IFP/West Los Angeles Film Festival

Los Angeles’s premiere independent film festival opened April 20 at the Directors Guild of America Theatre for the sixth year, this time under new management and with a new banner: "The IFP/West Los Angeles Film Festival." Acquired by the Independent Feature Project/West, the formerly titled Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, or LAIFF, was also expanded this year to nine days, with 51 feature films and 48 shorts being screened at four Hollywood locations. And though the setting and many of the faces were identical to the 2000 edition, this year’s event seemed quite different. The film lineup was generally strong, and the organization was efficient and friendly, but a large number of attendees commented that the festival was surprisingly quiet, with little going on besides the screenings.

Two years ago I attended the L.A. fest as a filmmaker with a short film in the lineup, and there seemed to be more people, more parties and more general excitement around the DGA building. To make sure my memory was not coloring things pink, I re-watched an early issue of Film-Fest DV, which included coverage of the 1999 festival, and my feelings were confirmed: it was a more exciting event, with more character and more parties. In a sad coincidence, though, I ran into one of the people behind the excellent Film-Fest DVs, John Bernstein, at this year’s event, who told me that the company had recently gone into liquidation and that he was looking for a new job. Perhaps the depressed economic climate, the then impending WGA strike deadline, and a general sense of dot-com doom was to blame for the low-key atmosphere, but even the free-cocktail bar on the DGA terrace (a popular networking point in years past) was opened only several days into the festival, seemingly as an afterthought.

Reactions to the fest by attending filmmakers were mixed as well. Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle, who made the powerful Ever Since the World Ended – a low-budget postapocalyptic pseudo-documentary admittedly influenced by The Blair Witch Project – claimed that they hadn’t heard much about the L.A. festival in the past but, after reading a positive review in Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, decided to go for it. "We were treated so well by the festival, and the film got a wonderful kickoff. We’re glad we premiered here." But one previously award-winning documentary filmmaker whom I spoke to had a different experience: the night before the first show, only seven tickets had been sold. The filmmakers quickly rallied, copying flyers and spending the rest of the evening and next day canvassing their film, and eventually managed to fill half the auditorium for a well-received screening.

The opening night film, Sidewalks of New York, written and directed by and starring Edward Burns, confirmed the actor/filmmaker’s determination to become a new, Catholic Woody Allen for nonintellectuals. Other premieres included Michael Radford’s ensemble improv piece, Dancing at the Blue Iguana, set in an L.A. strip club, Jesse Peretz’s Americans-in-France comedy The Chàteau, acquired for theatrical distribution by IFC Films at the festival, and Dan Mintz’s extraordinarily spare and utterly compelling drugs-and-ghost story, Cookers.

Of a handful of Sundance films selected for the L.A. screenings, Ilya Chaiken’s Margarita Happy Hour and Denis Villeneuve’s beautiful Maelström stood out as two of the fest’s strongest films. Some notable documentaries were Amato: A Love Affair with Opera by Stephen Ives, Who is Bernard Tapie? by Marina Zenovich, Scratch by Doug Pray, and the exceptional Life and Debt by Stephanie Black.

The short films included some gems, such as Mollie Jones’s haunting antidrug film, Invisible, Ari Gold’s wrenching, autobiographical Helicopter, and Leanna Creel’s Offside. But the lineup also brought a few expensively made lemons, including Kandeyce Jorden’s Undone, in which production values and sex/crime/violence clichés seem to have completely conquered story and character development, and Jason Reitman’s ridiculous Gulp, essentially a long and oblique car commercial with lots of pointless special effects and very few ideas.

About a third of this year’s feature films were shot on DV – so many that it is no longer noteworthy to name them. In fact, chuckles were heard from industry members of the audience before each of the festival screenings, when Kodak’s sponsor-trailer seemed to try very hard to argue for the value of celluloid. At one digital master class seminar, filmmakers Allison Anders (Things behind the Sun) and Kristian Levring (The King Is Alive) discussed their experiences making digital features. Whereas Levring’s technical experiences were extremely informative and empowering, Anders’s personal comments revolved more around the human aspects of her experiences. When asked what kind of camera she used on the film, she wasn’t sure. "I don’t know," she said. "I think it might have been a something-500?"

Incomprehensibly, one of the festival’s weaker films won the Critics Jury Award, Kaaterskill Falls by Josh Apter and Peter Olsen, a movie with stereotypically flat characters, heavy-handed directing and self-consciously choppy editing. The festival’s biggest winner was Kissing Jessica Stein, a harmless and sometimes charming romantic comedy about lesbian self-discovery, directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, which won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Writing and Acting for its two scribes and stars, Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt. It was picked up by Fox Searchlight shortly after the festival. Honorable Mention of the Critics Jury went to Stephanie Black for her political documentary feature Life and Debt, which explores the negative effects of International Monetary Fund loans to developing countries, using Jamaica as her example. Not the sexiest of subjects, but Black’s film is still brilliant, both cinematically and for the important message it brings home.

Despite a few half-empty screenings, this year’s festival did manage to attract audiences of more than 30,000 people. If only it had been a bit more "festive." – Rolf Gibbs

Cannes International Film Festival by Noah Cowan
IFP/West Los Angeles Film Festival by Rolf Gibbs
South by Southwest Conference and Film Festival by Josh Zeman
San Francisco Documentary Film Festival by Justin Lowe
San Francisco International Film Festival by Chuck Stephens