AFI/L.A. Festival to Feature Films From Eastern Europe

With a whopping 205 titles on the program schedule, the 1990 AFI/Los Angeles Film Festival figures to be a browser’s special. Ken Wlaschin, the festival’s director, thinks it’s a whole lot more.

“We think this is the strongest film festival ever held in Los Angeles, (with) the highest quality and most comprehensive range,” Wlaschin said, warming up for a Thursday morning press conference to announce plans for the festival, which gets under way April 19. “We’re not a rich festival but we certainly have adequate funding.”

This year’s event, with venues at the Cineplex Odeon Century City, Fairfax Cinemas and the American Film Institute’s Hollywood campus, is highlighting Eastern European cinema.

“We’re dedicating the festival to the filmmakers of Eastern Europe,” Wlaschin said. “We’re calling this section of the festival ‘Hollywood Glasnost,’ and it will include 47 films from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia.”

Wlaschin said the AFI festival will present a number of films that had been banned before the raising of the Iron Curtain and the falling of the Berlin Wall. One of the showcase events is 21-year-old Jiri Menzel’s “Larks on a String,” a satire on socialism that was a winner at the recent Berlin Film Festival.

Menzel and about 20 other Eastern European filmmakers will be here: among them, Polish director Krzystof Kieslowski, whose “Decalog” has been hailed as one of the great films of our time. This year’s festival poster was designed by Poland’s leading poster maker, Andrzej Pagowski.

The festival will also provide an American arena for “The Drayman and the King,” a Jewish film from the Soviet Union directed by a Jewish director, Vladimir Alenikov, and based on the Odessa stories of Isaac Babel.

Another segment of the program is called Black Independent Cinema Now, which Wlaschin said will emphasize black independent Los Angeles filmmakers. “We’re showing eight feature films and will have a panel discussion with virtually all the new black independent filmmakers, not just from L.A. but from other cities as well,” said Wlaschin. “The theme of the discussion will be a quote from Warrington Hudlin, the producer of ‘House Party,’ who said that ‘This is the best time ever for black filmmakers.”

The festival’s opening film is decidedly American--William Friedkin’s “The Guardian,” a horror picture Wlaschin likens to Friedkin’s earlier “The Exorcist.”

Other key festival offerings are a survey of about two dozen U.S. independent films, a section of 16 films that won grand prizes at other international film festivals, and programs of a dozen Spanish-language films and 10 Asian films.

There will be tributes to documentarian David L. Wolper on his 40th anniversary in show business, to animator Walter Lantz, who will celebrate his 90th birthday in the course of the festival (Lantz’ most famous creation, Woody Woodpecker, will turn 50 at the same time), and to director Stanley Donen, whose recently restored 1957 “Funny Face,” with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, will close the festival.

Once again there will be the presentation of the Orson Welles Awards, composed of seven prizes to directors chosen by their peers around the world. Last year’s top prize went to Clint Eastwood for his direction of “Bird,” while the lifetime achievement award went to Billy Wilder.