Los Angeles Filmforum

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Los Angeles Filmforum

Filmforum is the city's longest running organization that screens experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation.

Hand-crafted, non-commercial films!

08/24/2026

Lew Klahr: From 45 To 33 — Part 1: Fable by the Door — World Premiere with Klahr in person!

“… This… is a cinema of shifting moods and engagements that offers a tactile exploration of elliptical narrative and poetic montage. Like a waking dream, what can be clearly described in words is less significant than what can be felt.”
— Lew Klahr

9/13 at 1pm at 2220 Arts + Archives !

07/29/2026

Floribunda, an outdoor garden screening, in collaboration with The Livonian Cinema comes to the Arlington Garden on Saturday, 8/8, at 8:30pm!

We are thrilled to return to Pasadena (where Filmforum was founded) for a lovely set of films set in this beautiful space. A very special chapter of our 50th anniversary celebrations!

Contemplative, whimsical, analytical, reverential, materialist, political or diaristic - the garden has been the colorful source for a bounty of cinematic approaches. We have chosen to share a range of contemporary short experimental films all looking closely at the life and realms of gardens.

Tix + info about seating on our site. Lineup TBA!

07/27/2026

Sunday matinee! Jeff Perkins presents the LA Premiere of his film George: The Story of George Maciunas and Fluxus, a feature documentary as mercurial as its subject.

8/2 at 2pm at 2220 Arts + Archives with Perkins in person

Fascinatingly contradictory interviews with artists, including Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, and Nam June Paik, and inventive sound and screen design, shape this rich portrait of a visionary artist. Dedicated to cooperative methods and expanded processes, everything could be Fluxus: kits, shops, festivals, islands, weddings, food, or Flux Lofts–the first network of artist-owned lofts in SoHo, New York. The iconoclastic Maciunas and the spirit of Fluxus provoke questions still critical to artists working today.

07/25/2026

Sunday matinee! Films by Yoko Ono featuring an introduction by Sarah Loyer, curator at The Broad Museum!

We invite you to bring small musical instruments to play along with Film No. 5 (Smile), as Ono and Lennon originally called for in the film’s world premiere in Chicago in November 1968.

In conjunction with The Broad’s exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, Filmforum presents some films of hers not included in the exhibition, along with a couple of her Flux films.

“All Ono’s films are fundamentally conceptual, and are characterized by the same concerns that underpin her work in other media: the body, duration, ephemerality, seriality, measurement, language, an active engagement of the viewer as participant, a performative structure, attention to the properties of the material, and a break with the autonomous work of art.” — Chrissie Iles

2pm matinee at 2220 Arts + Archives

07/21/2026

Sunday! Films by Yoko Ono featuring an introduction by Sarah Loyer, curator at The Broad Museum!

In conjunction with The Broad’s exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, Filmforum presents some films of hers not included in the exhibition, along with some of her Flux films.

We invite you to bring small musical instruments to play along with Film No. 5 (Smile), as Ono and Lennon originally called for in the film’s world premiere in Chicago in November 1968.

The films of Yoko Ono demand that one slows down to view them. They might be humorous or rarified, reserved or unruly, precise or uncontrolled.

2pm matinee at 2220 Arts + Archives - 7/26

07/19/2026

Don’t miss International Documentary Association (IDA) ‘s Getting Real ’26, a biennial conference on the art & industry of documentary filmmaking.

The industry’s most influential figures gather online and in L.A. July 20-23 for networking and workshops that tackle everything from financing and distribution to the role of AI.

Use code INVITEAAGR26 for a discounted all access pass (20% off)

07/10/2026

BOUCHRA, the acclaimed feature debut from artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki comes to Laemmle Glendale this weekend! Join Filmforum programmer and Animation Historian Sam Gurry for an introduction to the 7:30pm screening on 7/11!

Part memoir, part animated fantasia, BOUCHRA follows a q***r Moroccan artist in New York whose stalled film project is transformed by difficult conversations with her mother in Casablanca. As she navigates creative uncertainty, cultural displacement, and new romantic relationships, the boundaries between art and life begin to dissolve.

Inspired by films like Chungking Express (1994) and After Hours (1985), this Blender animated film combines anthropomorphic characters with scanned and digitally reconstructed environments. Rather than following a traditional animation pipeline, the filmmakers continually rewrote and re-recorded scenes throughout production, giving the film the spontaneity of a documentary.

Bouchra plays 3 times daily July 10-16: 12:50 pm, 5:15 pm, 7:30 pm

07/08/2026

Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s R**E featuring a talk by writer and educator Jennifer Doyle - this Sunday, 7/12, at 2220 Arts + Archives - 7pm

In conjunction with The Broad’s exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, Filmforum presents her rarely screened film “R**E” followed by a talk on the film by writer and educator Jennifer Doyle.

The film is not included in the exhibition, so this is your only chance to see it currently.

“In the film, [camera operator Nic] Knowland and his crew encounter a woman in the Highgate cemetery and begin to film her, tracking her relentlessly through Lindon’s streets and finally forcing their way into the flat she shares with her sister.” -Joan Hawkins

Note that there is no s*x or nudity or conventional physical violence in the film, but it is an intense presentation of stalking.

07/04/2026

Star Spangled to Death — Ken Jacobs’ “underground masterwork” at 2220 Arts + Archives on 7/5 is one of the week’s best films in LA thanks to Mark Olsen Los Angeles Times !

See you there for all 4 chapters of this epic made “of bits of the banal, clichéd, grotesque, vulgar, dripping sentimentality that is being sold to the people as real food and everybody feeds on it and even enjoys it and then dies” per Jonas Mekas

07/02/2026

Ken Jacobs’ Star Spangled to Death at 2220 Arts + Archives - Sunday 7/5 — beat the heat and America 250 blues with a rare matinee of this epic tribute to “a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict.”

“Rather than use brief clips from campy old films to score easy political points,” Dave Kehr wrote in a 2004 review in The New York Times, “Mr. Jacobs brilliantly and generously allows much of the borrowed material to play out in its entirety, at which point it indicts itself.” The effect is a vast American pageant in which not just Jolson but Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Mickey Mouse and the cast of Oscar Micheaux’s “Ten Minutes to Live” share a time-space continuum with [Jack] Smith, crowned with a paper bag and brandishing a mop, materializes in one sequence on the Bowery to consternate a meeting of winos... -J. Hoberman

Special Thanks to Az**el Jacobs

Address

2220 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
90057-2208

Website

http://www.lafilmforum.org/

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