Blog

  • Rosa la Rose Fille Publique

    “Hailing from the cordless umbilica of cinephilia, Rosa la Rose Fille Publique (1986) presents an ambitious audience member with the chance to fall as deeply in love as can be allowed, more than one could know themself. Our Parisian sex worker Rosa, falls in love as she questions everything impermanent around her, what is short and long term, preferably long. Directed by recently deceased Maverick, Paul Vecchiali, we celebrate a key achievement in his life as a Diagonale.

    Diagonale Productions is the occasion for the new issue #2 of Narrow Margin Quarterly, a movie magazine that can only inspire honesty and thoroughness. Celebrating Radiance Films recent 2k restoration, approved by Vecchiali himself, we welcome your inspiration.

    Language: French, English subtitles

  • Rewards Program: Fallopia

    A three-projector celluloid meditation live-scored by improvisational trio Rewards Program, on sex, systems, and sensation. Visuals in special collaboration with musician and artist Katia Mashikian.
    MILES LASSI is an interdisciplinary artist based out of Oakland, CA. As a musician, he has performed in over 150 cities throughout North America, Europe and Asia with many different ensembles ranging from the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to national broadway tours like Ain’t Too Proud, Dirty Dancing, and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Miles is dedicated to creating new media and has done so at the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theater, deYoung Museum, Joyce Theater, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, A.C.T., SXSW and Snap Studios/KQED.
    SKYWAY MAN is the alias of keyboardist, songwriter, and producer James Wallace. Based in Oakland via Richmond, VA, and Nashville, TN, he has released seven albums and composed music for Film/TV, including Joe Pera Talks With You (HBO). Over the past 15 years, he has toured extensively across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, performing at festivals like Bonnaroo, Pickathon, SXSW, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and Wilco’s Solid Sound. He has collaborated with Abigail Washburn, Langhorne Slim, Erin Rae, and Maya Hawke, among others. Brittany Howard once named his band a favorite local act in Rolling Stone, and his work has been featured in NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Stereogum. He’s produced 20 full-length albums for other artists, including Bay Area musicians Mikayla McVey, Milk for the Angry, and Pancho Morris. Over the past few years he’s developed a practice of live instrumental film scoring using keyboards and sequencers.
    ZEKARIAS MUSELE THOMPSON (b. 1983, they/them/their) is an artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavik, IS often working in sonic composition, mark-making, photography, collaborative group practice & performance, and writing. Their practice is concerned with humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures—and how we bring them into material form. Zekarias has presented solo exhibitions and projects at the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Lab, Gray Area, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Zekarias is a co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively owned and organized arts institution with the mission of building institutional stability and equity for underrepresented creative practices, ideas, and people. They were part of the Emerging Artist Program at the MoAD for 2024, and are currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley.
    ELLIE VANDERLIP is a San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker, performer, and educator. She received her MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 2022. She is a co-director at Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema, on the board of directors at San Francisco’s Cinematheque, and maintains a studio at Artists’ Television Access. She has hosted filmmaking workshops with the Exploratorium, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the University of San Francisco, and lectures at St. Mary’s College and San Francisco State University. Her primary focuses are found footage experimental documentary, material cinema, and expanded cinema performance. Her work has screened nationally and internationally, including at San Francisco DocFest and Belgrade’s Kinoscope Festival, and has upcoming writings about alternative archives in Found Footage Magazine.
  • Gregg Biermann Recent Works

    Gregg Biermann in person

    Sometimes described as a “math-rock filmmaker”, Gregg Biermann is a video artist whose work radically deconstructs Hollywood images and other mainstream media. Using digital technology, Biermann dissects the mechanics of film itself, often revealing new, uncanny interpretations of familiar visual structures. Biermann’s practice draws from traditions of formalist experimental film, but retools them for the digital era, creating work that is both analytically rigorous and viscerally disorienting.

    “The artist and filmmaker Gregg Biermann makes sculptural and intellectually playful work that transforms images from Hollywood and other mainstream media. A few years ago, Biermann had a near-death calamity when his heart suddenly stopped. Recovering from an experience that only one in ten people survive, Biermann realized that “death challenges who we think we are and how we tend to think about ourselves.” His engaging and remarkably inventive film Personal Effects (2024, one hour) uses animation, and a wide range of cinematic techniques to illustrate his interior monologue, creating an intimate essay on death, time, the mind and other perplexing philosophical topics. Biermann will present the film, along with his short Quartet for the End (2023, 14 mins.), which creates a kaleidoscopic reworking of a climactic scene from James Cameron’s Titanic.” –David Schwartz, Curator, Barrymore Film Center.