Uncanny Cabaret II - Variety Show & Fundraiser
Saturday, September 27, 2025
5-7pm
Admission: $25-50, sliding scale (All proceeds go to benefit Driveway Follies)
Limited tickets available!

As summer turns to fall and the days grow shorter, we can only think of one thing — Halloween! Join us to kick off the season with Uncanny Cabaret II — a special multi-media variety show and fundraiser for our friends at Driveway Follies, the long-running and beloved Oakland Halloween puppet show tradition.

This family-friendly event will include live puppet and expanded film performances + recent and historic Halloween-adjacent films with live music accompaniment.

PROGRAM: Halloween Spooks, blacklight puppet performance by Driveway Follies; Pedagogy, puppet performance by Risa Lenore; Ombres & Apparitions: Phantasmagoric Parlor Tricks, expanded film/shadow puppet performance by Facing West Shadows; Spook House, 16mm animated film + live sound performance by Kathleen Quillian; Mr. Strictland, puppet performance by David Wallace & Leonora Taylor-Wallace; The House of Ghosts (1906) by Segundo de Chomón and The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901) by Walter Booth, with live sound performance by Renée Delores & Owen Caraway; Tuning the Sleeping Machine (1996, 16mm film shown on DV) by David Sherman; Spook Sport (1940, 16mm film shown on DV) by Mary Ellen Bute & Norman MacLaren; Once Upon a Time (1974, 16mm film shown on DV) by Lawrence Jordan.

Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues
Program 11 - Relative Positions | Unmapping Lineages
Presented in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
Sunday, September 28, 2025
7pm
Admission: $15 (discount for members)

By deconstructing ties to family, culture and geographical origins, the films in this program create new navigational charts—triangulating between points known and points unknown—to find paths that lead toward the discovery of the self.

Screening: Incantation (2021, DV) by Kalpana Subramanian; Hair (2023, Super-8 film shown on DV) by Sara Alghesheyan, Mudra (Yearning to be Loved) (2023, DV) by Meghana Bisineer; Kolmas Punkt (The Third Point) (2019, 16mm shown on DV) by Alina Taalman; Everything in our house did not seem to fit (2023, Super-8 film shown on DV) by Alicia Abieyuwa Bergamelli; Can You Carry Me? (2023, 16mm film shown on DV) by Tess Meersman; Dandelions (1995, 16mm film shown on DV) by Dawn Wilkinson; Range (2005, 16mm film) by Bill Basquin, and Navajo Talking Picture (1986, 16mm film shown on DV) by Arlene Bowman

Find out more about the Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues series.

Do-Over Music Series - Brown / Kalb / Rivero / Greyduck / Glenn
Thursday, October 2, 2025
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

The Do-Over Music Series at Shapeshifters Cinema, organized by Lisa Mezzacappa and Jordan Glenn, is a monthly series of sound performances presented by a rotating cast of local luminaries and special guests. The first set features performances of creative - improvised - composed - electronic - acoustic - music. The second set opens up to a live improvised collaboration of sound and visuals made using images culled from the Shapeshifters 16mm film collection.

Set 1 (7pm): Chris Brown presents "RhythmiChrome"

Solo music for virtual piano in just intonation and live electronics performed to video projections by Johanna Poethig

Set 2 (8pm): expanded cinema + improvised music with:

Chris Brown
Isabelle Waldner Kalb-guitar
Danishta Rivero- voice
Sadie Greyduck- double bass
Jordan Glenn- drums/percussion
Films, film loops and other visual interventions by the Shapeshifters Performance Group (Ellie, Kathleen & Gilbert)

99 Hooker Presents: Incredibly Strange Music + Britney Buddha
Friday, October 10, 2025
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

Selected from Other Cinema's legendary underground vault of media ephemera, Incredibly Strange Music is a program of zany, delightful, and downright thought-provoking short music films (or "soundies") curated and compiled by Craig Baldwin & 99 Hooker. From the weird and dark to the radiantly quirky, these 16mm films constitute a material history for music lovers and "media archeologists" everywhere.

Following this tantalizing teaser, 99 Hooker will perform a live "autopsy" of the sounds + images exhumed and aggregated from the body of work created by pop princess and cultural icon Britney Spears to round out this entertaining, avant-pop extravaganza that will leave you with a really weird medley of ear (and eye) worms going back almost a century!

The Tactile Diary - A Personal Filmmaking Workshop
Instructor: Ellie Vanderlip
Sunday, October 5, 2025
12-6pm
In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema
Admission: $70 + $10 for materials (Discount for Shapeshifters members)

Filmmaker (and Shapeshifters Director of Education & Outreach) Ellie Vanderlip hosts The Tactile Diary, a filmmaking workshop dovetailing on two recent programs of the Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues series—Program 10: Craft, Ritual, and Tradition and Program 11: Relative Positions | Unmapping Lineage—featuring a guest presentation by filmmaker (and Gravitational Lensing Co-Curator) Amy Reid on her latest film projects documenting quilters and quilting.

Explore personal filmmaking from the direct to the abstract in this afternoon of screenings, reflection, and analog filmmaking to help you jumpstart a personal film project, or simply brainstorm about possibilities. We will discuss the feminist history and relevance of the diary film and how artists have used film to explore a range of topics with all the dimensions inherent to the medium, including the film's surface, chemistry and ability to capture both narrative and abstract images and concepts. We will explore animating the personal paper and/or film archive as well as chemigrams, photograms and a range of material cinema techniques from painting and scratching the film surface to altering found and photographed images in order to tell intimate/personal/human-scale stories.

Materials will be provided, though it is recommended that attendees arrive with a few personal concepts to explore, as well as any personal paper, photographic, or moving image material they may want to engage with.

San Francisco International Film Festival Call for Submissions: Submissions are now being accepted for the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival scheduled for April 23–May 3, 2026. Works in all genres, forms, and lengths are considered. Early submission deadline is September 26, 2025. Find out more.

San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival Call for Submissions: Media Meltdown are resurrecting the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival at the 4 Star Theater this November! SFUSF is a punk rock phantasmagoria, lifting up local, no budget, no-holds barred films. From bizarro B-films to midnight movie trash, they want to see your silly, your subversive, your surreal, and your strange, regardless of budget or experience level. Deadline to submit is September 30, 2025. Find out more.

PRISME #8 Call for Submissions: PRISME – Argentique du futur, the annual film festival organized by Mire Artist Film Lab aims to highlight inventive and engaging contemporary analog works made with Super 8, 16 or 35mm film. PRISME #8 will take place in Nantes, France February 26-March 1, 2026. Deadline to submit is October 1, 2025. Find out more.

Assistant Professor, Film and Electronic Arts, Bard College: The Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College invites applications for a practicing filmmaker or media artist at the rank of tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professor. Preferred candidates will make work centering on documentary and nonfiction media, sound art, expanded cinema, installation, and/or digital and emerging modalities. Deadline to apply is October 15, 2025. Find out more.

Wide Open Experimental Film Festival 2026 Call for Submissions: WOEFF 2026 is seeking submissions for screenings in Spring 2026 in Oklahoma City. Organized by the Film Department at Oklahoma City University, WOEFF is looking for anything that falls under the broad umbrella of “experimental film,” including unusual techniques, fringe topics, edge cases, longing outsiders and fed-up insiders, films that break machines, films that channel rage onto celluloid, films that quietly observe, films that chaotically invent. Deadline to submit is October 15, 2025. Find out more.

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.

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.

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.