ATA Independent Cinema in the Mission: Free First Thursdays

Artists' Television Access runs a free open screening on the first Thursday of every month, and anyone can walk in with a short film under 15 minutes or simply take a seat. Doors open at 7:30 pm at 992 Valencia Street, at 21st Street in the Mission, and the show starts at 8 pm. Entries need to arrive by 7 pm on the night. The next two dates are November 5 and December 3, and ATA calls it the only monthly open-submission screening in the Bay Area.

ATA did not begin as a cinema. In the early 1980s John Martin and Marshall Weber ran the Martin/Weber Gallery at 220 Eighth Street in SoMa, and in October 1983 they joined Lise Swenson and other media artists to turn it into a nonprofit. The first idea was a public television studio, where anyone could make work for Artists' Television, a local cable program. Programming started in 1984, and tax-exempt status followed in 1985.

On Halloween night in 1986 a fire made the SoMa space unusable. The group camped briefly in an artists' warehouse on Clarion Alley, then moved to the Valencia Street storefront in early 1987 and held its first show there on April 28, 1987. Nearly four decades later, it is still in the same room.

Nobody runs ATA in the usual sense. Artist volunteers program the calendar, produce the events and make the decisions together, and the organization describes the arrangement as teaching and learning with each other in a spirit of shared responsibility. That is why the calendar swings from Brazilian dramas to noise performance to activist documentaries in a single week: each night belongs to whoever pitched it.

Programming proposals go to the collective by email, and the house rule is that all non-commercial work is considered. If you make films, this is one of the few rooms in the city where a first-time director and a veteran experimentalist share the same calendar.

The screening room holds 49 seats and is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. The projection booth can run 16mm, Super 8 and standard 8mm film alongside a bright digital projector, and the patch bay still accepts VHS, Betacam SP and Mini-DV decks. For the open screening, filmmakers bringing 8mm or 16mm prints should give advance notice so a volunteer can thread the right projector.

The room is plain, and the seating is close to the screen. What makes it special is the projection: on a good night the clatter of a 16mm projector at the back of the room is part of the show.

The Cine+Mas festival takes over the room from October 23 to 25. It opens Friday at 6:30 pm with Carmela and the Walkers, a documentary about an Afro-Ecuadorian woman who feeds Venezuelan migrants near the Colombian border. Saturday has the Bonds of Belonging shorts at 2 pm and a Family and Resilience shorts program at 7 pm, and Sunday brings the Brazilian drama Garden of Silences at 2 pm and Oca at 4 pm.

In between, Litcrawl brings a live comics program from CCA on Saturday at 5 pm. On Sunday, October 25 at 7 pm, TINAFF, short for This Is Not a Film Festival, shows Bay Area work with no submission fees, no awards and no gatekeeping. On October 28 at 7 pm, When ICE Melts documents the Minneapolis response to the 2025 immigration raids, with filmmaker Kip Hedges leading a discussion afterward.

The program on Monday, November 2 at 7:30 pm is Rewards Program: Malignant, a live-scored performance using three celluloid projectors at once, with Oakland musician Miles Lassi. On November 9 at 7 pm, Studio 26: Fantom Classroom of the Art Institute is a free seminar on 16mm experimental films from the SFAI Legacy Foundation and Archives, which holds films from the collection of the former San Francisco Art Institute.

Craig Baldwin's long-running Other Cinema series also calls ATA home. This month alone it hosted a session on strange pop music, a special Thursday program with artist Trevor Paglen on the UFO disinformation agent Richard Doty, and a benefit for Oakland's Shapeshifters microcinema project. On October 16 the collective hosted An Evening with Mike Kuchar, the underground filmmaker behind Sins of the Fleshapoids.

When ATA is not screening, the room can be rented for screenings, readings, workshops, shoots and private gatherings between 10 am and 10 pm. A four-hour block costs $150 for grassroots groups and low-income artists, $200 for nonprofits and schools, $300 for film productions and $400 for private events, with full-day rates of $300 to $800. Viva members, who give $1,000 a year, get one free four-hour rental.

ATA sits midway between the 16th Street and 24th Street BART stations, about a ten-minute walk from either. A few blocks northwest, Dolores Park climbs toward the J Church tracks with a wide view of the downtown skyline, and it is a good place to sit with a burrito before an 8 pm show.

Five blocks north up Valencia, the Roxie Theater on 16th Street runs nightly ticketed shows on two screens. A Thursday that starts with a Roxie matinee and ends with the open screening at ATA covers two very different ideas of what an independent screen can be.

Address: Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110, at 21st Street. Phone: (415) 824-3890. Email: ata@atasite.org. There are no fixed box office hours, so each event lists its own start time on atasite.org. The open screening is free on the first Thursday of each month, with doors at 7:30 pm, the show at 8 pm and entries due by 7 pm.

Submissions for the open screening go to openscreening@atasite.org, and the collective recommends sending files one to two weeks early, although walk-in entries are accepted before the show. Physical media should be labeled with your name, contact, title and running time. Ask the Karpo APP for a taqueria on Valencia that fits before an 8 pm start, and it will plan the walk.