Curtain rises on L.A. film fest

The variety of offerings in the 11th annual Los Angeles Film Festival is dramatic, stretching from two strikingly different silent classics, “The Son of the Shiek,” with a Rudolph Valentino at his most romantic, and F.W. Murnau’s haunting “The Last Laugh,” with Emil Jannings as a proud hotel major-domo reduced to men’s room attendant, to the gritty documentaries “La Sierra” and “Pilgrimage” that focus on the perils and anguish of border crossings -- from Mexico to the U.S., from Iran to Iraq. The grungy, surreal quality of the Russian “4” offers a bold contrast to the neo-realist poignancy of the late Morris Engel’s unforgettable “The Little Fugitive.”

Amid the 11-day festival, crammed with more than 70 features and 50 shorts in 16 venues, the LAFF, which began as a weekend event at the Raleigh Studios, even manages to work in Julia Sweeney in her new one-woman live show, “Letting Go of God.” Festival headquarters will again be on the floor above the Sunset 5, the festival’s principal venue along with the nearby Directors Guild of America.

Thursday’s opening-night attraction, at the Cinerama Dome, will be David Jacobson’s “Down in the Valley,” starring Edward Norton and set in San Fernando Valley. Kathy Baker stars as a woman desperate to speak to her daughter in Rodrigo Garcia’s “Nine Lives,” this year’s Centerpiece Premiere, screening June 21 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The festival closes at the National Theater in Westwood with Don Roos’ “Happy Endings,” composed of vignettes of modern life and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Laura Dern, Tom Arnold, Bobby Cannavale, Steve Coogan and Jason Ritter.

The festival is produced by Film Independent (FIND), the new name for the Independent Feature Project, and will also present several special events, including such treats as an evening with writer-director Robert Towne reflecting on his relationship with his hometown, Los Angeles, and a program of the final work of major experimentalist Stan Brakhage.

The festival’s concern for variety is revealed in this year’s choices for guest director, director Sydney Pollack, and its artist-in-residence, THE RZA, chief producer and founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan -- each of whom will be presenting three films.

Eight of the films available for preview, mostly documentaries, set a high standard for the festival. Written by Vladimir Sorokin from an idea of its director Ilya Khrzhanofsky, “4” (Sunset 5 Friday at 9 p.m. and Monday at 9:45 p.m.) exemplifies the high-risk filmmaking that tests a festival’s daring. Demanding and mysterious, appalling yet intriguing, “4” brings together three deceptive characters in a Moscow bar.

The film focuses mainly upon Marina, who treks across a long stretch of the most desolate countryside imaginable to the funeral of Zoya, another young woman, who is perhaps her sister and with whom she had a falling out and who died under circumstances of descriptiondefying bizarreness. “4” is an implacable film whose images, many of them frankly revolting and crude, suggest that a relentlessly degraded humanity is devouring itself; for what it’s worth, Khrzhanofsky has said he wanted to express the individual’s feeling of loss in an increasingly globalized world..

“Romantico” (Sunset 5 Friday at 7 p.m. and June 24 at 10 p.m.) refers to the songs that Carmelo Munoz Sanchez sings as he accompanies himself on his guitar rather than to the 57-year-old’s solemn spirit. In following Carmelo and his lifelong friend and fellow troubadour Arturo as they serenade customers in San Francisco’s Mexican restaurants and to their native Salvatierra, Mexico, Becker brings into sharp focus the plight of illegal immigrants. Carmelo and his family are much happier when he’s home, but it takes two weeks in Salvatierra to make the $100 he can make on a good weekend night in San Francisco -- and he would like to give his two daughters a better chance in life than he had.

“La Sierra” (Sunset 5 Saturday at noon and Sunday at 9:30 p.m.) takes its title from one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the hillsides overlooking Medellin, Colombia. Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez at one point have to dodge bullets themselves to focus on Edison, the charismatic 22-year-old leader of Bloque Metro, affiliated with Colombia’s illegal paramilitary armies who have fought with left-wing guerrillas for 40 years. The filmmakers capture the fatalism of Edison and the cycle of violence in which he and his friends are caught up but are short on information.

Margaret Brown’s “Be Here to Love Me” (DGA 1 June 25 at 7 p.m.) is an extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary man, Townes Van Zandt (1944-97), known as the songwriter’s songwriter, a man who toured and recorded for nearly 30 years but never came near having a hit on his own. His “Pancho & Lefty” took Willie Nelson to the top of country charts and his “If I Needed You” did the same for Don Wilson and Emmylou Harris.

Brown has created a delicately shaded portrait of Van Zandt from a treasure trove of archival materials and reminiscences to reveal a tall, lean, greatly gifted man, born into a wealthy but itinerant childhood, a rebel subjected in childhood to months of electro-shock therapy that seem to have left him feeling permanently disconnected emotionally. He had the gift, however, of pouring out his feelings into innumerable haunting songs and embarked upon a life that was as creative as it was ultimately destructive, for Van Zandt fueled himself on alcohol, leaving behind a legacy of poetry and pain -- in his work and in the hearts of those who loved him.

Maren Ade’s “The Forest for the Trees” (Sunset 5 June 23 at 9:30 p.m. and June 25 at 5:30 p.m.) coolly yet compassionately observes the unraveling of a clueless young small-town teacher (Eva Lobau) who accepts a position as a substitute, teaching both fifth- and ninth-graders in the German city of Karlsruhe. She eventually connects with her younger students, but her failure to assert her authority immediately ensures she will never gain control of the ninth-graders.

Too proud to be honest about her plight to anyone, the teacher exposes herself to the full chill of society’s indifference.

David Fenster’s droll, deadpan “Trona” (June 24 at 7 p.m. and June 25 at 10:15 p.m.) tracks a frazzled young businessman (David Nordstrom) who abruptly winds up in the Mojave Desert with only his wallet, briefs, socks and shoes. Feeling more liberated than desperate, he gradually acquires clothing -- and a graveyard for wrecked cars. “Trona” may be minimalist fare, but Fenster effectively suggests that the businessman, having experienced a catharsis, has worked his way toward a crucial crossroads in his life.

Natalia Almada’s poignant, punchy “Al Otro Lado” (“To the Other Side”) (Sunset 5 Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and at the DGA 2 June 22 at 4 p.m.) chronicles 23-year-old Magdiel’s decision to become an illegal immigrant. The son of a fisherman in La Reforma, Sinaloa, a region in economic crisis -- and a shrinking shrimp catch but abundant opium and marijuana crops -- Magdiel has but two choices if he is ever able to afford a home of his own and support a family: to become a drug trafficker or to try to cross the border into the U.S. But Magdiel has a gift that provides perspective on the plight of impoverished Mexicans: He is a singer-composer of corridos, ballads that give voice to the people and their dreams and despair -- and also tell stories of the drug smugglers. Almada interweaves his story with interviews and performances with such famous corrido musicians as Los Tigres del Norte, the late, legendary Chalino Sanchez, Jenni Rivera and Jesse Morales. Los Tigres composer Paulo Vargas cuts straight to the status of illegal immigrants when he says bluntly that that the U.S. needs cheap labor and that Mexico is glad to get rid of them.

Bahman Kiarostami’s illuminating “Pilgrimage” (DGA 2 June 25 at 4:45 p.m. and Sunset 5 June 26 at 7:30 p.m.) deals with another border crossing that of Iraqis long exiled in Iran who, since the fall of Saddam Hussein, have by the thousands traveled to visit Iraq’s holy shrines. In wartime the journey is dangerous, but ironically the pilgrims say American soldiers treat them kindly while Iranian border guards often bully them.

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The Los Angeles Film Festival

Where: ArcLight Cinerama Dome, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood; Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd.; Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd.; and other venues.

When: Thursday through June 26

Contact: www.lafilmfest.com; (866) FilmFest