AFI Launches 2nd Film Fest Tonight

The American Film Institute Film Festival--this city’s very own international film festival-- will turn the spotlight on its second season tonight with a gala screening of the controversial “Aria.”

Festival officials admit to a bit of apprehension as AFI Fest activities begin--”We have a lot more to prove and to succeed in this year,” said festival director Ken Wlaschin--but they believe that the festival’s second edition will succeed.

“This whole past year we’ve been thinking about what to do next,” said Wlaschin during an interview. “Do we go after Asian films? Do we start giving prizes? (AFI Fest is a non-competitive festival.) We had a lot of directions we could have gone in.”

“We learned a lot last year,” echoed institute deputy director James Hindman. “That was really a tune-up year. This year we’re more structured, a little better-funded and more patient.”

Some of the changes involved this year: A new site (Cineplex Odeon’s Century City Cinemas); more special series (seven in all); a nod toward made-for-television movies, and an “international gala premiere” honoring a noted international director each night of the festival’s two-week run. (It closes April 28.)

“We thought of more grandiose schemes, but realized that that was what got the festival’s predecessor (Filmex, which ran from 1971 through 1983) into such financial hot water,” said Wlaschin. “We’d rather let the festival evolve than impose radical change on it.”

Hindman and Wlaschin also noted the festival’s increased participation with other arts festivals and film organizations, although--just like last year--the sole sponsor listed in the program is the Interface Group, an international producer of trade shows and expositions

“But we really got on the nonprofit-group networking hookup this year,” Wlaschin said. “We worked with the academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and UCLA on the Swedish series, with the International Documentary Assn., the Independent Feature Project and a number of others. The little bit of quirky freedom we lost was nothing compared to the programming muscle we got in exchange.”

That muscle helped create what Wlaschin calls seven different “sidebar series” to the main festival, which is dedicated to the screenwriter--an irony, considering the writers’ current strike against producers, that is not lost on the festival’s officials.

“We had thought recognition to the writer was long overdue,” Wlaschin said. “What we didn’t know was that this recognition would become a political act.”

The seven sidebars are: Films from Latin America; Europe and Asia/Africa; offbeat American cinema; “New Sweden ‘88”; English-language films from abroad, and foreign films submitted for Academy Award consideration by the countries where they were produced.

The Latin film festival is regarded as “particularly important” by both Wlaschin and Hindman, for different reasons.

“We’ve included some really important films, we think,” said Wlaschin, citing “Nadie Escuchaba” (April 22) and “Lola La Loca” (April 27) as examples. “And it was about time that Los Angeles, with almost a plurality of Spanish-speaking people, recognized the quality of films coming from that linguistic region.”

“The Latino films struck us as the perfect way to bring a new audience to the film festival, people who don’t normally go tosuch events,” said Hindman. “This way, AFI Fest really is trying to become a festival for the whole city, not just parts of it.”

A total of 90 films from 42 nations comprise this year’s festival, which will also include--for the first time--accompanying lectures and seminars. Among them are evenings with master titlist-editor-director Saul Bass and Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, seminars on screen writing and documentary film making and a salute to women screenwriters.

“We felt it was important to a inject a little more background information this year,” Wlaschin said. “We’d much prefer educating festival-goers about the film process than just sticking them in the theater and turning out the lights.”

Such education includes emphasizing the increasing internationality of the film scene--a fact promoted by festivals such as the AFI Fest and underlined by the Oscar sweep of “The Last Emperor,” a film about China in the 20th Century that was produced by a Briton and directed by an Italian.

“ ‘The Last Emperor’ should prove we are no longer living in the world of dominant national cinema,” Wlaschin said. “There will always be certain national cultural characteristics that make, say, Japanese film different from French film. But increasingly we’re seeing films addressing issues that cut across national lines, made in styles that many different countries can identify. . . . The global village is coming to pass.”

Sampling the AFI Fest’s global cinematic village will cost $6 a ticket. All of the films will be shown at the Cineplex Odeon Century City Cinemas, 2040 Avenue of the Stars in Century City. Most of the seminars will take place on the AFI campus, 2021 N. Western Ave. in Hollywood. Tickets are available at the Cineplex Odeon box office or through Ticketron: (213) 410-1062 in Los Angeles; (714) 634-1300 in Orange County.

For further information (but no ticket orders), call (213) 520-2000.