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
Founded by filmmaker Bruce Baillie in 1961, San Francisco Cinematheque is the Bay Area’s premier venue for avant-garde/experimental, underground and personally expressive film, and video. In its dedication to exhibiting works of aesthetically radical cinema from all historical eras and geo-political locales, Cinematheque cultivates the international field of artist-made cinema, inspiring aesthetic dialog and critical discourse and encouraging appreciation across the broader cultural landscape. 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 Cinematheque’s Artistic Director Steve Polta.
CROSSROADS 2024 is the fifteenth iteration of the festival, featuring 75 works of film, video and performance by 68 artists representing 19 countries and territories presented in 10 curated programs. Major themes of this year’s festival include considerations of personal and collective history in the context of global politics; accountings of urban and natural landscape in the Anthropocene era; contemplations of erotics, isolation and identity in an increasingly virtualized world; and the status of myth in contemporary culture.
Cinematheque is proud to announce that, of these 68 featured artists, 28 are receiving their CROSSROADS debut this year. Full festival details available here.
Friday, August 30
6:30pm – 11:00pm
Saturday, August 31
12:30pm – 11:00pm
3 - depending on the light to make a difference
4 - obscured by clouds
5 - seen and not seen, they ventured inside
6- can you tell me about the dream?
Sunday, September 1
12:30pm – 10:00pm
7 - a neverending story
8 - move forward and breathe
9 - o’er the land
10- an exit sign out of focus (in memoriam to identity)
Friday, August 30
Doors: 6:30pm / Screening: 7pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
A haunted elegy to the late great SFAI opens the 2024 CROSSROADS commencement, a program presenting urban luminances and dystopic crawls within the walls of the encroaching and increasingly virtualized city, the contemporary cosmopolis as a state of mind. Envision yourself waking up. Recall the history you once inhabited.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Friday, August 30
Doors: 9pm / Screening: 9:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Lyrical contemplations of land and landscape, human and non-human history and malleability of memory and the bidirectionality of history. Dulcet snapshots of the synanthropic Anthropocene bookended by pensive retrospections on colonial legacies (including the occupation of Alcatraz). Truths are discovered, songs are remembered and forgotten as the rocks crumble.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 31
Doors: 12:30pm / Screening: 1pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Morgan Quaintance’s ruminations on subjectivity, isolation and the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa cap a program weaving interiorities and transhistorical eruptions. Traumatic political histories rattle the windows, falling through silence, punctuated by shock, reflecting how it is to be broken. Program dedicated to the memory of filmmaker Vincent Grenier (1948–2023).
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 31
Doors: 3pm / Screening: 3:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
A hinging program of personal and generational portraiture and the reveration of martyrs. Enactments of intimacy, public yet silently private, precede ruminations on introspection, solitude and travel, giving way to considerations of legacies of global resistance, rippling across history, and testaments to survival. These bitterly poisonous times will pass.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 31
Doors: 5:30pm / Screening: 6pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Personal elaborations of myth and private exploration bookend this program of hermetic allegory and luminous reverie, with a set of dazzlingly radiant in-camera compositions and alchemically material investigations forming the program's sensuously igneous core. Within these visual fables, gestures of guardianship smolder like inextinguishable embers, breathing and alive.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 31
Doors: 8:15pm / Screening: 8:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
A soliloquy on loneliness, freedom, power and care opens a program of enactments, embodiments, memorials and portrayals of figures absent or lost. Films which explore intimate and universal experiences of childhood, adolescence, familial distance and mortality by opening reliquaries of retrospection, museums of grief, hermetic archives of trauma (private and collective) and the uncovering of uncertain memories.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Sunday, September 1
Doors: 12:30pm / Screening: 1pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Grace, unnatural stillness, some tension. With a notable lyrical digression to England’s New Forest, the apparitional landscapes of southern California haunt this program exploring (largely) the west coast’s peculiar interlacing of garden and city. Films of restless searching, cryptic messages sent and received, familial support, acts of vanishing, uncertain transmutation and stories without end.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Sunday, September 1
Doors: 3pm / Screening: 3:15pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Like silent storms, and with references to transnational political struggle and resistance, this program intermingles alchemical explorations of the corporeal experience of cinematic emulsion with spiritualized renderings of evanescent, weather-inflected and abstracted landscapes and reclaimed erotics of the sensuously visceral body.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Film still from Lake Idlewild © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
Sunday, September 1
Doors: 5:30pm / Screening: 5:45pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Contemplations and occupations of land, air and sky in the contemporary Anthropocene Era, from the lyrical to the speculatively dystopian, boundaries blurring. Considerations of the cessation of seasons and the colonization of the heavens rub against lyrical, if troubled, depictions of idyllic moments, culminating in a strangely exhilarating post-human globalist folktale.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Sunday, September 1
Doors: 7:45pm / Screening: 8pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Rituals form and unform you. Replete with references to personal and collective effacement and museological display, the CROSSROADS 2024 conclusion, through a darkening lens, probes matters of identity (and its erasure) in the post-human era, interrogating issues of authorship and authenticity, collaborative portraiture, individuation and the apocalyptic advent of the era of artificial intelligence. Love laughs at locksmiths.
FILMS to SCREEN:
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.
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