Michael Fox

The new BAM/PFA

Whether you’re running a museum or a pizzeria, location is paramount. Currently nestled adjacent to the UC Berkeley campus, the Berkeley Art Museum is perfectly accessible and yet a tad out of the way, unless you’re student or faculty member. Same goes for the affiliated Pacific Film Archive, displaced from the BAM building some years ago due to seismic concerns and ensconced in a theater a few blocks west. Hence the excitement, from audiences and curators alike, about BAM/PFA’s new $100-plus-million home reuniting the two that is under construction in downtown Berkeley at the site of a former UC printing plant.

Read More

New Susan Sontag Documentary

It was a day much like any other in her Berkeley office in the Zaentz Media Center when Nancy Kates was struck with the idea of making a documentary about the late essayist and novelist Susan Sontag. “I went home and I had seven of the 16 books she published while she was alive,” Kates recalls. “That said something to me.”

Read More

Faces of the East Bay