Up to His Eyeballs in Cinematic Wonders

On Saturday I visited Hiroshima, Spain, Colorado, Mexico, Turkey, Warsaw, Manhattan, San Francisco, Tanzania, Brazil, Las Vegas, Wisconsin and Montreal, and I wasn’t even tired. OK, I was a little tired, but I managed to see all those places without venturing more than a couple of hundred yards from the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards.

The day was spent at the IFP/West--Los Angeles Film Festival, an event in its eighth year that has received an infusion of life by repositioning itself as a general-interest fest, including for the first time an international showcase.

With more than 150 films in 10 days, a festival like this can be daunting for an audience facing a schedule full of unfamiliar titles. One can either handpick films and try to see one or two per day or take my approach: total immersion in a full day of screenings, sampling something from each of the festival’s programs.

Through 12 hours of screenings, which included 11 films, I witnessed houses that ranged from half-full to sold out. The enthusiasm and response to both films and filmmakers was strong all day; some of the smaller crowds, however, would indicate that the audience may take a few years to build to fully support the festival’s lofty ambitions.

The festival’s first Saturday offered a full slate of films and events and seemed to be a perfect way to experience a bit of everything. Among the many joys of a film festival is variety that one simply cannot find at even the best-programmed art house. The eclectic nature of the festival can be quickly observed within the context of a short-films program.

My day began with the 10 a.m. screening of “The End,” five disparate shorts, including two animated films, two comedies and a documentary, all of which in some way encompassed the theme of existence.

Though all five films were splendid, the highlight of the program, and ultimately of the entire day, was Yasemin Kasim’s “We Missed Our God,” a touching documentary capturing her elderly grandparent’s return to their native Turkey. Although the least technically sophisticated of the shorts--UCLA student Kasim used a simple hand-held approach--it expresses strong emotions and underscores the powerful effects place and faith have on our sense of self.

As were most of the screenings, “The End” was followed by a brief audience question-answer session with three of the directors. The presence of the filmmakers is one of the joys of seeing films at a festival. There is something about hearing in person what inspired them to make their films and what they had to go through to get them made that enhances the experience of seeing the finished product.

After a quick lunch, I ducked into the “Coffee Talk” on acting, part of a series of discussions on the various crafts of filmmaking featuring two or sometimes three filmmakers in a moderated chat about their jobs. Actors Blair Underwood and Molly Parker, along with moderator screenwriter Naomi Foner, herself the mother of two actors, compared their experiences from very different careers and offered advice to the audience, which, not surprisingly, appeared to be made up primarily of aspiring actors.

Intensity and Diversity

The heaviest part of the film-viewing day was upon me. At 2:15 p.m., I saw an intense black-and-white Polish drama, “Hi Tereska,” directed by Robert Glinski. Aleksandra Gietner stars as a sweet Warsaw teenager whose gradual slide into delinquency explodes in an ending that can only be called unremittingly grim.

Next was a pairing of two diverse documentaries, each involving a man of color seeking a missing part of his being. Sarah Kernochan’s Academy Award-winning short, “Thoth,” tells the story of an eccentric Central Park performer who has created a one-man opera as well as his own mythology.

In “That’s My Face,” Thomas Allen Harris, a filmmaker afflicted with double vision, goes on a poetic quest in search of his roots that leads backward to a similar journey his mother made in the 1970s and forward to an area of Brazil known as “The Island of the Tides.” The quest was inspired by one dream and Harris was aided by another, which led him to a treasure trove of home movies shot by his grandfather; they are incorporated into the film.

The definite crowd-pleaser of the day was Christian Taylor and Lindy Heymann’s faux documentary, “Showboy.” Taylor, basically playing himself, is a writer for TV’s “Six Feet Under” when a BBC documentary crew chooses him as the subject for a “successful young Brit in Hollywood” piece. Although he is almost immediately fired by producer and mentor Alan Ball, the crew still follows him as he goes to Las Vegas; he is supposedly researching a screenplay, but it gradually becomes obvious that he is actually pursuing his dream of being a dancer.

Chris Collins’ short, “Pickup Polka,” has a dry Great White North sensibility and is similar in some ways to “Fargo.” A team of nerdy Czech immigrants accompanied by a polka-playing accordionist takes on a team of ringers in a game of basketball in a Madison, Wis., gymnasium. The short aptly preceded “Looking for Leonard” by Canadians Matt Bissonette and Steven Clark, an equally dry black comedy about a comely femme fatale who reads Leonard Cohen novels and has a deadly affair with yet another Czech emigre.

At 11:30 p.m., following the “Looking for Leonard” question-answer session, I called it a night even though there were midnight screenings beckoning. My cinematic passport was full.

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IFP/West--Los Angeles Film Festival, Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood; Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Many of these films will screen again in the remaining days of the festival. (866) 345-6337 or www.lafilmfest.com for information.