kino21
Irina Leimbacher and Konrad Steiner together program their independent film series at venues around the Bay Area. They focus on documentary and experimental film that is politically astute and formally provocative, as well as live events that combine moving images with spoken word and/or original music. kino21’s repertoire includes contemporary productions, historically significant films, and new inter-arts collaborations that they commission.
For BAN5 kino21 will present The 10,000 Mile Bike Race, a performance based on a text adapted from Le Surmâle (The Supermale), the first cyborg sex novel, by Alfred Jarry. The text is narrated by poet Brent Cunningham, interpreted on film by a collection of local filmmakers (Jerry Hiler, Paul Clipson, Bill Basquin, and Kerry Laitala) and accompanied live by the jazz ensemble of composer Graham Connah.
“Angels are no economists. Magnificently they squander their light.”—Hans Arp
Irina Leimbacher is a scholar, film programmer, and teacher. She is co-founder, with Konrad Steiner, of kino21 and former artistic director of San Francisco Cinematheque. She has guest-programmed for the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; San Francisco Camerawork; San Francisco International Film Festival; Cinema Project, Portland, OR; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and many other venues. Her writing has been published in Film Comment, Framework, Camerawork Journal, Discourse, Wide Angle, and Release Print, and she is currently teaching and completing her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.
Konrad Steiner is a filmmaker, producer, and writer, and has been a resident of San Francisco since 1984. Since 1981, his own short films have been shown in festivals, galleries, universities, living rooms, and other off-multiplex cinemas in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He was a curator at San Francisco Cinematheque from 2003 to 2006, and subsequently co-founded kino21 with Irina Leimbacher in 2007. Recently, his work has turned to engaging cinema with music and poetry, often in a performance context, including live narration and musical improvisation to projected images.