It’s been a rough three years for the local film scene. Beloved neighborhood theaters closed, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art cut its film program and the Castro, our gilded temple, remains in committee limbo, seemingly on the verge of becoming forever changed.
And yet, there’s good news too: the 4 Star is back in action (though currently fundraising), organizations like Canyon Cinema, Shapeshifters Cinema and San Francisco Cinematheque are programming up a storm, and BAMPFA continues to screen around six films (!) a week.
To tilt the scales even more overwhelmingly into the positive, Light Field, our favorite celluloid film festival, returns to The Lab March 30–April 2. It’s been three years since the 2020 iteration was canceled on the eve of the pandemic lockdown, and the 2023 program debuts in a very different world. This time, the simple act of gathering for a series of carefully selected experimental films is a closely held privilege.
Living through the pandemic hasn’t changed the way Light Field approaches the festival — there are still hundreds of submissions to watch and all the intense behind-the-scenes work that goes into collectively planning the four-day event. But the past three years have deepened the curatorial team’s commitment to in-person gatherings and, as member Zachary Epcar wrote via email, “cinema as collective experience.”
“These things only feel more important, more valuable, and more precious now that we know how truly tenuous they are,” Epcar says.
Like years past, each Light Field program is curated by a different collective member — the artists Samuel Breslin, Emily Chao, Zachary Epcar, Trisha Low, tooth, Syd Staiti and Patricia Ledesma Villon. The exceptions this year are Programs 1 and 2, which offer a full retrospective of the late Los Angeles filmmaker Amy Halpern, curated by her husband David Lebrun and filmmaker Mark Toscano, and the collectively organized Program 10, showing a trilogy of Bill Brand films made between 1972 and ’74.
