Here’s where I’ll post any screenings coming up that Zena and/or I are programming!
>>>(Click pictures for links to info/tickets!)<<<
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Thursday, February 19, 2026 @ 8:00pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Tacita Dean & Robert Nelson: Acting on Film
Tacita Dean in person!
Lightstruck is honored to welcome artist Tacita Dean for a rare cinematic projection of her riveting 2015 film Event for a Stage, paired with Robert Nelson’s seldom seen 1982 short film Hamlet Act, both screening in their original 16mm format. These two remarkable films each explore the endlessly complex interplay between live performance and cinematic construction, as the camera, editing, and even the director’s presence complicate the illusion of narrative continuity, not to mention the presumptive reality that appears to hover at the margins.
Nelson’s film is a brilliant and unusual deconstruction of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, activated into multiple, recursive layers of artifice through its employment of film and video to extend the original text’s nested complexity. Outtakes, retakes, and the typically unseen ragged edges of live performance carry as much meaning here as Shakespeare’s precise words and stage directions, giving us an exploded view of the highly constructed nature of cinematic performance.
Also invoking Shakespeare is actor Stephen Dillane in Dean’s breathtaking film, in which the volleying interactions between actor and director frame an almost molecular exploration of live performance and its resistance and acquiescence to being captured. Dean filmed the absolutely magnetic Dillane over four disparate performances, recomposing them into an explicitly filmic thread of continuity as he navigates between themes of memory, forgetting, family, artifice, and above all, the slippery power balance between actor and filmmaker at the heart of every cinematic performance.
program:
Hamlet Act (1982) by Robert Nelson, 16mm, bw, 19.5m (written by Joe Chang and featuring Dick Blau as Hamlet)
Event for a Stage (2015) by Tacita Dean, 16mm, color, 50m (featuring Stephen Dillane)
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Very special thanks to Tacita Dean, with additional thanks to Marine Pariente and Marian Goodman Gallery. 16mm print of Event for a Stage courtesy of Tacita Dean and Marian Goodman Gallery. 16mm print of Hamlet Act courtesy of the estate of Robert Nelson and Canyon Cinema.
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Sunday, March 15, 2026 @ 1:00pm
2220 Arts & Archives, Los Angeles
**note atypical start time!!**
Jonas Mekas’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1996) on 16mm
Lightstruck is thrilled to invite you to celebrate the origins of the experimental film community in a 16mm matinee program to complement the big Hollywood to-do later in the day – one show a twisted funhouse mirror vision of the other (but which is which??)
A luminous cinema icon unto himself, Jonas Mekas pioneered a distinctive form of hyper-present 16mm diaristic filmmaking, capturing the resolutely anecdotal with engaging, earthly poetry. But he was also inarguably one of the leading lights of the avant-garde, determined to foment and connect a global independent film community that he saw as utterly crucial to the potential, power, and humanity of the medium. His feature Birth of a Nation radically appropriates a title inextricably linked to cinema history (yet tainted by its own corrupt vision), instead repositioning the phrase to describe and celebrate the myriad brilliant constellations of Mekas’s beloved film community. Utilizing his characteristic handheld camera, quick cutting, and an unparalleled eye for the touchingly mundane, Mekas creates a vital moving image album of filmmakers and assorted film friends that reveals these myths and legends of the avant-garde in all their anecdotal mortality.
Vastly more than a guessing game of who’s who in experimental film (there’s Will Hindle!), the film represents an incredibly rich emotional bridge between the vitality of these people at their moments of capture, and the assembly of this footage by Mekas into a collective portrait at a time (1996) when many were already gone, and their original contexts resolutely in the past. Seeing the film another 30 years further on, it packs an unexpected emotional wallop, as we are welcomed with inviting arms into the throng of a living, breathing community that – at least in its unique idiom and fragile temporality – has essentially disappeared. And yet, thanks to film itself, it still lives and breathes, and our local/global experimental film community is in part an ongoing tribute to the hundreds of folks in this film, who made independent movies and watched them together in independent spaces, just like us.
“We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are Cinema.” (Jonas Mekas)
PROGRAM:
Birth of a Nation (1996) by Jonas Mekas
16mm, bw & color, sound, 80 minutes
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. 16mm print from Film-makers’ Cooperative (which was co-founded by Jonas Mekas).
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Sunday, April 12, 2026, 6:30pm
Xcèntric @ The CCCB, Barcelona, Spain
Akran (1969) by Richard Myers
American filmmaker Richard Myers’ first feature-length film, Akran (1969), feels like both a culmination of the emotional and psychic upheaval of the previous decade, and an unsettling new vision of the world to come. Rather than a utopian image of human connectivity and lucid sociopolitical optimism, this is a journey through the wreckage of an American cultural and political landscape that has devolved into an existential confusion of purpose and place.
A multigenerational native of Ohio, Richard Myers began making his vividly dreamlike films in 1960 and quickly distinguished himself as one of the most sophisticated and daring explorers of the contemporary American psyche. His filmmaking language encompasses the entire vocabulary and history of cinema, employing numerous ingenious techniques and effects, as well as sublimated and conscious references to cinema history and culture, on an elaborate scale of production and vision that elevates his work to the level of the truly mythic. Further defined by Myers’ collage editing and sometimes almost painfully expressive, haunting cinematography, these conceptual and material innovations conjure up a singular and astonishingly ambitious vision of fragmented cultural consciousness from firmly within the heart of the American Midwest.
In Akran —a deliberate misspelling of the Ohio city of Akron that suggests instability at the fundamental level of daily existence— a young couple meet and traverse a series of mystifying and sometimes harrowing urban spaces, haunted by dreams, memories and a pervasive, unsettling confusion. They encounter numerous unnerving characters and scenarios in their attempts to define some kind of contemporary American normalcy, and the film radically resists any reassuring structure or linear narrative as the false security of memory and nostalgia continually fragments and implodes their (and our) comprehension of the present.
As with the majority of Myers’ truly hypnotic, immersive films, in Akran the lines between reality, dream, memory and nightmare are never fixed, and the collage of associations that he creates often manifests multiple emotions simultaneously. Myers’ restless, searching camerawork and quite sophisticated approaches to editing build an anxiety and uncertainty within the film and its protagonists, powerfully underscored by an often unrelenting electronic soundtrack by composer Fred Coulter.
In Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel rightfully wrote that “Myers is unquestionably a major talent of the American avant-garde and Akran one of his most important films”. Myers’ entire body of work is without parallel or comparable sensibility, and his ambition, creativity and audiovisual ingenuity are incredibly rich and involving. The Academy Film Archive restored Akran in its original 16mm format in 2010, and. though still too little known, this underseen masterpiece continues to find passionate admirers every time it is screened.
Akran, Richard Myers, 1969, 16mm, 118 min.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. 16mm screening, original version with Catalan subtitles. Copy supplied by the Academy Film Archive.
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Sunday, May 24, 2026 @ 12:00pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
**note atypical start time!**
Ulrike Ottinger’s TAIGA: A Journey to Northern Mongolia
This screening begins at 12pm noon and will conclude at approximately 10pm, with two breaks.
“Taiga is an experience that causes us to think about why we live as we do, what it is to be human, and what is important in life.” (Roger Ebert)
Lightstruck is extremely excited to present a truly epic cinematic experience, as we screen Ulrike Ottinger’s nearly 8.5-hour, immersive documentary Taiga (1992) in a special all-day screening.
Known for her meticulously crafted experimental narrative films infusing political radicalism with a rich, surrealist opulence, German artist Ulrike Ottinger has also produced a singular body of memorable nonfiction work, though perhaps none so monumental – and mesmerizingly beautiful – as Taiga.
During an extended period spent in Northern Mongolia through multiple seasons, Ottinger approached ethnography in a radically different way, rejecting authoritative narrativizing or presumptuous didacticism. The extended length of the film reflects Ottinger’s larger impulse and approach in this project: to spend time – unadulterated, attentive time – with the Northern Mongolians she had befriended, and to enable their own distinctive approach to time and space in everyday life dictate the scale and pace of the film.
Over ten parts and 38 chapters, we see a seance, two weddings, preparation of foods, wrestling contests, music performances, storytelling sessions, and countless other events large and small, yet all equally defining the overall year-to-year and day-to-day experiences of nomadic life in the Darkhad Valley of Northern Mongolia. The film succeeds so brilliantly in part because of the unapologetically and earnestly fascinated gaze with which Ottinger documents what she sees, and the clear love for and engagement with people that the filmmaking reflects.
“I tried to explain my wish, which was to record a way of life that no longer exists in the place where I’ve come from, in order to show the document to the people back home, who are very interested in the nomadic ways. At first this puzzled them, but then they thought, Yes, indeed, we too would be interested to know how your people live…” (Ulrike Ottinger)
Screening:
Taiga: A Journey to Northern Mongolia (1991/92)
by Ulrike Ottinger
501 minutes, English subtitles
Digital restoration courtesy of Arsenal with thanks to Carsten Zimmer, Reinhild Feldhaus, and especially Ulrike Ottinger.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano.
Snacks, coffee and tea will be provided, as well as some dinner at the evening break, for a suggested donation.
Schedule:
12:00pm: Part 1 (Chapters 1-13) (2:57)
(ends 3:00-3:15)
(approximately 20 minute intermission)
3:30pm: Part 2 (Chapters 14-26) (2:52)
(ends 6:30-6:45)
(approximately 45-60 minute intermission)
7:30pm: Part 3 (Chapters 27-38) (2:32)
(ends 10:00-10:15pm)
LIGHTSTRUCK 