Last year, the inaugural Los Angeles Film Festival brought an energy jolt that is well necessary for the city, just evoking the right mixture of hipness in knowledge and welcoming inclusiveness.
Taking place from Thursday to Sunday, Lafm second edition aims to maintain the party projecting more than 20 films in a circuit of places all in the east of Hollywood.
The festival, presented by Mezzanine and Mubi, opens with the premiere of the west coast of the satirical “Magic Farm” by Amalia Ulman, with Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, Simon Rex and Ulman. A special projection of the comedy of Andrew Deyoung “Friendship”, with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, and the selection of closing of the night in the history of Neo Sora “Happye” will also have their first on the west coast.
The festival will include live shorts, a new program of animated shorts and artist discussions, including the novelist-Filmaker Dennis Cooper In conversation with the author Tony Tulathimutteand another with costumers The Kurnor Kurnor Kur and actor John early. The other features of the program include the horror film Campy de Grace Glowicki “Dead Lover”, the atmospheric of Alexandra Simpson, the Florida set “No Sleep Till”, the unpredictable family history of Cooper and Zac Farley “Room Temperature” and the self-reflexive documentary by Charlie Shackleton and Charlie Shackleton “Zodiac Killer Project.”
Chloë Sevigny in the “Magic Farm” of director Amalia Ulman.
(Bad)
“For Lafm, we always try to celebrate films that feel personal and clearly go against the grain of commercial cinema in one way or another,” said Micah Gottlieb, co-founder and artistic director of Lafm, by e-mail of Los Angeles.
But even with the accent put by the festival on new works, its selection of renewals is an important part of the program.
“With the covers, we are trying to make an implicit argument that these independent films – each of them a triumph of strong vision and limited resources – should also be more widely recognized and considered to be part of a wider tradition of daring and visionary work,” said Gottlieb.
Among the strengths of this year's program are the first of new restorations on the west coast of two 1981 films, “Will” by Jessie Maple and “Nightshift” by Robina Rose. The two have never had that a limited theatrical distribution and these projections should bring their filmmakers, who both recently died and have rarely appreciated such a showcase during their lifetime, under a brighter projector.
“The new restorations are a really important part of it and the cinematographic scene of Los Angeles, so we are proud to continue to include a selection to highlight in the wider program,” said Sarah Winshall, co-founder of the festival, by e-mail.
Among the high points of the festival last year, there was a screening of the 1996 film by Bridgett M. Davis “Naked acts”, “ An exploration of identity and films initially self-distributed. The restoration and the release of this film were defended by Maya Cade, designer and curator of the film Noir archives. Cade will be back at the this year festival to present the projection of “Will”.
“It was an honor to play` `bare acts '' in Lafm last year because I felt like I was on the wave of a breakthrough in the cinematic community of Los Angeles,” said CAD by E-mail of Los Angeles. “The festival, even in its first iteration, has canceled so many hypotheses on what film rallies can do in the city where all the other parts of film creation and the exhibition occur. Why could there not be a festival? 'Naked Acts' was so warmly received here because the festival has honored the revisions of contemporary possibilities.”
Maple, the first black woman to join the Cinematograph Union in New York and among the first black women to lead an independent feature film with “Will”, died in 2023 at the age of 86. Located in Harlem, “Will” is a story with a deep emotional power while he follows an old All-American basketball (Obaka Adudyo) who fell into a drug addiction. With his wife (Loretta guesses In his beginnings in the cinema) patiently by his side, he tries to put his life back on the right track, taking a boy from the street (Robert Dean) which he affectionately calls “little brother”.
E. Danielle Butler has been assistant and collaborator of Maple in the last years of her life and co-wrote the memoirs of Maple 2019, “The Maple Crew”. Butler thinks that Maple would be happy to see his film finding a new audience younger.
“Many conversations we have had in the past few years concerned the inheritance – what does that mean now?” said Butler in an Atlanta call. “And so I think that even if she is not there to see him, I think she would be satisfied with the opportunity of another generation, a new generation, to participate.”
Obaka Adudyo, on the left, and Robert Dean in the film “Will”.
(Janus Films)
Tony Best is an archivist and entrepreneur at the Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Academy of Films which carried out an interview with the oral history of the Academy with Maple in early 2020 and remained part of his circle.
Best noted DIY ethics that has gone through the work and life of Maple. She opened a coffee and a bakery to collect funds for her films. When she could not find places to show her work, she opened a film hall in her Harlem Brownstone, which has become a longtime place known as 20 West which was also part of a distribution circuit and a small archive for other filmmakers.
“With 20 West being in itself a kind of micro-cinema, community cinema, it is interesting that his films are screened in these spaces now,” said Best in a call from Los Angeles. “And I know she would really dig to Lafm. She really believed in the community and the way cinema can bring together the community. ”
The 4K restoration of “Will” is a joint project between the Black Film Center and the Archives of the University of Indiana and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American and Culture. The 4K restoration of “Nightshift” was undertaken by the Lightbox Film Center in collaboration with the British Film Institute and Cinenova.
Where “Will” is told with a simple franchise, faced with practical realities, “Nightshift” is an ambiguous evocation film, existing in an interzone between alarm clock, dream and nightmare.
The film follows an employee of the hotel in London (the Jordan Monomoniké, a famous part of the Punk scene in London) on a very hectic night, exploring a liminal space of night reveries which seem to open a portal towards all kinds of behaviors of an assortment of unusual guests, in particular punks, businessmen and magicians.
Jordan in “Nightshift” by director Robina Rose.
(Arbeos Films)
Rose, who died in January at 75, worked at the time at the Portobello hotel in western London. The hotel closed at Christmas and the production was therefore racing on Monday morning to a Saturday morning. The filmmaker Jon Jost, who was the director of the project photography, lent the production of his 16 mm camera and donated a reserve of high contrast inversion films which he had bought for sale to a steep reduction, helping the film his clearly unreal look.
“The stock of films turns out that the context of this rather funky and slightly old -fashioned hotel,” recalls Jost in a telephone interview in India, where he recently lived and worked. “And the hotel itself was original because it was what we would call a charming hotel today. We knew that each room was its own fantasy. So we turned in different rooms and had a sense of fantasy. This quality was perhaps improved by the film.”
Charlotte Procter, which is part of the organization of feminist distribution and preservation The Cinenova Working Group, met Rose for the first time in 2018 for a projection of Rose's film in 1977 “Birth Rites” and recalled the filmmaker as “Spirit and clear and a little contrary”.
Procter noted that a 1983 entry into the reviews of the British filmmaker acclaimed Derek Jarman Noted that unlike their European counterparts, most British avant-garde filmmakers have remained widely informed. Among the few names he listed with his, there was Rose.
“He spoke of a deeply personal cinema, shaped by direct experience, often neglected by the dominant current,” said proctering from London. “Robina's films embody this – distinct, convincing and often made in collaboration with the people around her.”
The film also serves as a snapshot of creative and artistic energies of its moment in the early 80s in London. Among these counter-culture figures that have collaborated or appeared in the film are Jost, co-series Nicola Lane, Jordan (who also appeared in Jarman's “Jubilee”), filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg, the philosopher-activist Mike Leser, the writer Max Handley and the poet Heathcote Williams.
The restorations of “Will” and “Nightshift” are well part of the broader Lafm program, offering a historical context for the new films which are the essential of the festival. This feeling of living something special for the first time is part of the key to the success of the event, giving off an energy of invention and revelation.
“We were so lucky last year to be able to start the festival with such a daring program,” said Winshall. “This year, when entering conservation, we followed some of the directives of last year, prioritizing the first of our local audience, keeping eclectic things in the content, finding the films of various sources, while trusting our preservative noses. The program is full of discoveries, films that I had not heard before programming them.”
