This is the last week of our month-long membership drive. THANK YOU to everyone who has joined or renewed memberships over the past several weeks. We literally can’t do this without the support of the community. While we have made progress towards our $10,000 goal, we still have a looooong way to go (we’re only about a 1/3 of the way there now). If you have not yet joined as a member, please consider doing so now!

A small venue with a big vision.

Shapeshifters is one of the few microcinema venues on the west coast dedicated specifically to experimental and avant-garde film, video, music, sound and multi-media performance. Along with regular screenings and performances by local and visiting artists, including our on-going series Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues, Do-Over Music and the newly launched Punk Rock Docs, we also host monthly workshops on DIY and experimental moving image and sound practices, like the upcoming Composing with Found Sounds workshop with Kirk Pearson, Tangible Media: Magnetic Tape & Creative Reuse workshop with John Davis and Build Your Own Crankie workshop with Risa Lenore.

We are all artists here.

Shapeshifters is run by just three* people—Kathleen Quillian, Gilbert Guerrero and Ellie Vanderlip (* with the support over the past year of our amazing intern Emily Hernandez)—all of us volunteers, all of us artists. We are fully committed to the venue, the community and all of the artists who come through our doors and we put so much work and care into bringing (and holding) it all together. We don’t have a corporate overlord to keep us funded. We are beholden only to the community (that’s you!) and we need your support to help us stay open so that we can continue to bring you all of the amazing, ephemeral, one-of-a-kind experiences that you have come to know and love at Shapeshifters.

Your third place.

We strive to make every visit to Shapeshifters a memorable one in our cozy, community venue where folks can gather together to take in a range of experimental film, video, music, sound and multimedia events. Watch a short sneak peak of what a typical event feels like in our cinema.

Guests will always find snacks and beverages, both hot and cold, available for purchase at all of our events. Along with warm empanadas, freshly baked focaccia or grilled cheese sandwiches, we have a rotating selection of ice-cold beers on tap, made with locally-sourced, seasonal ingredients in our fully-licensed, on-site nano-brewery. Take a look at this short behind the scenes look at how our beers are made.

Shapeshifters members are the heart of the organization.

By joining the Shapeshifters Membership Program, you become part of an engaged, diverse, creative community working in and around experimental moving image, sound and time-based art.

In exchange for your generous support, we offer a wellspring of fantastic benefits including:

• 10% discount on tickets, registrations and everything purchased in both the cinema and café (Seer level, $60)

• A special, limited edition beer mug (with original image designed this year by Anna Firth!) + one free beer at every on-site event you attend (Clairvoyant level, $100)

• Shapeshifters T-shirt or tote bag (Conjurer level, $150)

• One free admission to every screening hosted in our cinema (Magus level, $300)

• Named sponsorship of one Shapeshifters Fellow (Shapeshifters level, $500)

Help ensure the future of Shapeshifters Cinema. Become a member now.

Larry Gottheim: Knots & Entanglements
Presented in partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque
Larry Gottheim in person
Friday, November 7, 2025
7pm
Admission: $12 (discount for Shapeshifters & SF Cinematheque members)

Working in film since the late 1960s, the cinema of avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim is an observational cinema, rewarding contemplation, stillness and active intellectual engagement and offering uncannily commonplace imagery rife with elusive metaphor and/or accumulating into densely immersive conceptual conundra. In Gottheim's films, time slows, hesitates and seems to move in novel and non-linear directions, the circularity of experience a recurring aspect of the master filmmaker's rich body of work. Gottheim's recent book, The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films (published 2024 by Eyewash Books and the Film-Makers' Cooperative) is a ruminative and musing career-spanning culmination, teasing out longitudinal threads and uncanny occurrences in the oeuvre, presenting the artist's body of work as a multi-faceted whole, a throughline of thought and material-based philosophy.

In celebration of this publication, San Francisco Cinematheque is honored to present a three-program residency (in partnership with the Roxie Theater, Gray Area and Shapeshifters Cinema) presenting selections from the artist's vast body of work, from early single-shot films, still lifes and nature studies to the complex sound/image constructions of later work to the very recent films completed 2019–2024.

Cinematheque's whirlwind survey of Gottheim's works wraps at Shapeshifters Cinema with later period films and recent digital videos, each a dense and sensorially confrontational collage of off-the-cuff cinematography and/or collaborative encounter, from "Sorry/Hear Us" (1984), an open-ended group project exploring temporal and linguistic reversal to recent digital works Entanglement (2022) and A Private Room (2024), each a confounding rebus-like audio/visual puzzlement. (Steve Polta)

SCREENING: Thought (1970), "Sorry/Hear Us" (1986). Entanglement (2022). A Private Room (2024).

Punk Rock Docs - In the Red & She's a Punk Rocker UK
Presented in partnership with Nixed
Sunday, November 9, 2025
5pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

Punk Rock Docs is a monthly film series highlighting the origins and legacy of DIY/punk music and culture in the Bay Area and beyond.

For our second program we take a look at the early years of punk from the perspective of women, starting with Liz Keim & Karen Merchant's In the Red, a short impressionistic collage glimpsing the early, formative years of the San Francisco punk scene in and around Mabuhay Gardens.

Following that we will screen the feature film She's a Punk Rocker UK, a powerful documentary directed by Zillah Minx highlighting the roles and experiences of women in the early days of UK punk and their respective parts in the movement that irreversibly changed the face of society, politics, art, and music. Featuring Poly Styrene, Eve Libertine, Gaye Advert, Caroline Coon and more.

Lynne Sachs - The Washing Society + Handbook, A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry
Presented in collaboration with Friends of Canyon Cinema
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for Shapeshifters members; free for Friends of Canyon)

NYC-based filmmaker Lynne Sachs joins us for a deep, poetic dive into laundry—an area of focus she has examined over the past decade, through her film The Washing Society (co-directed with Lizzie Olesker) and a new book, Handbook, A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry, just released by Punctum Books.

Along with a screening of The Washing Society, Lynne will present a performative reading, with Shapeshifters Programming Director Kathleen Quillian, of excerpts from Handbook, A Manual as well as engage in a discussion about the book, film and process with Canyon Cinema director Brett Kashmere.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and can be signed by the artist after the event.

Composing with Found Sounds
Instructor: Kirk Pearson
Sunday, November 16, 2025
12-4pm
In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema
Admission: $55 (Discount for Shapeshifters members)

How can the textures of a city become the basis for composition? This collaborative workshop between Dogbotic Labs and Shapeshifters Cinema invites participants to explore the acoustic life of Oakland through the lens of sound as material. Rather than beginning with instruments, we’ll begin with the act of listening: tracing how the built environment, weather, and human activity form a constantly shifting score around us, and then learn practically how to structure larger musical ideas out of found sounds in ways that are novel and poetic.

Participants will make short field recordings in the neighborhood, guided by prompts that emphasize attention, timing, and perspective. Back at Shapeshifters, we’ll share these recordings and explore simple ways to work with them--cutting, arranging, layering, and using structure to draw out the music already present in the noise.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in sound, whether or not you consider yourself a musician. By the end of the session, we’ll have assembled a collective composition shaped by the city’s own voice, and compiled an impressive sample library of downtown Oakland.

Tangible Media: Magnetic Tape & Creative Reuse
Instructor: John Davis
Sunday, December 14, 2025
12-5pm
In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema
Admission: $60 (+ $25 materials cost) (Discount for Shapeshifters members)
NOTE: Registration will close November 13th to allow us time to purchase materials!

For artists and consumers alike, the rapid shift from analog to digital media platforms over the past few decades presented both an economy of means and a seemingly unlimited range of possibilities. Though some artists, driven perhaps by nostalgia or curiosity, continue to work with obsolete media, inspired by the fundamentally unique materials and aesthetic properties inherent in them.

This workshop, led by musician/filmmaker John Davis, digs into the past to mine some veins of discarded media culture—more specifically, the creative use (and re-use) of magnetic audio tape technology. We'll take a brief look into its history and look at some of the ways the technology has been used creatively and unconventionally. We'll also demonstrate some accessible ways of using the media, while covering practical tips and strategies for sourcing playback and recording machines, new and used tapes, as well as some related tools and equipment. Participants will be encouraged to independently expand on the information provided, as the workshop serves as a jumping off point for those curious about working with magnetic tape for artistic exploration and experimentation.

New in our shop! Inspired by Helen Hill’s classic community-sourced booklet Recipes for Disaster, Analog Cookbook, Issue #8: All Recipes is a curated compilation of analog media recipes, techniques, and tutorials, compiled by Kate Hinshaw and the staff of Analog Cookbook with new and updated material for a new generation of filmmakers. From alternate chemical recipes using household items to optical sound and home printmaking techniques, this issue fosters a spirit of generosity, experimentation, and open exchange among artists sharing their analog filmmaking methods.

Available in our storefront shop or purchase online here.

Experiments in Cinema Call for Submissions: Experiments in Cinema seeks submissions for the next edition of EIC (v21.5) happening in Albuquerque, NM April 16-19, 2026. Deadline to submit is November 1, 2025. Find out more.

Cosmic Rays Film Festival Call for Submissions: The Cosmic Rays Film Festival is an annual celebration of short films that expand our idea of what film is and what it can be. The festival presents several programs of short films made by filmmakers from North Carolina and around the world that are formally inventive; speak with a personal voice; and are inspired by the possibilities of film as art. Deadline for submissions is November 16th, 2025. Find out more.

Associate Professor of Film & Media, Grinnell College: Grinnell College is currently accepting applications for an Assistant/Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies. The ideal candidate is a scholar who can contribute to the core curriculum and develop new courses in their area of expertise. Deadline for applications is November 17, 2025. Find out more.

Cauldron Film Festival Call for Submissions: Cauldron Film Festival (Salt Lake City) seeks unorthodox film narratives, rogue documentaries, avant-garde cinema, video mashups, abstract video art, genre-bending storytelling of all kinds with an eye towards innovation, iconoclasm, personal visions, and any/all unique motion picture experiences for its next festival happening in Feb/March 2026. Deadline to submit is December 15, 2025. Find out more.

Single Frame Call for Submissions: Single Frame has opened up its call for entries of experimental documentary shorts under 20 minutes for its 5th annual event happening on April 19, 2026 at UNEXPOSED, a microcinema facilitating the growth of experimental and avant-garde film in the Triangle, NC. Deadline to submit is January 1, 2026. Find out more.

CROSSROADS 2026 Call for Submissions: San Francisco Cinematheque seeks submissions of recent films, videos and works of performance cinema for CROSSROADS 2026, the seventeenth iteration of our annual film festival. CROSSROADS 2026 will be held September 4–6, 2026  at Gray Area/Grand Theater in San Francisco. Early submission deadline is January 31, 2026. Find out more.

Found Footage Magazine Call for Submissions: Authors are invited to submit essays, interviews, video-essays, film and book reviews for Found Footage Magazine, Issue #12. Deadline to submit is June 1, 2026. Find out more.

Mr. B’s Gumbo Getdown, Part Deux
Saturday, November 1, 2025
1-5pm
Shapeshifters Café

Back for a second round–this time in celebration of Dia de Los Muertos–Mr. B aka Mario Benjamin brings you Mr. B’s Gumbo & Getdown, Part Deux!

Food: chicken & andouille sausage, seafood or vegetarian gumbo served with your choice of white or brown rice & quinoa blend, plus honey butter cornbread

Drinks: sangria, lemonade, and in-house brewed beer (by Shapeshifters Brewery)

Music: dance, funk, house, disco, soul, old-school, and classic hip-hop spun by E-Solo and DJ SPooN

Find out more and pre-order now.