Shapeshifters Cinema

About Us

SHAPESHIFTERS CINEMA provides a venue and support for contemporary artists working with experimental and artist-made film, video, sound, music and other types of mediated performance. We host screenings and performances by local and visiting artists in our intimate 40-seat theatre and offer workshops on a variety of experimental and DIY moving image and sound production. Our storefront shop specializes in print publications, DVDs, sound recordings and other kinds of media made by artists who have screened or performed in our venue.

SHAPESHIFTERS BREWERY makes a variety of small-batch, seasonal, hand-crafted beers, brewed on-site in a space right behind the cinema. These are served (to 21+) at all our events as well as some off-site events. Find out more at shapeshiftersbrewery.com

SHAPESHIFTERS CAFÉ, is right next door to our cinema! We offer freshly-made salads, sandwiches, coffee, tea, pastries and more. Open Monday-Friday 6am-2pm and every Saturday 10am-2pm. Find out more at shapeshifterscafe.com

Staff

Gilbert Guerrero - Operations Director & A/V Tech
Kathleen Quillian - Programming Director
Ellie Vanderlip - Education & Outreach Director

The Shapeshifters Membership program provides crucial, sustaining support for our small, DIY, volunteer-run organization. By joining the membership program, you become part of an engaged, diverse, creative community working in and around experimental moving image, sound and time-based art. Each level offers a range of access to members-only resources and events, discounts, comps and more. Find out more and join now!

Cinema

Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues is a series curated by Amy Reid and Kathleen Quillian that is dedicated to exploring the visions, voices, concerns and lineage of women, non-binary, genderqueer and trans filmmakers through public film screenings, workshops, conversations and presentations. New programs are presented monthly at Shapeshifters. Find out more.

Upcoming Programs & Events

99 Hooker Presents: Incredibly Strange Music + Britney Buddha
Friday, October 10, 2025
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

Selected from Other Cinema's legendary underground vault of media ephemera, Incredibly Strange Music is a program of zany, delightful, and downright thought-provoking short music films (or "soundies") curated and compiled by Craig Baldwin & 99 Hooker. From the weird and dark to the radiantly quirky, these 16mm films constitute a material history for music lovers and "media archeologists" everywhere.

Following this tantalizing teaser, 99 Hooker will perform a live "autopsy" of the sounds + images exhumed and aggregated from the body of work created by pop princess and cultural icon Britney Spears to round out this entertaining, avant-pop extravaganza that will leave you with a really weird medley of ear (and eye) worms going back almost a century!

Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues
Program 12 - Mythology
Presented in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
Friday, October 24, 2025
7pm
Admission: $15 (discount for members)

Films that re-cast communally-shared mythological narratives through contemporary lenses.

Screening: The Story of Lillith (1997, 16mm film) by Lynne Sachs; Calypso (2021, DV) by Mariangela Ciccarello; Panyen Banbou (2023, DV) by Laïssa Christelle Alexis; and others TBA

Promotional Image from Panyen Bambou by Laïssa Christelle Alexis

Punk Rock Docs - Crime 1978 & Outsider Artists
Presented in partnership with Nixed
Sunday, October 26, 2025
5pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

Join us for the first of a series of punk rock documentary films highlighting the origins and legacy of DIY/punk music and culture in the Bay Area and beyond.

We start with San Francisco's First and Only Rock'n'Roll Movie: CRIME 1978 directed by Jon Bastion, a short film built primarily around one, well-documented performance of the San Francisco punk band Crime in June 1978 at Mabuhay Gardens.

Following that we will screen the new feature film Outsider Artists made by Dave and Greg Clifford which looks at the 40-year history of the Irish punk band Paranoid Visions as well as the political and cultural climate from which they emerged and the legacy of the subcultures which surrounded and sustained them.

Larry Gottheim: Knots & Entanglements
Presented in partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque
Larry Gottheim in person
Friday, November 7, 2025
7pm
Admission: $12 (discount for Shapeshifters & SF Cinematheque members)

Working in film since the late 1960s, the cinema of avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim is an observational cinema, rewarding contemplation, stillness and active intellectual engagement and offering uncannily commonplace imagery rife with elusive metaphor and/or accumulating into densely immersive conceptual conundra. In Gottheim's films, time slows, hesitates and seems to move in novel and non-linear directions, the circularity of experience a recurring aspect of the master filmmaker's rich body of work. Gottheim's recent book, The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films (published 2024 by Eyewash Books and the Film-Makers' Cooperative) is a ruminative and musing career-spanning culmination, teasing out longitudinal threads and uncanny occurrences in the oeuvre, presenting the artist's body of work as a multi-faceted whole, a throughline of thought and material-based philosophy.

In celebration of this publication, San Francisco Cinematheque is honored to present a three-program residency (in partnership with the Roxie Theater, Gray Area and Shapeshifters Cinema) presenting selections from the artist's vast body of work, from early single-shot films, still lifes and nature studies to the complex sound/image constructions of later work to the very recent films completed 2019–2024.

Cinematheque's whirlwind survey of Gottheim's works wraps at Shapeshifters Cinema with later period films and recent digital videos, each a dense and sensorially confrontational collage of off-the-cuff cinematography and/or collaborative encounter, from "Sorry/Hear Us" (1984), an open-ended group project exploring temporal and linguistic reversal to recent digital works Entanglement (2022) and A Private Room (2024), each a confounding rebus-like audio/visual puzzlement. (Steve Polta)

SCREENING: "Sorry/Hear Us" (1986). Knot/Not (2019). Entanglement (2022). A Private Room (2024).

Do-Over Music Series - Jakobsons / Golightly / Oba / Mezzacappa / Glenn
Thursday, November 13, 2025 (NOTE SPECIAL DATE)
7pm
Admission: $10 (discount for members)

The Do-Over Music Series at Shapeshifters Cinema, organized by Lisa Mezzacappa and Jordan Glenn, is a monthly series of sound performances presented by a rotating cast of local luminaries and special guests. The first set features performances of creative - improvised - composed - electronic - acoustic - music. The second set opens up to a live improvised collaboration of sound and visuals made using images culled from the Shapeshifters 16mm film collection.

Set 1 (7pm): sound performance by:

Marielle V Jakobsons - violin/electronics +
David Golightly - keys

Set 2 (8pm): expanded cinema + improvised music with:

Jakobsens/Golightly joined by
Erika Oba - flutes
Lisa Mezzacappa - bass
Jordan Glenn - percussion
Shapeshifters Cinema Performance Group - expanded film projections

Workshops

Upcoming Workshop

Composing with Found Sounds
Instructor: Kirk Pearson
Sunday, November 16, 2025
12-4pm
In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema
Admission: $55 (Discount for Shapeshifters members)

How can the textures of a city become the basis for composition? This collaborative workshop between Dogbotic Labs and Shapeshifters Cinema invites participants to explore the acoustic life of Oakland through the lens of sound as material. Rather than beginning with instruments, we’ll begin with the act of listening: tracing how the built environment, weather, and human activity form a constantly shifting score around us, and then learn practically how to structure larger musical ideas out of found sounds in ways that are novel and poetic.

Participants will make short field recordings in the neighborhood, guided by prompts that emphasize attention, timing, and perspective. Back at Shapeshifters, we’ll share these recordings and explore simple ways to work with them--cutting, arranging, layering, and using structure to draw out the music already present in the noise.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in sound, whether or not you consider yourself a musician. By the end of the session, we’ll have assembled a collective composition shaped by the city’s own voice, and compiled an impressive sample library of downtown Oakland.