brydie O’Connor, 2026) [excerpted from my Hammer to Nail review out of Sundance]
The late, great experimental, queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) left behind a treasure trove of work worthy not only of exhibition but of preservation. This is exactly how Brydie O’Connor’s documentary Barbara Forever begins, in a museum—Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the films and other material now reside—as Hammer’s life partner, Florrie Burke, pays a visit to commune with old friends. From there, we proceed on a comprehensive journey through the life and career of a seminal artist.
Bouchra (Orian Yani Barki/Meriem Bennani)
An animated drama about a queer Moroccan woman living in Brooklyn, with flashbacks to the homeland interspersed throughout the present, Bouchra—the title character of which is portrayed as a canid and voiced by co-director Meriem Bennani—presents a colorful world full of vibrant characters. The semi-autobiographical story centers on self-actualization and combines real archival footage of Casablanca, phone conversations with an actress standing in for Bennani’s actual mother, and vivid images (where everyone is a different kind of animal) that propel the coming-out narrative forwards. If ultimately we have seen this kind of intricate personal piece before, we have not seen done in exactly this kind of way.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Lynne Sachs)
Continuing the personal and experimental theme of the festival, Lynne Sachs’ Every Contact Leaves a Tracefollows the director as she works her way through old business cards to explore the way that people’s lives intersect and then drift apart. She bases her ideas on Dr. Edmond Locard’s “exchange principle”—the foundation of all modern forensic science—which states: “Trace evidence can be used to link people or objects to places, other people, or other objects. It often serves as a starting point for a line of investigation.” And so this intriguing, sometimes oblique, movie goes, Sachs (Film About a Father Who) acting as our guide through an exploration of the resonance of meetings, no matter how fleeting.
House (Nobuhiko Obayashi)
Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 experimental horror film was apparently originally inspired by the 1975 American film Jaws, though you would never guess that just by watching it. A group of young women travel for what they think is a weekend getaway to the home of one friend’s aunt … except that the aunt is actually a malevolent spirit bent on eating all of them. Filled with wild and giddy images and music, the movie is a must-see for genre fans and anyone looking to have their mind blown. The MdFF always screens a few revivals, and if you haven’t yet watched this one, be sure to check it out Friday night.
In her first feature, Ugly Cry, writer/director/star Emily Robinson delivers a compelling meditation on how the harsh gaze—male, female, and even one’s own—within cinematic systems built on exploitation inevitably leads to terrible outcomes. A young actress who should be focusing on performance instead becomes obsessed with making her face show as little actual emotion as possible. You wouldn’t want to scare people with the ugliness of real pain, now, would you?
The pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer produced more than 80 films between 1968 and 2019; this program showcases an array of works that explore her artistic output, her as a being, and the ripple effects both continue to have. The filmmaker began this process herself while she was alive—Audience offers a playful array of snippets from conversations about her work with attendees of numerous screenings. The program goes on to move through films by filmmakers who were/are in conversation with Hammer—from engaging in her practices to making homages, writing letters, and (upon Hammer’s invitation) even using her footage.
Audience (1982) Dir. Barbara Hammer 32min
Love, Barbara (2022) Dir. Brydie O’Connor 15min
Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited) (2005) Dir. Liz Rosenfeld 13min
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018) Dir. Lynne Sachs 9min
A Video Letter to Barbara Hammer (2018) Dir. Joey Carducci 17min
A Month of Single Frames (2019) Dir. Lynne Sachs 14min
