Director of film programmes, Academy Museum
Repertory film programmer KJ Relth-Miller returned to her native Southern California to work at UCLA Film & Television Archive, Slamdance Film Festival and AFI Fest after gaining her masters (she took media studies and film at The New School in New York) and working at Tribeca. She joined the Academy Museum in 2022.
Relth-Miller is in thrall to the wonders of 70mm projections, nitrate prints and curating esoteric film series such as last year’s Yasujiro Ozu In Color: The Final Six Films (“audiences showed up in droves”) and this year’s upcoming screening of Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema’s 1987 queer indie I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing.
Yet she loves the entire spectrum of culture and is just as happy discussing The Toxic Avenger, recalling the “genre-heavy” screenings of VHS double bills she used to organise in a friend’s backyard. “Since the Covid pandemic, we’re seeing a new fondness with Academy Museum audiences for films from the ’90s,” says Relth-Miller.
Bret Berg, a hiring manager and host at Cinefamily, the now defunct single-screen cinematheque in Los Angeles where she worked as a repertory programmer, has been a key mentor. “He thinks very intelligently about films that others might deem silly,” she says.
Scouting trips often take Relth-Miller to the Cote d’Azur to devour Cannes Classics. She also plans to attend Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna next month, and cites Locarno Film Festival’s retrospectives as a “rich source of ideas”.
“We don’t show any first runs but in terms of discovering new filmmakers, the Academy Film Archive is always bringing me to works that are newly restored or newly preserved,” says Relth-Miller.
“The hardest part of being a repertory film programmer,” she adds, “is challenging myself to do something that has never been done before. That’s also my favourite part.”
Contact: KJ Relth-Miller
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