Photo: Grasshopper Film

The inaugural Los Angeles Festival of Movies, which ran for four days at the start of this month, provided a fairly eclectic slate: out of twelve non-shorts/talks programs, four were restorations, while the rest ranged the gamut—within a general independent film bent—from the buzzy opening night Sundance hit I Saw the TV Glow to the closing night world premiere of the medium-length Rap World. Every feature film could theoretically be seen by a single person, though the talks and the promising shorts program (which ran on both Saturday and Sunday)—featuring work from Laida Lertxundi, Deborah Stratman, and Alison Nguyen among others—took place concurrently with the rest of the slate. Such compression, along with the use of the always stellar 2220 Arts + Archives as the primary screening space, did indeed result in a festive atmosphere: throughout the weekend, the venue was as packed relative to its size as I’ve ever seen it, a hopefully healthy sign for a city with an often fitful relationship to new non-studio filmmaking.

Self-curation at a film festival can often be just as revealing as a festival’s overall programming. For my own part, I confined my viewing to three films, all of which ended up bearing some remarkable common ground. They were all films primarily about youthful people, bearing clear markings of their directors’ past works and contemporary trends in filmmaking while also striking out into new territory. Importantly, each strove to embody the spirit of the time period they were depicting, embracing a certain freedom through narrative or formal means.

The first of these, Bill & Turner Ross’s Gasoline Rainbow, was at once the least and most familiar. I’ve only seen the Ross brothers’ previous film, the lovely Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets; that work, about a dive bar’s final night of operation, derived a great deal of its potency from the one-night, single-location set-up, along with its distinctive focus on so many wizened and downtrodden regulars. By contrast, their latest film dispenses with virtually all of these characteristics, aside from their signature blend of narrative and non-fiction. At the outset, five high school seniors (introduced via their student IDs) from Wiley, Oregon take a van and begin driving 513 miles west to Portland, a final adventure before they have to enter the workforce in their podunk town.

As a result, Gasoline Rainbow feels most akin to its predecessor primarily in the many scenes with the teens simply hanging out; pointedly, the group is a well-balanced, multi-ethnic mix of boys and girls, fully enveloped in a collective Gen Z mindset, and I found myself growing more fond of the film as it went along simply as a result of their charisma and evident care for one another. At the same time, the film registers as much more obvious in its narrative signposting, with a daisy chain of individuals along the way that help the protagonists, direct them towards a Portland party suggestively called the End of the World, and generally embody how these kids might turn out once they’ve grown a little more, whether it be train-hoppers or punk homeowners. The kids, too, each get their time to discuss their backgrounds—sometimes in voiceover that may be taken from interviews with the Rosses—in a way that, while earnest, can become a little overly neat and self-conscious. One of the film’s emblematic moments, with the teens walking along the streets of Portland before meeting a skateboarder who becomes their temporary chaperone, has a split-second where a cameraman becomes visible on the edge of the frame, a handy summation of what’s both captivating and limiting about this generally compelling film.

Eduardo Williams’s second feature The Human Surge 3 is only mildly more in keeping with its director’s oeuvre. For me, The Human Surge (2016)—as everyone is mandated to note, there is no The Human Surge 2 at present—is the greatest summation of what it felt like to be alive in the 2010s, perfectly capturing the interconnectedness of the modern world across entirely different continents and ways of life. Its quasi-sequel massively expands on the formal and narrative experimentation: while the first film took place sequentially in Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines, each respectively shot on 16mm, a Blackmagic Pocket (then projected and filmed off the screen using 16mm), and a RED, this work jumps between Peru, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan, all filmed using a 360-degree camera and edited in VR. Each section in the first Human Surge had a certain objective for its characters, a tendency which is almost entirely jettisoned; though little words and motifs recur as connective tissue, the focus is almost solely on a certain exploratory spirit, often in concert with nature. Notably, technology takes more of a backseat in comparison to the first film, with phones glimpsed but rarely the center of any given interaction.

It can sometimes feel paradoxically cliché to say that no film has ever felt like this one, but it genuinely is true with The Human Surge 3. In the very first scene, Williams’s predilection for tracking shots that are from a vantage point far behind the ostensible subject is further destabilized by the post-production choice to largely frame out the subject while still moving in a forward direction, while a mix of cryptic Spanish and English dialogue can be heard even as their speakers move in and out of frame, and things only become more daring from there. Throughout the film, people from each country pop up in other places, often speaking simultaneously with the nation’s residents. Presented with two sets of subtitles (one white, one yellow), the shared comprehension varies, lending each interaction a sense of unpredictability that dovetails with the film’s unique rhythms, which can sometimes hold for wonderfully extended periods of time or explode into dazzling moments of expressive motion. Though Taiwan is initially given somewhat less screen time than the other two countries, that is made up for by the final twenty minutes, an ascent up a mountain by all of the film’s main characters where the image makes it seem like the land is literally peeling away. If The Human Surge 3 ultimately does not seek to embody the spirit of the times like its predecessor, then it aims at something even grander and more mysterious.

Mystery is the ostensible name of the game with Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn’s Dream Team, which surprisingly made its U.S. premiere at the festival just a few months after it showed in Rotterdam. The duo are perhaps best known for their gorgeous graduate student vacation film L for Leisure (2014), though their other work in Blondes of the Jungle (2009) and Two Plains & a Fancy (2018) similarly display an interest in using genre pastiche as a backdrop for their 16mm reveries. This is taken to new extremes with this riff on 1990s TV serials, presenting seven episodes of the fictional eponymous series, each with their own separately presented opening credits sequences. Featuring Alex Zhang Hungtai (a.k.a. Dirty Beaches) and Esther Garrel as two Interpol agents investigating mysterious deaths related to coral, the film purposefully leans into the campy nature of its presentation (influenced primarily by the show Silk Stalkings), full of much more lowbrow humor than Kalman and Horn’s previous work, particularly in the sophomoric episode titles (“Ashes to Asses,” “Fax on the Beach,” etc.).

That being said, Dream Team is blessedly eager to never be perceived as just one thing: most of the first scenes after the credits for each episode are long, languorous shots of nature that lend a different, almost hypnotic tenor to the proceedings. Characters unexpectedly take center stage, including Zhang’s assistants and a coral researcher hilariously named Veronica Beef; much of one episode is even given over to a rap performance at a house party. The feeling that anything goes dominates, as does a general embrace of lasciviousness and the quirks of its inspirations: the characters and storylines in the opening credits are frequently absent from the episodes proper, and new threads are brought up and abandoned almost at random. The film ends on such a disjunctive note, the beginning of a new season that brings in a new Interpol duo and leaves practically everything unresolved, a perfectly strange way to end both the film and my time at the festival.