Following the extraordinary success of last year’s inaugural event, Fraenkel Gallery is proud to announce the return of the Fraenkel Film Festival, a groundbreaking cinema series curated entirely by visual artists. The festival will run July 9-19, 2025, at San Francisco’s historic Roxie Theater. Once again, all of the proceeds from the festival will benefit the Roxie, which recently began a major capital campaign.
Tickets for the Fraenkel Film Festival are available through the Roxie.
The Fraenkel Film Festival takes an unprecedented curatorial approach—the 21 films were selected by Fraenkel Gallery artists who love cinema and are deeply sensitive to its subtleties. Highlighting the artists’ distinct perspectives, the selections present an unexpected look at their range of creative influences and intellectual curiosities. The festival holds special significance as it includes a selection by the late Mel Bochner, who chose Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece The Music Room (1958) shortly before his passing earlier this year.
Most films are shown in pairs, two per evening, and many will be presented in their original 35mm format. A special opening night event will feature a prerecorded screening of a conversation between Richard Misrach and his childhood friend Jeff Bridges. Their conversation will accompany Bridges’s first major film, The Last Picture Show (1971), which Misrach selected.
“After the fantastic response to last year’s festival, which celebrated the gallery’s 45th anniversary, we knew we had created something special that resonated with both the art and film communities and with the city of San Francisco,” says Jeffrey Fraenkel, founder of Fraenkel Gallery. “This year we’ve become even more ambitious and invited all of our living artists to participate, creating a festival that reflects the full diversity of artistic voices we represent. One of the deep pleasures of the festival is knowing that 100% of the funds go directly toward supporting the Roxie, one of our city’s true cinematic treasures.”
Each artist’s selection offers insight into their thinking and temperament, and many wrote about their connection to the film they chose. Richard Misrach remarks that The Last Picture Show “speaks to the importance of film and the death of small towns all over America,” noting the connection between cinema and community. Artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have often explored the power of sound in their work, and chose Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), a film celebrated for its groundbreaking sound design: “The muffled, distorted conversations, along with the constant presence of surveillance sounds, create such unease and uncertainty,” they note. For Elisheva Biernoff, who makes meticulous paintings recreating found photographs, The Wizard of Oz (1939) represents “a story where the familiar warps into fantasy.” She describes her enduring love for “this complex movie [that] thrills at imagination realized through craft—the unabashed beauty of the film stock, the virtuoso vaudevillian song-and-dance routines, the score, the dazzling sets and matte paintings, the fantastical costumes—it’s lush and luminous and terrifying.” Christian Marclay selected Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), and writes about the film: “Slow to the point of stillness, this film gives you time to think. It will put you in a meditative state, and its mysterious beauty will free your imagination more than any action film.”
