Film Fest Is Right for L.A.

A festival that begins with Charlton Heston onstage introducing one of his finest movies, “El Cid,” and that features films starring people like Sir Alec Guinness, Kathleen Turner and Gabriel Byrne, and that allows audiences to talk to Ray Bradbury about his films, and that ends with Bibi Anderson, Ally Sheedy and Helen Slater on stage discussing films in which they star, hardly seems like a festival too esoteric for the ordinary Los Angeles filmgoer.

Yet Kenneth Turan’s commentary (Sunday Calendar, July 4) suggests that the American Film Institute L.A. International Film Festival does not cater to local audiences and that it presents obscure films by directors he hasn’t heard of from 40 countries around the world and is generally too big.

The American Film Institute believes that an L.A. festival has a real obligation to present films reflecting the multiethnic basis of the city with movies in Spanish, Chinese, Armenian, Swedish, Korean, Israeli, French, Japanese and many other African, Asian and European languages. There is great value in allowing Hollywood to see a survey of what is happening in cinema in other countries and in the American independent sector.

Multiculturalism needs width and breadth. This cannot be done in a small festival of 25 films. Until 1968, most festivals were of this size, but intense pressure to show the range of international cinema made all of the major festivals expand to well over 100 or more films (only New York kept the old limited pattern).

Los Angeles needs a festival that spotlights new as well as established filmmakers, and that shows the work of low-budget and short-subject directors, in addition to showing the major works of great international figures, paying tribute to the work of major directors of the past and attracting attention to debut directors.

The AFI does not ignore the major studios and big-budget movies, and has often presented Hollywood films when they are available within the strict marketing plans that studios devise for their investments. The festival has even been dedicated in different years to writers, producers and cinematographers and has worked with Hollywood guilds in special tribute series.

Hollywood films will always be presented in Los Angeles with fanfare and large advertising budgets. Films from other countries and sectors could well be ignored without an event like AFI Fest.

The AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival provides a real service to Hollywood and the community and is certainly the right kind of festival for Los Angeles. It may not have the multimillion-dollar funding needed to make it as glamorous as Cannes or Berlin, but it is an essential part of the cultural life of the film capital.