CROSSROADS 2026
Presented by San Francisco Cinematheque & Gray Area

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

…the most expansive showcase for experimental media in the United States…

— Alex Fields, In Review Online

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, video and performance work. 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 2026 is the seventeenth manifestation of Cinematheque’s annual film festival. CROSSROADS 2026 features 49 works of film, video and performance by 52 artists representing 22 countries and territories presented in 8 curated programs. CROSSROADS 2026 features alchemical excursions through everyday hauntings, speculative explorations of the materialities of archives, films hovering at interstices between bodily physicality and luminous ephemerality. CROSSROADS 2026 consists of rituals of remembrance, cryptic missives to future generations and the hauntological frisson of surface noise. Special guest artist JG Thirlwell performs live to legendary beatnik polymath Harry Smith’s obsessively occult classic Heaven and Earth Magic.

Cinematheque is proud to announce that, of these 52 featured artists, 20 are receiving their CROSSROADS debut this year. Full festival details available here.

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Festival Programs

Friday, September 4
6:30pm - 11:00pm

1 - coming and going / breath by breath

2 - JG Thirlwell scores Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic

Saturday, September 5
2:00pm – 11:00pm

3 - we name no heroes

4 - bury it in the garden

5 - the flamethrowers

Sunday, September 6
2:00pm – 10:00pm

6- in the distance, quietly

7 - before the great palaces, everything was still

8 - faraway so close

Friday

PROGRAM 1
coming and going / breath by breath

Friday, September 4
Doors: 6:30pm / Screening: 7pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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Full Program Details

No future. Only Now. The pendulum swings. CROSSROADS begins. Eco-punk phytophonics explore a fecund space of life after decay while alchemical excursions through the everyday hauntings of dead media give way to ruminations on pyrophytic transmutations, bio-mystical fables and considerations of the daily and generational rhythms of the textile arts. Deep breaths, heart beats and the incessant tides. This program is dedicated to the memory of filmmaker Sheri Wills (1963–2025).

FILMS to SCREEN:

PROGRAM 2
JG Thirlwell scores Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic

Friday, September 4
Doors: 9pm / Screening: 9:30pm
Admission: $20 General / $15 Members

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Full Program Details

CROSSROADS opening night culminates in a rare screening of psychedelic archivist, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, mystic and paper airplane hoarder Harry Smith’s legendary work of obsessive cinematic stop-motion occultism, the primitively hypnotic and hallucinatory Heaven and Earth Magic (1957–1962) presented with a live score by the equally legendary industrial noise composer JG Thirlwell, performing a surround sound soundtrack using electronics, triggered samples and theremin. Program opens with Thirlwell’s 2018 film Sonder. Join us for an appropriately incantatory inauguration of the weekend’s haunted festivities.

FILMS to SCREEN:

  • Sonder (2018) by JG Thirlwell
  • Heaven and Earth Magic (1957–1962) by Harry Smith

Saturday

PROGRAM 3
we name no heroes

Saturday, September 5
Doors: 2:00pm / Screening: 2:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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More missives from the rotting archive. Nothing is documentary. Nothing is fiction. Onyeka Igwe’s Penkelemes, on Nigeria’s University of Ibadan, anchors this program of fragmented and fragmentary films considering familial history, colonial legacies and the boundaries between representation and re-presentation, films which question objectivity in favor of speculative exploration of the materiality of the archive.

FILMS to SCREEN:

PROGRAM 4
bury it in the garden

Saturday, September 5
Doors: 4:30pm / Screening: 5:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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Full Program Details

As a centerpiece, Maryam Tafakory’s Daria’s Night Flowers—“draw[ing] upon dozens of Persian-language films, both classics and obscurities, to weave a tale of jealousy, muted ambition, and creative suppression” (Michael Sicinski)—grounds a program of quiet incantations, rituals of remembrance, intergenerational traumas and healings and domestic anxieties. Works exploring mysteries within the everyday, losses latent in quotidian spaces.

FILMS to SCREEN:

PROGRAM 5
the flamethrowers

Saturday, September 5
Doors: 7:30pm / Screening: 8:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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Full Program Details

Behold our visceral Saturday night centerpiece, a cacophonous cavalcade of luridly queer confrontations in which lovingly hand-made collage works rub against explorations of lushly floriferous filmic tactility, sensuous life-affirming elegies and ambivalently beautiful dystopian landscapes, providing loving and community-centered counter to horrific AI-hallucinated nightmares of surveillance and state violence. Throughout, as surface noise is celebrated, boundaries are made permeable and vulnerability is celebrated as strength.

FILMS to SCREEN:

Sunday

PROGRAM 6
in the distance, quietly

Sunday, September 6
Doors: 2:00pm / Screening: 2:30pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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Full Program Details

Tomorrows Tomorrows Tomorrows. The stones speak. CROSSROADS day 2 begins with oblique visions of lost cities, forgotten and rediscovered, singing their songs across atmospheres. Memorials to unsung saints and survivors. Cryptic missives to future generations.

FILMS to SCREEN:

  • Air (2025) by Alexander Barancheyev (Latvia)
  • NECROPOLIS (2026) by Kevin T. Allen (US)
  • nearer to thee in a triptych (2025) by Matt Whitman (US)
  • 09/05/1982 (2025) by Jorge Caballero Ramos (Spain) & Camilo Restrepo (Spain)
  • Veronique (Ein Friseursalon in Paris aus dem Barbieland) (2025) by Friedl vom Gröller (Austria)
  • Dooni (2025) by Kevin Jerome Everson (US) & Claudrena N. Harold (US)
  • Buried in the Snow 藏在雪裡 (2025) by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu (Taiwan/US)

PROGRAM 7
before the great palaces, everything was still

Sunday, September 6
Doors: 4:30pm / Screening: 5:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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Full Program Details

Cinematic poems of forgetting and remembering, experienced as much through the body as through the eyes. A program of films which, like curtains drawn against a heatwave, keep the sensuous world at a distance, thrumming and beating against the sweltering, synesthetically, longingly, infusing in their liminality.

FILMS to SCREEN:

  • A Poem (2025) by Vasilios Papaioannu (Greece/Italy/US)
  • A Pure Portion of Anxiety (2026) by Chae Yu (South Korea/US)
  • Mounds Above the Earth (2026) by Jiayi Chen (China)
  • Body, remember... (2025) by Matthew Berka (Australia/UK)
  • Forgetting (2026) by Antoni Orlof (Poland)
  • Songs Overheard in the Shadows (2025) by James Edmonds (Germany/UK)

PROGRAM 8
faraway so close

Sunday, September 6
Doors: 7:30pm / Screening: 8:00pm
Admission: $12 General / $10 Members

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Full Program Details

Following Bruno Varela’s simulacra, a paranoid evocation of contemporary (and never ending cold war), Maximilien Luc Proctor’s The City & Her Stones—a sensitively and softly searching drift through the always past-haunted Berlin—and Emmanuel Piton’s similarly (if introspectively) phantasmic The Ghost Image serves as epically lyrical anchors to program of subtle meditations on the privileges of motion and the paradoxes of distance and proximity as CROSSROADS comes to a close.

FILMS to SCREEN:

  • simulacra (2026) by Bruno Varela (Mexico)
  • The Ghost Image (2025) by Emmanuel Piton (France)
  • Kata Tjuta, west of Uluru (2026) by Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy (Australia)
  • Canticle of The Sun (2026) by Nathan Swann (US)
  • The City & Her Stones (2025) by Maximilien Luc Proctor (Germany/US)

Partner

San Francisco Cinematheque

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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