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.
