By Jason Sanders

Like the real estate agents say, it’s all about location, location, location, and this year the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 22-July2) proved it by swapping its previous strip-mall digs for the more expansive realm of Westwood Village. Giddily fanning out over roughly five blocks and several movie theaters, including the historic Majestic Crest, the Landmark Regent and the Mann Festival, this year’s version of the LAFF swamped the pedestrian-friendly Westwood area, usually associated with UCLA students and the parents who spawned them, with filmmakers, moviegoers, some harried volunteers and staffers and even movie stars.

An uncomfortable heat wave during the fest’s first weekend didn’t stop audiences from puffing their way from venue to venue in search of a cinematic discovery, or at least someone who starred in one. Can’t get into the sold-out screening of Robert Cary’s NYC-set relationship comedy Ira and Abby? Well, at least you can join the crowd and take photos of its supporting co-star, Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander, or even the screenwriter-star Jennifer Westfeldt, or maybe even, um, Donald Trump, who showed up to lend some bewigged support. Waiting for the premiere of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly? Maybe you could snap some shots of Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and others while they bemusedly stood in front of a fake wall of LAFF logos. Indeed, at times this year’s LAFF seemed ready and anxious to degenerate into an orgy of flashbulbs and star-licking, with festival staff hitting upon a clever way to increase crowds and curiosity: hire throngs of photographers to snap photos of pretty much anyone involved in a film. Passers-by would stop and crowds would form to watch the “paparazzi” take photos of fest guests, whether they were Woody Harrelson, Jane Seymour, Harrison Ford or, more often than not, unknown CalArts juniors. Photos triggered more photos, and a small crowd a larger one, and suddenly the line outside the theater became much more electric, with that first-time director or cast member given the paparazzi’ed time of his or her life. Welcome to Los Angeles indeed.

Penetrating that line of trigger-happy camera-wielders led viewers to what they should be attending festivals for anyway: the films. Featuring eight works duking it out for a $50,000 cash prize, this year’s Narrative Competition unfortunately seemed a step back in terms of diversity, with too many similar-sounding works tracing a familiar pattern around themes of teenage pains, postadolescent confusion and relationship angst. The presence of groundbreaking new American indies like Old Joy, Man Push Cart and In Between Days outside the competition further highlighted the straightforwardness of the films therein. The most polished and distributor-ready of the bunch, the aforementioned Ira and Abby, is the 1930s screwball-comedy tribute that Woody Allen dreams of making. In this era of caricatured, unsympathetic romantic comedy leads, Westfeldt delivers a refreshingly human performance as Abby, a deliriously manic young slacker in Manhattan who impulsively proposes to Ira, a deliriously depressive philosophy student. Charting the ups and downs of their union as they chug up and down the streets of Manhattan, Ira and Abby is a Manhattan made by Angelenos, a radiant look at the pitfalls of love in the Big Apple. Filling out even the smallest roles with memorable characters, Ira and Abby hearkens back to the glory days of romantic comedy, the 1930s, when the heroes and heroines actually had personality and the supporting roles stood out as much as the leads. It’s a film with that nearly forgotten aura, the Lubitsch touch: elegant, breezy and always witty.

While snaring the festival’s Audience Award for narrative films, Ira and Abby lost out on the Jury Prize to Steve Collins’s Gretchen, a deadpan look at the peculiar agonies of being a teenager without luck, love or looks. Shot on video, Gretchen might be a feminist Napoleon Dynamite, thanks to a similar fashion-challenged teen outsider protagonist who, no matter what, stays true to herself. Collins’s pared-down direction serves the film well, and gives Gretchen something far more solid than the at-times smirking Dynamite: an actual heart. Collins seems to care about his characters and their milieu, showcasing, as the jury noted in their award presentation, “a distinctive vision and truthfulness to his characters, which makes us want to see what the director will do next.”

Other highlights of the Narrative Competition included Mike Akel’s >Chalk, whose made-in-Texas, Office-style spoof on life inside the teachers’ lounge earned extra credit for its filmmakers’ real-life jobs as...substitute teachers. Its ensemble cast, all eerily perfect as alternately stuffy, panicked and hopeless public school teachers, deservedly won the festival’s Outstanding Performance Award. Chris Chan Lee’s anticipated Los Angeles film noir Undoing, meanwhile, spotlighted rising star Sung Kang (Better Luck Tomorrow, The Motel) as an aimless young tough in way over his head against crooked cops and various mobsters. An atmospheric grafting of Hong Kong action stylistics onto the L.A. cityscape, the film benefits from its assured feel for the streets of Los Angeles, putting its Koreatown setting and Asian-American characters firmly within the traditions of both genres.

On the documentary side of the festival competition, Amy Berg’s powerful stomach punch of a film Deliver Us From Evil deservedly swept both the Jury and Audience Awards. Uncovering the life and times of Father Oliver O’Grady, a Catholic priest from Ireland who, for over 20 years, sexually abused countless children in various parishes in California, all while the Catholic Church’s higher-ups knew what was happening, Deliver Us From Evil is one of the most effective protest films made in years. With subjects as intense as this, there’s a danger in emotionally suffocating the viewers, but Berg keeps the audience involved throughout, neatly balancing the weight of the issue with some outstanding interviews and an assured, unhurried pace. By film’s end most audience members were simultaneously choking back tears and outraged, but unlike with many such topic-heavy films, most viewers said they needed to see it again.

The festival solidified its emerging status as a market when Berg’s harrowing film was quickly snatched up for distribution by Lionsgate. It was later joined in distribution heaven by Jody Hill’s North Carolina–set comedy The Foot Fist Way, a droll rural-Americana merging of martial arts and middle-aged breakdown that features a small-town tae kwon do instructor on his way to losing his mind and his bimbo of a wife, but who’s (almost) kept sane by his undying, utterly incorrect belief in his own talent. With the relentlessly mustachioed Danny McBride unleashing a terrifyingly spot-on impersonation of Suburban Homo Sapiens (complete with khaki-shorts-and-white-loafers suburban-man outfit), The Foot Fist Way is not only funnier than any independent film made this year but funnier than any Hollywood film. Evidently worried about the competition, none other than Will Ferrell and his production shingle Gary Sanchez Productions picked up the film for release, and a possible remake.