Month: September 2026

Signs of Life [Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2026]

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Courtesy of Grasshopper Film.

Another year, another absurdly delayed dispatch: once again, I am writing about an April film festival abord my September plane to New York, only barely wrapping up one bit of coverage before I immediately dive into the next one. As such, I won’t belabor this with an extended introduction, aside from a few more preliminary notes. On the whole, I saw fewer films at this year’s Los Angeles Festival of Movies for a few reasons, mostly pertaining to scheduling, which makes comparison between years a little difficult. While I would say that last year felt more consistent, where virtually every film felt necessary to see, this year, even with a smaller sample size, probably had more films that I felt passionately about. It’s also worth noting that, in addition to two that I did catch at the festival, Avalon Fast’s Drinking and Driving and Shatara Michelle Ford’s Dreams in Nightmares have both gone on to significant notices in their theatrical runs. (Once again, I am without wi-fi as I write these words, so I apologize for any inaccuracies.)

As I was unable to attend the opening night—John Early’s Maddie’s Secret—my first film was Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza. A respected veteran experimental filmmaker, Aljafari had an unexpected breakout with A Fidai Film (2024), which reappropriated and redacted footage from Israeli archives to showcase the downtrodden hidden in plain sight. His newest feature is also an archival intervention, but of a much less overt variety: Aljafari recently rediscovered mini-DV footage that he had shot in 2001 during the second Nakba, as he journeyed into Gaza to attempt to find a friend with whom he had served a brief sentence in an Israeli prison. The footage, apart from its striking textural qualities, captures a people and place already in dire straits, and With Hasan in Gaza understandably draws much of its power from putatively extra-textual knowledge, knowing that the destruction onscreen has been multiplied near-infinitely in the intervening 25 years. But it is also an exhaustive, patiently anguished document unto itself: as Aljafari’s camera and his guide linger upon specific faces, especially of children, the film seems to stretch much longer than its two hours and the few days that it covers, almost buckling under the weight of the disappearing lives it documents.

I had been hearing about Christine Haroutouian’s After Dreaming for more than a year before finally getting to watch it at LAFM, but while I liked it quite a bit, I must confess that I have probably the least to say about it among the films in this dispatch, such is the slippery, near-hallucinatory mood that it conjures. I mainly remember a few things: that it is in some ways a road trip film, at least initially following a soldier escorting a woman in the middle of a conflict; that it looks akin to a Carlos Reygadas film with slightly smeary wide-angle lenses; and that there is a truly extraordinary sequence where the camera spins around for something like 10 minutes as prospective brides and musicians dance around and sing. The film does not attempt to sustain that level of ecstasy, and most other details aside from individual shots are beyond fuzzy, but it’s memorable where it counts.

The one restoration I watched—aside from the fine dance short “Dreams of Passion” (1989, Aarin Burch) that it was paired with—was Mary Stephen’s Shades of Silk (1978), one of the more curious rediscoveries of the past few years. Stephen is best known as Éric Rohmer’s editor and sometime actor towards the latter part of his career, including A Tale in Winter, but before her association with him she made this remarkable depiction of a somewhat opaque relationship between two French-Chinese women, one played by Stephen herself, and a slowly developing love triangle. I quickly understood and appreciated that this film was made partly as a response to Marguerite Duras’s masterwork India Song (1975), using that film’s voiceover dialogue as the basis for the epistolary form that this employs quite well. A wonderfully ornate film in both setting (I truthfully cannot recall if the film takes place in Hong Kong but is set in France, or vice versa) and costuming, the mystery of its relationship and characters is maintained to the end with grace.

A film on the opposite end of the production spectrum came in the form of Frédéric Da’s isaiah’s phone. The eagerly anticipated follow-up to his debut Teenage Emotions (2021), it acts like the dark twin of that film’s ensemble, in which high school students used iPhones to film their peers as they enacted various vignettes from their everyday lives. Da’s focus narrows to one teenager in particular: Isaiah (Isaiah Brody), who receives an iPhone for his birthday and decides to start documenting himself and the world around him. Shot almost exclusively in vertical video, the film is designated from the outset as found footage, moving inexorably towards an act of violence, a choice that perhaps tips the film’s hand a little too much. But the details of Isaiah’s loneliness, as embodied in Brody’s fearless performance, and the partly comedic (especially courtesy of Max Vadset as an extroverted potential friend), largely crushing depiction of typical high school life are hard to shake.

One of the most beloved feature debuts of recent years, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor was also my favorite film of LAFM. Using its shadowy libraries and aloof, unreadable professor protagonist as a conduit for a slowly developing conspiracy that shifts into high gear in its supremely well-executed closing moments, the film strikes me even more as a work that communicates the joy of learning, with its reading scenes set to Gustav Holst’s magnificent “The Planets” rather than some skeletal ambience or tense thriller cues. The effect is to induce the feeling of revelation, even triumph with each new uncovered bit of the puzzle, and the commingling of these sensations with a certain growing horror at the implications of its mysterious invention powers the film, just as much as the lovingly tactile 16mm, the ingenious method of translating and highlighting words to help orient the viewer-reader, or even the pleasure of watching someone speak three+ languages while trying to conduct her research. A quasi-spoiler warning here: Chronovisor did fool me, whether that was its intention or not. I had assumed during the entirety of the film that this was an elaborate constructed narrative, with fabricated documents to rival the likes of Ricky D’Ambrose; I also thought of my favorite film of last year’s edition, Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. But I learned afterward that these documents were actually real, and that this was indeed a real conspiracy theory surrounding a “genuine” invention suppressed by the Catholic Church. While I can’t say this for certain, I’m fairly sure that not having this foreknowledge did not affect my great appreciation of the film, such is the intoxicating effect of its spiral into the unknown.

And yet, Chronovisor, and indeed basically any feature debut I can think of from the past five years or so, exists in the wake of the LAFM closing night film, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, coming off a string of already quite well-received short films. Romvari has been an online acquaintance for a decade at this point, and while this is probably my favorite of her works to date, her move to (nearly) pure fiction from the docufiction mode she was previously in creates a different set of problems that holds me back from appreciating this to the same extent as its many deserving partisans. I had gone in knowing that this leaps forward in time in the second half, which may have affected my immersion into Romvari’s recreation of what is more-or-less her childhood in the first half. That being said, the first half never quite establishes the perspective necessary to ground the second half’s ruminations: mostly omniscient, pointedly capturing conversations between her parents that she could not have seen as a young girl. The subjectivity and rich detail that many seem to find only comes through sporadically, and the second half only truly sings when it directly confronts its suppressed melancholy. One wholly positive note: Romvari mentioning that a chance viewing of Jon Jost’s The Bed You Sleep In at the end of pre-production inspired her to add possibly the best scene in the film was completely lovely, exactly the kind of tribute to a past work and revealing anecdote that a film festival should offer.

The Big Picture [FILM]

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As Christopher Nolan’s IMAX 70mm epic The Odyssey continues to play to sell-out crowds months after its initial release, there is a big-screen celluloid experience opening today in Los Angeles that deserves equal, if not greater attention: the installation simply titled FILM—which debuted in 2011 at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall—finally making its US debut at the Marciano Art Foundation, which will be showcasing until the end of February next year. It is by Tacita Dean, the British experimental filmmaker and artist, whose work is more aligned with the titan blockbuster director than meets the eye: both are steadfast in their dedication to the preservation and vitality of motion picture film and have hosted numerous talks, beginning with an event at the Getty Museum in 2015 entitled “Reframing the Future of Film,” to demand that studios and cultural organizations do all that they can to prevent the loss of this artistic medium. As eloquent as Dean has been in these and other discussions, her finest statement on the matter might be FILM, conceived after she had written an article for the Guardian that launched the movement to save celluloid. An 11-minute loop, its argument for the film strip as not only an artistic object to be celebrated in its entirety, but also one that can be displayed as its own, imposing monumental work is elusive, captivating, and entirely persuasive all at once.

Even from the numerous descriptions and pictures available online, it’s difficult to describe FILM and Marciano’s exhibition without actually being there: in the same cavernous room where the Foundation exhibited seven Bruce Conner films (on four/seven separate screens with the audience sitting in the middle) earlier this year, there is only one this time around: a thirty-one-foot-tall vertical screen looming at the back of the room like the monolith from 2001. Aside from some benches in the back, the viewer is free to roam around the space and walk up to the screen itself, and can also go up to the mezzanine, where the projection booth’s interior can be seen through a window.

In a talk at the press preview yesterday with Dean and Mark Toscano, co-curator of this exhibition and one of the preeminent American film preservationists—and my discussions with the latter, I gleaned some guideposts that might be helpful for grounding the viewer: though FILM has no title card to signal a starting or ending point, it begins with a shot of an escalator, and thereafter proceeds in three unmarked sections: roughly 8.5 minutes of color film stock (including some black-and-white images), one brief snippet lasting less than thirty seconds which I’ll get to later, and about a minute of black-and-white film stock. The collages and juxtapositions of images are almost entirely done in-camera, using then cutting-edge 3D-printed mattes and numerous iterations of filming on the same strip. As for the aspect ratio, it was accomplished by simply rotating a Cinemascope anamorphic lens 90 degrees, stretching the frame vertically rather than horizontally, resulting something like an actually viewable version of the Instagram-like frames—Dean noted that FILM was conceived and first exhibited before iPhones and the proliferation of vertical images truly became ubiquitous, though seeing them on such a wide canvas makes the experiences nearly incomparable—on the poster for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, as noted by Vadim Rizov in the 2022 edition of his sadly defunct Filmmaker Magazine series of articles chronicling the year’s feature films shot on 35mm.

At this time, the program booklets come with a celluloid strip taken directly from a “sacrificable print” of FILM; I don’t know if those will last the entirety of the exhibition, which should be all the more reason to go see this, especially with free admission, as soon as you can. The strip proves illuminating for one aspect you may have noticed: the sprocket holes, typically used for pure functionality to guide the film through the projector, are visible on the image. On the film strip, it is apparent that there are actually two sets of sprocket holes: the outer ones are the actual functional ones, while the inner ones are images. Through a process that I readily confess to still not entirely understanding, Dean was able to construct mattes so that the camera only photographed the outside edges of the strip, allowing the image of the sprockets to be captured. The effect anticipates but entirely outdoes the now semi-common practice in some experimental and documentary films of over-scanning a film strip and keeping the sprockets: rather than demonstrating all the ways in which those digitally-scanned images are *not* being presented in their original format, FILM uses it as both a reminder of the actual tangible thing unspooling above the viewer’s heads and an aesthetic object in and of itself; Toscano mentioned to me that the mattes were even designed to create a slight drop shadow, emphasizing the dramatic nature of their effect on the images contained within them.

As for those images: much of FILM captures the towering architecture of Turbine Hall, which I wasn’t previously aware of, occasionally using that space and its many windows as containers for disjunctive images while also moving into abstract shapes and colors. Other sequences use the inverse aspect ratio to capture suitably vertical images: waterfalls, smokestacks, staircases, sometimes refilmed with separate mattes to jumble the pieces of these objects, cheekily displacing them to disrupt the viewer’s perception of a uniform towering image; there is even a virtual jump scare involving an ostrich egg that must be seen to be believed. But as intricate as the rhythmic and imagistic interplay may be—especially involving a stretch where balloons and bubbles lazily drop from the top to the bottom of the frame in a manner that could only be captured in this way with this large and vertical a screen—the effect is immediate, and more than 24 hours later I’m still marveling at the shock I felt when I stepped forward to the screen, which stretches all the way to the floor, and saw my shadow fall upon the image. In the many times I have seen my shadow on a cinema screen, it’s never been right there, where (if I felt permitted to) I could literally reach out and touch the screen on a 1:1 scale; for that sensation alone, FILM delivers an incomparable experience.

One final note, which I believe is not mentioned in the program booklet: FILM is not simply one 11-minute 35mm loop, but six laid end-to-end. The difference can be spotted in the brief interlude I mentioned earlier, a shot of mushrooms that, for its first half, is in a uniform color before shifting to black-and-white. For this exhibition, Dean and Toscano enlisted the help of a Czech film lab to hand-tint this first half of the interlude, producing an image quality entirely distinct from what surrounds it. Apparently, Dean’s preferred order is as follows: red, blue, pink, yellow, orange, and green (I myself saw the first two last); the latter was actually produced by tinting the film yellow and toning it blue. In my interpretation, this color sequence saves its most dark and vivid iterations for the two poles, though I can’t be certain about it. While I would not claim per se that this actually qualifies FILM as something that one must watch for 66 minutes—I popped in and out, only happening to stay long enough while talking with Toscano to witness every iteration; even from the lobby, the spectacle of the screen is invigorating—it only enhances the sense of this installation as a container for all that film is capable of, an argument essayed at a time when it needed it the most. As Dean writes in a essay in the booklet reflecting upon the intervening fifteen years, film is in a happier (if still precarious) place now, but the awe of FILM will never pale.