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Canyon Cinema Foundation

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Canyon Cinema Foundation

Canyon Cinema Foundation is an advocate for artist-made, independent films. Canyon is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit.

Canyon Cinema Foundation is an advocate for independent moving-image media artists, dedicated to providing continued and meaningful access to the groundbreaking and innovative works in our collection. The Foundation manifests this commitment by:
- Nurturing scholarship and awareness with public programming at universities and cultural organizations worldwide.
- Partnering with other nonprofit orga

nizations to further visibility of the works in the collection.
- Maintaining the quality of the collection by abiding to the highest standards of care and handling.
- Serving the artists we represent by providing resources that support preservation as well as the creation of new moving-image media that expands the boundaries and reception of cinema.

06/03/2026

This Sunday!

MICHAEL WALLIN, OUTSIDE IN
SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Tall Grass (1968/1980, 12 min)
Fearful Symmetry (1981, 15 min)
Decodings (1988, 15 min) *
Black Sheep Boy (1995, 37mm) *

All on 16mm

* Preserved by Canyon Cinema through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Free with RSVP: sfmoma.org/event/michael-wallin-outside-in

05/27/2026

New on Canyon Cinema Connects:

THE MICHAEL WALLIN COLLECTION
including primary and secondary documents such as photographs; correspondence; screening posters, flyers, and postcards; production materials; newspaper clippings; and other ephemera.

View at: connects.canyoncinema.com/the-michael-wallin-collection/

Digitization courtesy of California Revealed.

Screening Reminder!
Michael Wallin, Inside Out, featuring new 16mm restorations of DECODINGS (1988) and BLACK SHEEP BOY (1995), take places Sunday, June 7th at SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Program information and to RSVP: sfmoma.org/event/michael-wallin-outside-in/

05/21/2026

New on Canyon Cinema Connects:

"Q***r Film in the Seventies: A Personal Odyssey"
by Michael Wallin

Excerpt: "I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley in 1969 when, shortly after the Stonewall riots, I came out, along with thousands in the Bay Area. The closets suddenly seemed empty. When I arrived at San Francisco State, I had little on my mind except film and s*x, and it seemed natural to bring the two together. My exposure to personal experimental film at Yale suggested the importance of individual expression on film in an honest and open fashion. One’s intimate life could be the subject of one’s art, and what is more intimate than s*x?"

Read more at: connects.canyoncinema.com/q***r-film-in-the-seventies-a-personal-odyssey/

DECODINGS (1988) and BLACK SHEEP BOY (1995) – the second and third installments of Wallin's "Psycho-Sexual Trilogy" – screen June 7th at SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Image: Production still for THE PLACE BETWEEN OUR BODIES (Michael Wallin, 1975)

05/20/2026

Upcoming Screening!

MICHAEL WALLIN, OUTSIDE IN
SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Phyllis Wattis Theater
2pm Sunday, June 7

Co-presented by Canyon Cinema

Join us as we debut new 16mm restorations of Michael Wallin's acclaimed autobiographical essays DECODINGS (1988) + BLACK SHEEP BOY (1995)!

Preserved by Canyon Cinema through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Free with RSVP:
http://sfmoma.org/event/michael-wallin-outside-in/

05/19/2026

Canyon Cinema is pleased to announce the acquisition of 10 videos by the Bay Area-based Malaysian-American artist Azian Nurudin.

Made between 1986 and 2001, these under-seen works “feature leather and whips in the streets and S*M havens in the sheets."

“Ignited by unabashed, defiant q***r passion, Azian renders her politics and s*xuality through murky pixels and radical propositions for self-defence.” (Q***r East)

Info: canyoncinema.com/2026/05/19/now-available-ten-titles-from-azian-nurudin/

05/05/2026

Now available from Canyon Cinema: Tulapop Saenjaroen’s Local Sensations (2025, 25.5 min)

Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay, “How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine.” Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities — unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject — and gestures toward a kind of topological politics.

Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation center with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.

These fragments, only obliquely connected, are woven into an evolving, gently destabilizing field of sensation. Together, they form an ecological and metaphysical nexus — an invitation to reconsider what “locality” and “monumentality” might mean, and how close they are to us.

Info: canyoncinema.com/2026/05/04/now-available-tulapop-saenjaroens-local-sensations/

04/28/2026

Upcoming Screenings!

REFLECTIONS FROM A CINEMATIC CESSPOOL
Mike Kuchar and Andrew Lampert in person

SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Floor 1, Phyllis Wattis Theater
April 30 & May 2, 2026

Co-presented by Canyon Cinema

Free with RSVP

Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool is a two-part ode to the prodigal twin brothers of underground cinema, George and Mike Kuchar. Marked by a delight for the absurd, a sardonic wit, an admiration for the act of moviemaking, and a true interest in people, the Kuchars’ work is both one of a kind and two of a kind. For decades, both taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, where their influence on generations of students was as outsized as their own staggering output. In the films created directly with students, we see them shaping the school into a crucible for fearless, personal, and provocative filmmaking.

Recommended for mature audiences! Thank you to Anthology Film Archives, Video Data Bank, and Michelle Silva.

*

PROGRAM ONE: PLANET MIKE
6pm Thursday, April 30
sfmoma.org/event/reflections-from-a-cinematic-cesspool-planet-mike/

Program One: Planet Mike starts at the very beginning, presenting rare 8mm films shot on a camera the brothers received at age 12, alongside four additional works spanning 1967 to 2025, including a favorite SFAI class production. Curated by Andrew Lampert in collaboration with Mike Kuchar, with both in attendance.

*

PROGRAM TWO: GEORGE'S SPHERE
2pm Saturday, May 2
sfmoma.org/event/reflections-from-a-cinematic-cesspool-georges-sphere/

Program Two: George’s Sphere brings together four films across two distinct periods, pairing an SFAI class film with personal work by George Kuchar. The result is a double portrait of a filmmaker and his students. Together, the pairings reveal George’s fused relationship between teaching and creating and how his well-honed sensibilities radiated into the work of those around him. Curated by Andrew Lampert, who will be in attendance.

04/22/2026

Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome Tijana Petrović and her work to the collection!

Tijana Petrović is a filmmaker and artist born and raised in the former Yugoslavia. Her moving image work includes nonfiction films, and film and video installations which use landscape as a framework to observe and question our relationships to history, place, and the natural world. Tijana works with essayistic and analog approaches to examine connections between landscapes, materials and media technologies.

Tijana's Print Generations commission, Flow Attachment, is now available from Canyon Cinema.

Info: canyoncinema.com/2026/04/22/new-artist-member-tijana-petrovic/

04/15/2026

The latest release in Re:Voir’s Robert Kramer series is now available from Canyon Cinema.

WORK Vol. 3 pairs MILESTONES, an "epic dirge from 1975 on the failed dreams of '60s radicals" (Artforum) with Kramer's 1997 reflection GHOSTS OF ELECTRICITY, on Blu-ray + DVD.

canyoncinema.com/catalog/film/?i=6058

04/14/2026

Now available from Canyon Cinema: Emily Chao's chive pockets (2017, 3 min, digital file) + Light Signal (2022, 11 min, 16mm or digital file)

Light Signal screens at Shapeshifters Cinema this Friday 4/17 as part Gravitational Lensing, Program 14: Speculative Histories.

Info: canyoncinema.com/2026/04/09/now-available-emily-chaos-light-signal-chive-pockets/

Address

1777 Yosemite Ave, Ste 210
San Francisco, CA
94124

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 6pm
Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 5pm
Friday	10am - 5pm

Telephone

+14156262255

Website

http://www.canyoncinema.com/

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