It Will Be Better Before (Tsarulshi uket ikneba) (2024) by Keto Kipiani
Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 7:00 pm
It Will Be Better Before and Temo Re
Alternative Visions — Program 3
Presented in association with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Admission: $18 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
Alternative Visions
September 9–November 18, 2026
This fall BAMPFA’s long-running annual series of historical and contemporary experimental film includes the work of dozens of artists across ten programs, beginning with a program of cinematic investigations into automation and AI with Gibbs Chapman in person. The series continues into November with a program of films made by members of the Oakland-based Black Hole Collective Film Lab. Brydie O’Connor is in person with her archival portrait of queer experimental film pioneer Barbara Hammer. The late Marjorie Keller’s intimate 16mm films have a rare screening to mark the publication of a new book about her work. Artist Naeem Mohaiemen presents and discusses A Missing Can of Film (2025) in conjunction with BAM’s exhibition Private Frontiers. A selection of works made by COUSIN collective artists, including Sky Hopinka’s 2017 consideration of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest and Lindsay McIntyre’s film about caribou and lichen—made using those materials in the photographic process—screen with Lebanese artist Christophe Katrib’s This Dissonance (2024). Harun Farocki’s influential 2003 essay film War at a Distance and Gazan artist Mahmoud Alhaj’s recent videos examine how perception can be limited in the context of war and/or conflict. (Kate MacKay, Film Curator)
Alternative Visions
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Alternative Visions, program 3: It Will Be Better Before and Temo Re
In Conversation: Keto Kipiani, Anka Gujabidze, Salomé Asatiani and Anna Dziapshipa
It Will Be Better Before began as a collaboration between two directors. After five years, one of the directors, Keto Kipiani, re-edited and modified the film, sharing her perspective and feelings throughout the creation process. “The title, with its mixed tenses that collapse time, conveys the confused desperation of a future torn from one’s control …a personal story about hanging onto glimmers of meaning but also, implicitly and inevitably, a national one” (Carmen Gray, Senses of Cinema).
With Temo Re, photographer and filmmaker Anka Gujabidze creates a multifaceted portrait of Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi. The protagonist, an actor who earns his living as a motorcycle courier, is played by Temo Rekhviashvili, the author of Courier’s Tales, the novel upon which the film is based. Composed of thousands of black-and-white still images, this unique film won the Best Short Film Award when it premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
SCREENING: It Will Be Better Before (Tsarulshi uket ikneba) (2024) by Keto Kipiani (Georgia); DCP, color, Georgian and French with English subtitles, 26 minutes. Source: Keto Kipiani. Temo Re (2025) by Anka Gujabidze (Georgia); DCP, B&W, Georgian with English subtitles, 50 minutes. Source: Anka Gujabidze.
TRT: 76 minutes