San Francisco Cinematheque’s experimental, personal, and expressive annual film festival CROSSROADS 2026 (runs Fri/4-Sun/6 at Grey Area) is back for its 17th iteration, featuring eight programs and 49 new works. The wide-ranging, in-person, three-day cinematic spectacle can be overwhelming at first glance—but no worries, film buff, my Ficks’ Picks are here for your choosing ease and pleasure.
The following spoiler-free list consists of my 12 favorite films from the eight curated programs. Many showcase in-person appearances by avant-garde filmmakers, as well as a dozen returning and fresh local voices. Don’t skip these special screenings—you truly never know when you might get another chance to see their films.
>> Amy Reid’s Bay Area Sampler Quilt (US, 2026) plays in Program 1 “coming and going / breath by breath,” Fri/4, 7pm
As a person who has put hours upon hours into crafting their art, I found that Reid’s heart-wrenching 10-minute portrait of quiltmakers was easily one of my favorite films of the festival. Shot gorgeously on both 8mm and 16mm, the short’s director Amy Reid channels the look and feel of Barbara Kopple and Chantal Akerman, quietly capturing “different patterned blocks, techniques, and experiments created by each quilter.” Having grown up with a mother who continues to explore the intricacies of fiber arts, I could have watched this mini-cinematic masterpiece for another two hours.
>> Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic (US, 1957-1963) plays in Program 2 “JG Thirlwell scores Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic,” Fri/4, 9:30pm
Those who were in the Bay Area back in 2007 may have experienced the legendary SF-based band Deerhoof’s musical performance set to Harry Smith’s “most famous and mysteriously spiritual 66-minute, cut-out epic” from 1960 entitled Film #12 or, as named by fellow abstract film-maker and friend Jonas Mekas, Heaven and Earth Magic. Nearly 20 years later, we are given the opportunity to experience this absolutely essential avant-garde extravaganza with the mythical Australian post-punk composer, JG Thirwell (aka Foetus) creating a brand-new score.
“The film seems to have been made between 1950 and 1960 and during this process, Smith often used sleep deprivation as a gateway to spirituality and the subconscious, creating a process of falling asleep, awaking, and resuming work continuously next to his camera,” as the CROSSROADS program puts it. This is definitively the festival’s most exciting event and should be sought out at all costs.
>> TT Takemoto’s Swing Swish Sway (US, 2026) plays in Program 3 “we name no heroes,” Sat/5, 2:30pm
I haven’t been able to shake this magnificent seven-minute manifestation of a pole dancer ruminating on past traumas, which screened at SFMOMA earlier this year. It uses what the program calls “emulsion lifts, contact prints, pinhole imagery, as well as the pleasure of dancing, frying chicken, and swinging in the moonlight” to the utmost degree. A special mention must be made of its stunning sound design by Kadet Kuhne. Takemoto has noted that the film is inspired by Rosalie “Rose” Bamberger (1921–1990), a mixed-race Filipina American paintbrush maker, whose desire in the 1950s was to create a “secret society for lesbians.”
>> Rajee Samarasinghe’s A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth (Sri Lanka, 2026) plays in Program 3 “we name no heroes, Sat/5, 2:30pm
This haunting 8-minute movie is a compilation of footage originally captured for a feature documentary on forced disappearances among Sri Lanka’s Tamil population. Its most memorable moment is an interview with a mother “whose son vanished in the war’s final stages,” according to the program. Director Samarasinghe striking body of work has stood out for over a decade now, dating back to The Spectre Watches Over Her (2016). This is a wonderful addition to that track record—and it compelled me to hunt down a copy of filmmaker Robert Gardner’s 2006 memoir The Impulse to Preserve, which is memorably used in this film’s narration.
>> Kate Solar’s (for once I dreamed of you) (Canada, 2026) plays in Program 4 “bury it in the garden,” Sat/5, 5pm
A eerie six-minute exploration that leaned into the darkness so superbly, I found myself squinching my toes. Shot on 16mm in Mt. Forest, Ontario, then processed using a homemade developer (made with comfrey leaves), and startingly re-photographed with flashlight contact-printing, the film has a look you cannot forget. Director Kate Solar has mentioned that the starting point for the film was an incredibly haunting poem from the 1800s called “On the Wing” by Christina Rossetti. Add a moody sound design to the mix, and you’ve got another one of my favorite films of the festival. NOTE: Strobe warning!
>> Malic Amalya’s Plastic Aortas (US, 2024) and Leather Graves (US, 2025) play in Program 5 “the flamethrowers,” Sat/5, 8pm
Amalya, who is an assistant professor of experimental media and film production at Emerson College is showcasing two 16mm films at CROSSROADS. The first is Plastic Aortas, a breathtaking 10-minute look at the black plastic encasing that lines the Middlesex Fells Reservoir on the unceded lands of the Massachusett, Pawtucket (Pennacook), and Naumkeag peoples. “The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive common reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water,” states the CROSSROADS program.
The filmmaker’s second offering Leather Graves is an outrageously queer and aggressively activist 12-minute camp-fest. Defiantly filmed in a graveyard, it captures gay, trans, and gender non-conforming people who have been exiled from their biological families and shunned by their communities. Be on the lookout for some incredible in-camera double exposure techniques, boot licking, nipple tweaking and flower sucking, along with an astonishing synth soundtrack by Nathan Hill and sound mixing by Clovis Stocchetti.
>> Friedl vom Gröller’s Veronique (Ein Friseursalon in Paris aus dem Barbieland) (Austria, 2026), plays in Program 6 “in the distance, quietly,” Sun/6, 2:30pm
Pioneering Austrian photographer and filmmaker vom Gröller (who was once married to Peter Kubelka) has delivered a magnificent masterwork of the human face with her latest four-minute 16mm portrait. It captures the ins and outs of a hair salon “whose clutter has grown over the years, and focuses on the three women who have worked there,” states the festival’s program. This memorable time capsule is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and is a can’t-miss.
>> Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s Dooni (US, 2025), plays in Program 6 “in the distance, quietly,” Sun/6, 2:30pm
In the style of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), Dooni is an eight-minute gem celebrates the story of U.S. soul-singer Sylvester (1947–1988), as told by the gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins with the voice of Timothy Johnson. Directors Everson and Harold are creating a body of work that present and future generations should and will study.
>> Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu’s Buried in the Snow 藏在雪裡 (Taiwan/US, 2025), plays in Program 6 “in the distance, quietly,” Sun/6, 2:30pm
An odyssey into an other world is a rare treat, and this 20-minute melancholic mystery will teleport you instantly. While commemorating the passing of a dear friend from the filmmaker’s youth, Hsing-Hsin Liu’s cinematic poem will be quite a sight projected on a large screen, accompanied by a wonderful Neil Young Dead Man-esque musical score by Michael Pisaro-Liu.
>> Jiayi Chen’s Mounds Above the Earth (China, 2026), plays in Program 7 “before the great palaces, everything was still,” Sun/6, 5pm
A film confronting life and death through the eyes of cicadas that utilizes an ancient fable while showcasing macro-lensed footage of the rare emergence of “two periodical cicada broods surfacing simultaneously for the first time in more than two centuries,” according to the program. Chen has created a therapeutic experience that transcends its own eight minutes.
>> Matthew Berka’s Body, remember… (Australia/UK, 2025) plays in Program 7 “before the great palaces, everything was still,” Sun/6, 5pm
The most visceral experience of CROSSROADS 2026, this exquisite 16-minute film immerses your senses and then some. Water drips across your lips, sand spills down your skin, blood droplets dispense from your fingertips. Its highly erotic manifesto understands exactly what we are desiring, and could be the ultimate ASMR for the eyes.
>> Emmanuel Piton’s The Ghost Image (France, 2026) plays in Program 8 “faraway so close,” Sun/6, 8pm
They saved the best of the fest (and perhaps of the year!?!) for its eighth and final program. Don’t miss the North American theatrical premiere of this absolutely terrifying mind-melter that had me holding my breath, cracking my fingers, and chewing on my cheek throughout its 20-minute running time.
It is filmed on 16mm in the house where the director grew up, where Piton has said that “a shape, a presence, an image appeared in the house, and has never ceased to haunt the memory of that place.” I dare you—in fact, I double dare you to enter Piton’s hypnotically creepy masterpiece as he “searches for traces of this apparition as if this image from the past had never left the house.” I’ll be at the screening, albeit curled up in a ball and hiding in the back of the theater.
