Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema coming to Mission St. this year

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Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema is entering its 21st season, and this year brings a change: Attendees to the outdoor movie showings, which feature films made by Bay Area residents, will be invited to a film crawl along Mission and 29th streets for the first time.

The festival’s events have mostly taken place on Cortland Street and Precita Avenue in the past, but organizers are hoping the move will stimulate the commercial corridors in the area. 

“This is our response to the doom loop,” said Valerie Reichert, the media manager for Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema: As people come to the neighborhood for the festival, they will stop by businesses in the area. 

“No to doom, no to negativity,” Reichert added. “Let’s get some joy in this situation.”

The film festival emerged from Bernal’s long legacy of local filmmaking. Reichart still remembers one night in 1997 when she suddenly noticed her neighbors streaming out of their houses in Bernal Heights. 

She followed them down the hill to the Bernal Heights Recreation Center Playground, where she sat on the blacktop and watched “Bernaltown,” a 1997 film made by a local dad about kids that saved Bernal Heights from an evil developer. 

In the film, Reichert said, the kids run around on soapbox cars — because they used to have soapbox derbies in Bernal — and pass by a bunch of neighborhood haunts while on their quest. 

At the time, Bernal was a rough neighborhood, Reichert said. Even so, there was “this vibrancy that came out of Bernal.”

Bernal has gentrified a lot since then, but Reichert thinks the film still holds up today. 

“It was a love letter to the neighborhood,” she said. 

In 2018, for the 20th anniversary of the film’s release, Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema arranged for the filmmaker, Gregory Gavin, to return, and for a remastered version to be screened at the Bernal Branch Library. 

The Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema, which is the Bay Area’s oldest outdoor film festival, will take place over three days. Its Mission film crawl is next Thursday, Sept 5. The next day, another film crawl will take place on Cortland Avenue. The season ends on Saturday, Sept. 7, with “Under the Stars,” an outdoor screening event at Precita Park. 

“People bring their blankets and their kids and their picnics and spread out and fill up Precita Park,” Reichert said, estimating that 200 to 500 people come to the Precita Park screening every year, even if it’s cold or foggy. 

“Trust me, they’re all out there, the kids are in sleeping bags,” she said. 

All events for the festival are free; the organization is sustained by volunteers, donations, and grant money.

Many of the contributions come from neighborhood merchants who appreciate the business that the festival brings, Reichert said. Another major supporter is Avenue Greenlight SF, a group that wants to revitalize San Francisco’s merchant corridors by funding projects and events.

“There’s a lot of life going on in San Francisco, and it should be elevated and brought forward and celebrated and nurtured,” Reichert said. “We believe that, they believe that.”

For the outdoor cinema season, Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema partners with other Bay Area filmmakers and film festivals. The partners, which include groups like the San Francisco Dance Film Festival or the Cine + Mas SF Latino Film Festival, get one location along the film crawl to showcase their films. 

The festival solicits films widely, with the only requirement being that the filmmaker have some connection to Bernal or the Bay Area; sometimes, even children submit films. One year, the festival received a film from two girls who were pretending to be cowboys and acting out “a good way to fight,” Reichert said.

Other films are more polished. In 2022, the festival received a submission called “Game Hawker” about a falconer from housing projects in Los Angeles. That film was funded by Patagonia and was “quite gorgeous,” Reichert said. 

Each year, Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema puts together a jury of “local people who love and understand film” to watch the movies and decide whether to accept them. The panel also awards prizes, which includes the “Best of Bernal Award,” “Spirit of Bernal Award,” and “Bright Star, Emerging Filmmaker Award.” The audience also votes for an award.  

The awards will be handed out on Thursday, Sept. 26 when the festival holds its season finale. The finale will be held at Bernal Branch Library, and will be followed by a neighborhood afterparty.

The Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema film festival starts on Thursday, Sept. 5, at 7 p.m. with the “Film Crawl on Mission Street.” On Friday, it hosts its annual “Film Crawl on Cortland” starting at 7 p.m., and on Saturday it hosts “Under the Stars at Precita Park,” starting at 6 p.m. You can read more about their programming here.