March 22, 2025
We’ve assembled a godsmackin’ troika of the most superhumanly gifted women makers of our time, a truly fortuitous curatorial coup that coincides with Sachs‘ visit to the Bay Area. She is showing a ½ hr. cut from her her new feature project, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, and fielding questions about her intentions and trajectories with this current long-form. AND: Old ATA comrade (relocated to Berlin) Sylvia Schedelbauer finally peeps back up with her 24-min. multi-layered portrait of her mother, also settled in Berlin (from Japan), an astounding feat of family-archive excavation (mostly from S8 color!) that is ever-so-meticulously ordered into a profoundly resonant, and revelatory montage. The third component of this collective debut comes from Kamila Kuc, the formerly London-based cine-artiste who has now moved to the Coast, Her Plot of Blue Sky.This jaw-dropping, never-before-seen penetration of Moroccan women’s society and sub-culture (Amazigh)–in fact enabling the women to use cameras(!)–gives voice to a huge marginalized population who are accustomed to being shuttled from forced marriage to prostitution to institutionalized old age dead-ends, by an oppressively patriarchal Arab state. $14
Other Cinema is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District. We are inspired and sustained by the ongoing practice of fine-art filmmaking, as well as engaged essay and documentary forms. But OC also embraces marginalized genres like “orphan” industrial films, home movies, ethnography, and exploitation, as media-archeological core-samples, and blows against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture.
Whether avant-garde or engagé, our emphasis is on the radical subjectivities and sub-cultural sensibilities that find expression in what used to be called “underground cinema”.
Our calendars are curated on a semi-annual basis, mostly comprised of polymorphous group shows–several pieces, in different moving-image and intermedia formats–organized around a common theme. Almost always the artist herself appears in person, bringing new work to a energized microcinema audience opting for the provocative images and ideas only available in a non-commercial and non-academic salon environment.
Conceived and stewarded by Craig Baldwin, with a whole lotta help from ATA Gallery, Steve Polta, Christine Metropoulos, and others in a core collective whose commitment has created a space for contemporary cinematic expression and exchange.