Fraenkel Gallery is proud to announce the return of the Fraenkel Film Festival, the groundbreaking cinema series curated entirely by visual artists, now in its third year. The festival will run July 8-18 and once again, all the proceeds will benefit San Francisco’s historic Roxie theater, where the festival has been held since 2024. Most films are shown in pairs, two per evening, and many will be presented in their original 35mm format.
Tickets for the Fraenkel Film Festival are available through the Roxie.
Featuring 20 films selected by Fraenkel Gallery artists who love cinema, the festival highlights a range of distinct perspectives and influences, reflecting each artist’s affinities in surprising ways. Christian Marclay selected Brian De Palma’s Carrie, which opens the festival. He notes, “Released during America’s Bicentennial year, the film feels unmistakably American while exploring the devastating effects of bullying and social exclusion. Its themes remain strikingly relevant today, especially in an age when social media can intensify cruelty and isolation.” Elisheva Biernoff chose The Princess Bride, noting its graphic beauty—“look for the scenes with Buttercup’s red dress set in relief against the startlingly green gorges,” she writes—as well as its unexpected structure and framing.
Other artists chose films for more personal reasons. Richard T. Walker selected the 2018 Italian magical realist drama Happy as Lazzaro “because of how delicately it plays with the notion of ‘making sense,’ something that I find myself concerned with in my own work.” Kota Ezawa was drawn to Hiroshima mon amour for its resonance with his own family history. “I can’t get over this movie … because the Japanese male lead and the French actress … strongly resemble photos of my parents shortly after they met in Münster, Germany in the early sixties,” he writes. Other festival highlights include 1970s classics such as The Warriors, selected by Wardell Milan; the 1966 Japanese New Wave film The Face of Another, selected by Hiroshi Sugimoto; and Spike Jonze’s prescient AI romance Her, selected by Richard Misarch.
On Saturday, July 11, the festival will present an in-person event, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about the San Francisco Art World (But Were Afraid to Ask), hosted by San Francisco Chronicle Arts & Culture columnist Tony Bravo. Organized in connection with Fraenkel Gallery’s summer exhibition Slice of the Pie: Fourteen Bay Area Galleries and What Makes Them Different, the talk will feature questions and conversations with principals from the galleries featured in the show. The event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
