CROSSROADS push[es] together the outer limits of narrative logic, experimental abstraction, and documentary… an essential festival for contemporary moving-image art.
— James Hansen, The Brooklyn Rail
San Francisco’s hub for experimental film, media, and performance…
— David Hudson, Criterion
Inaugurated in 2010, CROSSROADS is San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival, dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary avant-garde film, video and performance work. CROSSROADS is curated annually by San Francisco Cinematheque’s Artistic Director Steve Polta. A history of CROSSROADS (including past line-ups) is available here.
CROSSROADS 2022, the festival’s thirteenth iteration, features 67 works of film, video and performance by 71 artists representing 18 countries and territories presented in 10 curated programs. Major themes of this year’s festival include cinematic considerations of the contrasts between individual sensual experience and the rise of the corporate media state, the ongoing collisions and interminglings between analog and electronic media, and the role intimacy plays in the spaces of public communication and the narration of generational lineage.
San Francisco Cinematheque is proud to announce that, of these 71 featured artists, 32 are receiving their CROSSROADS debut this year.
Friday, August 26
Doors: 6:30pm / Screening: 7pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
CROSSROADS 2022 opens with a fit of pop delirium, lucidly polymorphous studies of precarious emotions, candied poisons, amorphous states of mind and matter and the alluring toxicities of the capitalist spectacle. Percussive psychogeographic wanders and prismatic nature studies rub against coded love letters and mediations of disaster—always promised; never arriving—while past and present tenses blend and promises of sublime erotics flicker tantalizingly beyond our grasp.
SCREENING: Squish! (2021) by Tulapop Saenjaroen. Color Prism Suite #2: Withering Ends (2021) by Zack Parrinella. Up Close (2021) by Sam Gurry. Skinship (2022) by Mike Hoolboom. SEA of SIGHS (2022) by J.M. Martínez. young, (2019) by Dale Hoyt. Polycephaly in D (2021) by Michael Robinson.
Live sonics cap a program of voiceless hauntings, elemental forces and explorations of archaic media and bygone existences. Surfaces whisper and scrape as hungry ghosts prowl. Fire, water and whispered breath fuse into luminous air.
SCREENING: SEAM (2021) by Sheri Wills (US); The Day Lives Briefly Unscented (2021) and ghost is hungry (2021) by Brandon Wilson (US); Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons by Jodie Mack (US); III. (2022) by Alexandre Larose (Canada), live score by Ashley Bellouin (US) & Ben Bracken (US); The Waterfall (2017) by Matthieu Hallé (Canada), live score by Marshall Trammel (US) & Umesh Mallery (US).
Friday, August 26
Doors: 9pm / Screening: 9:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Saturday, August 27
Doors: 12:30pm / Screening: 1pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
The home movie as myth, as legend, as lost document, never completely knowable. While exploring occlusions and omissions and embodying domestic and social histories oft unspoken, the films in this program roll like waves, presenting hesitant reflections on lineage, on generational continuity and rupture, on recovered memories. New forms of family are brought into being as previous older forms are subjected to rumination and contemplation. Fragmentary memories drift though shocking and oblique intimacies.
SCREENING: Future from Inside (2021) by Dani Leventhal ReStack (Canada/US) & Sheilah ReStack (Canada/US); Configurations (2021) by James Edmonds (UK/Germany); SHASHIN NO MA (2021) by Tetsuya Maruyama (Brazil, Japan); Home When You Return (2021) by Carl Elsaesser (US).
Quietly echoing CROSSROADS program 2, the films on this program explore elemental transubstantiations: air, fire, water and stone become one. Luminous and loving, life-affirming and elegaic. Meditations on the brevity of life, and on continuity, these works embody transformation and eternity. Melodramas of nature and contemplations of immateriality braid the intimate and introspective with the expansive and macrocosmic.
SCREENING: A Perfect Storm (2022) by Karel Doing (UK); Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga); Lácrimas (2021) by Jeremy Moss (US); Puncture (2021) by Carleen Maur (US); Ontogeny (2022) by Janis Crystal Lipzin (US) & John Wynne (Canada/UK); Amaryllis—a study (2020) by Jayne Parker (UK); M*U*S*H (2022) by Jodie Mack (US); from time without beginning (2021) by Lorenzo Gattorna (US); Solace (2021) by Chantal Partamian (Lebanon): Alone Sleeps the Water, Frozen She Awakes (2021) by Sofia Petersen (Argentina, Spain).
Saturday, August 27
Doors: 2:45pm / Screening: 3:15pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Saturday, August 27
Doors: 4:45pm / Screening: 5:15pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Ernst Karel (US) & Veronika Kusumaryati’s (Indonesia) Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the 1961 Harvard–Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea that set up tents among the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. In their nearly imageless film, Karel & Kusumaryati document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The work explores and upends the power dynamics between anthropologist and subject, between image and sound, and turns the whole ethnographic project on its head. (The Cinema Guild)
In this CROSSROADS 2022 centerpiece, alchemical ecstacies of haptic celluloidal surfaces play and flirt teasingly with deep dives into the worlds of circuitry, electronic feedback and system noise. Direct experiences of sensual cinema give way to heavily mediated electronic meditations. Performances of electronic transgression contrast and collide with reflections on the mediation of desire and the nightmarish traumas of the contemporary surveillance state.
SCREENING: Irradiance (2019) by Ramey Newell (Canada); Estuary (2021) by Ross Meckfessel (US); death by fantasies by mirrors (2022) by Charlotte Clermont (Canada); Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome (2022) by Jennifer Reeves (US); Thalassophobia (2022) by Kit Young (US) and Colleen Kelly (US); Dreams Under Confinement (2020) by Christopher Harris (US); Autoimmune (2020) by Marcos Serafim (Brazil).
Saturday, August 27
Doors: 8pm / Screening: 8:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Sunday, August 28
Doors: 12:30pm / Screening: 1pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Scintillating speculations on fact, fiction and the spaces between. Hauntological explorations of repressed, occluded and recovered memories, personal and cultural. Communication across space andtime. Amnesia. You are interested in the unknown. You long for glimpses of another world.
SCREENING: The Silver Reel (2022) by Joshua Gibson (US); A Valley Without Trees (2021) by Janelle VanderKelen (US); Curve the Night Sky (2021) by Peggy Ahwesh (US); Looking Backward (2021) by Ben Balcom (US); Missing Time (2021) by Morgan Quaintance (UK).
Explorations of light, abstraction and filmic materiality overlap with depictions of urban spaces, physical and psychic sites of labor and (dis)locations of memory. Considerations of the subjectivities of qualia orbit and intersect with interrogations of representation and racialized exoticism. The apparati of cinema are not without their ideological implications.
SCREENING: Light Signal (2022) by Emily Chao (US); Paper Bag Test (2019) by Trevon Jakaar Coleman (US); Pinhole Park (2021) by Alex MacKenzie (Canada); FERIADO (2021) by Azucena Losana (Mexico/Argentina); Madness Remixed (2021) by Rhea Storr (UK); Carbon Loops (2022) by Elia Vargas (US); Prometheus (2021) by Dominic Angerame (US); Patent 1,571,148 (2022) by Kevin Jerome Everson (US); Singing in Oblivion (2021) by Eve Heller (Austria).
Sunday, August 28
Doors: 2:45pm / Screening: 3:15pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Sunday, August 28
Doors: 5pm / Screening: 5:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Films as relics, dispatched from alternate futures. Memorials to lost worlds, burning, drowned or merely displaced. May you sleep profoundly and your vision may be wonderfully extended. Synthetic messengers communicate from the dark of your screens.
SCREENING: Time Crystals (2021) by Abinadi Meza (Wixárika); Berlin Feuer (2021) by Pedro Maia (Portugal/Germany); Microcosmos (2021) by Makino Takashi (Japan); THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR YOU (2021) by Matt Whitman (US); Show Me Other Places (2021) by Rajee Samarasinghe (Sri Lanka); The Deep (2022) by Gavin Hipkins (Aotearoa/New Zealand); High Heel Beloved (2021) by Leslie Thornton (US).
CROSSROADS 2022 closes in the skies and on the ground. Films of ritual, earthly rotations, seasonal transformations, telepathic transferences and interrogations of media. Suggestions of magic. Hints of worlds beyond veils, of escape. Shadows swell and subjectivities circulate. Find a door within yourself and enter the room behind it.
SCREENING: shadow swells (2022) by Karissa Hahn (US); Sometimes a little Sin is good for the Soul (2020) by Alex Beriault (Canada); The Girl Who Is (2021) by Sara Sowell (US); First Hypnotic Suggestion (2020) by Brittany Gravely (US) & Ken Linehan (US); Dans les cieux et sur la terre (2022) by Erin Weisgerber (Canada); Object Permanence (2022) by Alix Blevins (US); Of This Beguiling Membrane (2021) by Charlotte Pryce (US/UK); la mia camera (2019), Das Rad (2021) and Ertrunken (2021) by Friedl vom Gröller (Austria); AM RANDE DES VORHANGS (202X) by Antoinette Zwirchmayr (Austria)
Sunday, August 28
Doors: 7:15pm / Screening: 7:45pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Founded in 1961, San Francisco Cinematheque cultivates the international field of non-commercial artist-made cinema through curated exhibitions, through the creation of publications and by maintaining a publicly accessible research archive. Cinematheque’s work inspires aesthetic dialog between artists, stimulates critical discourse, and encourages appreciation of artist-made cinema across the broader cultural landscape. With a grounding in non-commercial, non-narrative and non-documentary filmmaking traditions, Cinematheque’s programs broaden the public’s understanding of non-mainstream artistic filmmaking practice while expanding and challenging established art- and film historical traditions.
