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 2025 is the sixteenth manifestation of Cinematheque’s annual film festival. CROSSROADS 2025 features 47 works of film, video and performance by 47 artists representing 20 countries and territories presented in 8 curated programs. Weaving through this year’s lineup are alchemical, environmental evocations of utopian and dystopian realities; ruminations on the impermanence inherent in existence; transnational, transgenerational and even trans-species relations and expressions of vulnerability, resilience and political resistance culled from the world’s rotting image bank. CROSSROADS opening night features a sound/image performance by legendary Portland sound artist Daniel Menche and filmmaker Karl Lemieux projectionist for Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Cinematheque is proud to announce that, of these 47 featured artists, 16 are receiving their CROSSROADS debut this year. Full festival details available here.
Friday, August 29
6:30pm – 11:00pm
Saturday, August 30
2:00pm – 11:00pm
3 - the earth as if it were a dream
Sunday, August 31
2:00pm – 10:00pm
Friday, August 29
Doors: 6:30pm / Screening: 7pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
CROSSROADS 2025 opens with works considering domestic, carceral and liminal spaces, intimacies, alienations and territories best left unmapped. Caesurae entangle. Wheels squeak and wind blows. Spectral figures roam through apertures of ghostings and dystopian fantasies unfurl beneath the San Francisco Bay. Program opens with Ken Jacobs’ Flo Rounds A Corner, presented in memory of Flo Jacobs (1941–2025). Here is the key; unlock the door.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Friday, August 29
Doors: 9pm / Screening: 9:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
CROSSROADS opening night culminates with Celluloid Between the Wounds (World Premiere), a visceral sound and image convergence of legendary Portland sound artist Daniel Menche and Karl Lemieux, a Montréal-based filmmaker known for projection work with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and for his own alchemical films and multi-projector performances. In collaboration, Menche’s massive, textural drones and percussive detonations seem to awaken something subterranean while Lemieux’s flickering visuals melt, collapse and resurrect with each improvised gesture. Nothing is stable and caught in the tension between precision and chaos, in a shared physical space vibrating with the energy of the now. Performance is preceded by Linda Izcali Scobie’s flickering double-projector Crystal Palace and the CROSSROADS festival opener A Certain Light by Nicole Remy, a sensuous and circling lo-fi pinhole exploration.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 30
Doors: 2:00pm / Screening: 2:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Premonitions, farewells, glimpses of hope. From the San Francisco Bay to the Antopodes and points in between comes a program of alchemical, environmental evocations; visions of ecological dystopia; fantasies of escape; reveries of solitude and an exploration of the sonorities of the sea.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 30
Doors: 4:30pm / Screening: 5:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
This isn’t what it appears. There is always the camera. Light enacted, spirits summoned, shadows sharpen and twist. Eight works which form a web of monsterful ponderings on indexicality; visual rendering and portraiture; hypnosis and hysteria; and the loves, losses and violences inherent in photography. Haunted evocations of repressed memories both personal and cultural, anonymous and specific.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Saturday, August 30
Doors: 7:30pm / Screening: 8:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
The call of silences and the tremblings of the city. San Francisco’s own Jerome Hiler’s masterful reverie Careless Passage caps a program of spectral and transmutational films, works which defy gravity while exploring the expressive properties of the cinematic apparatus and sensuous shock encounters with the physical and luminous world. Program presented in memory of Tomonari Nishikawa (1969–2025).
FILMS to SCREEN:
Sunday, August 31
Doors: 2:00pm / Screening: 2:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Are these archives? Global transmissions from the troubled present open CROSSROADS day three. Snapshots of doubt, pain vulnerability, resistance and resilience culled from the world’s rotting image bank. Interrogations of reality: sardonic and ironic, cutting and inciting. Misinformation flipped on its head. Hands touching hands holding hands. Touching me touching you.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Sunday, August 31
Doors: 4:30pm / Screening: 5:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
Fleeting seasons and persistent memories. Documentations of invisible threads, weaving between us, before us, around us and through us. Love in varying forms. An opening quartet of lush if melancholic lyricism gives way to a darker dreamscape of troubled interiorities and toxic landscapes.
FILMS to SCREEN:
Sunday, August 31
Doors: 7:30pm / Screening: 8:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members
CROSSROADS closes with five films exploring earth, sky and subterranean spaces, indigeneity, interspecies entwinement and relationships to the ungrievable land. Luminously material films embodying geologic memories, reconstructed histories and incantations of transformation. Speculations on potential futures: how it was and how it could be. Have we met somewhere before?
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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