DAY ONE

It is the cardinal sin of every writer who’s been based in LA long enough to wax poetic about the various versions of the city that seem to exist in conversation and contradiction with one another at any single point of time. A dilemma that filmmaker and film critic Thom Andersen more or less had the final say on when it comes to cinema through his, now canonical, essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which posits that the city will always exist in a perpetual identity crisis because of how often its been remixed, redressed, deconstructed and destroyed on screen. Yet somehow it feels appropriate to exhume these questions about identity and depiction at a time where local film and television production seem to be dropping to historic lows with each passing day, with LA at risk of becoming the “Detroit of entertainment”. A development that seems to place somewhat of a blow to Andersen’s thesis: we can no longer understand the city that exists fetishized on our screens because it so rarely seems to even cross our screens. In this way the LA of today seems to rest far outside of the imaginary, crossing into far scarier territory that many are unable, or maybe unwilling, to confront, that the LA of today is the LA you actually live in.

Now in its third year the Los Angeles Festival of Movies has continued to give dimension to the fractured film culture that exists in the city, a condition that seems inconceivable in one of the few global hubs that seems synonymous with film, but which reflects a larger systemic failure to foster younger talent and more outre voices in an entertainment industry that continues to seem far more interested in venture capital money than actual artistry. In a call earlier in the day with an industry professional she remarked something to the extent of “Oh LA festivals are great, you have AFI Fest and um… LAFM”, the former known to host the premiere of films such as The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (2025) and the latter mostly held at 2220 Arts and Archives. Just as alt lit and alt comedy seem to have coalesced around the margins of their respective industries, LAFM has created a similar platform for film, with incredible overlap between all three scenes. Perhaps this is best reflected in the tote bag that adorns the festivals merch stands which reads “Los Angeles Festival of Movies Remembers Taix, LA’s Oldest French Restaurant 1927 – 2026” a wearable memorial for a now bygone hub for LA based creatives who expect you to recognize them from their Instagram handles which has elicited all sorts of reactions from festival goers. “The reaction to the Taix closure is a pseudo event and anyone who cares sincerely about it should redirect this energy to something more important” opines archivist and actor Noah Brockman. “RIP Taix, OG fucking LA establishment, I don’t care what anybody says, I am entitled to feel sad about it” replies Tee Park (director of Cece’s Interlude) Everyone has their own version of LA.

But perhaps the actual LA of today is better reflected in John Early’s Maddie’s Secret (2025), the festival’s opening film which had its US premiere at Vidiots in Eagle Rock last night. In its opening minutes Maddie, a bulimic aspiring cooking influencer played by Early jogs through Silverlake all the way to her dish washing job at the Gourmaybe test kitchen, a food content creation hub obviously modeled after Bon Appétit, before being greeted by her conniving boss Zach (played by Conner O’Malley) who screams to the staff “Who’s ready to make some content!”, a fitting reminder of what actually gets produced in LA.

With Maddie’s Secret, Early, an alt comedy mainstay best known for his surreal, wry sense of humor and, among other things, starring in cult streaming series Search Party, makes a prodigious leap into the world of cinema, flexing an emotional sensitivity and formal ambition that rarely coexists with the post ironic tenor of most contemporary alt comedy. Early’s film borrows liberally from the conventions of both 1950s melodramas, most notably the work of Douglas Sirk, and 1980s after school specials, particularly (and perhaps obviously) Kate’s Secret (1986), genres known to exaggerate and embellish but which, otherwise, were willing to tackle contemporary social issues in a straightforward manner. By drawing from these influences Early’s film defies easy expectations, of course it is a frequently raucous comedy but underneath it all what you’re met with is an extremely frank film about bulimia. Comparisons are bound to be made with Todd Haynes, who similarly recontextualized the melodrama and more broadly, the idea of the old Hollywood “women’s picture” as the domain of the queer filmmaker, with the piano stings of Michael A. Hesslein’s score in Maddie’s Secret being reminiscent of how Haynes deployed repurposed Michel Legrand compositions in May December (2023) Yet throughout the film I couldn’t help but be reminded of the work of British filmmaker Mike Leigh who made his name in the somewhat contradictory world of kitchen sink realism. Stylistically Early’s film couldn’t be further from Leigh, approximating the expressionistic visual language of Sirk, crafting various pillowy frames with cinematographer Max Lakner. Yet like Leigh Early possesses an overwhelming empathy for his titular character, going to great lengths to sketch out how their underlying condition colors how they perceive the world and how they exist within various different communities, from the Gourmaybe Test Kitchen to the Presbyterian hospital she undergoes bulimia treatment in. With both of these locations filled out by a who’s who of alt comedians, from a never been better Kate Berlant to a nervy Vanessa Bayer, characters who tumble through mentions of therapy apps, streaming TV shows and short form video content, as if they can understand themselves better, or maybe understand how they exist in LA, when they get out the other end.

It should also be noted that Maddie’s Secret marks the second time production company Dogma 3000, run by Harris Mayersohn and Danny Scharer, who both serve multiple roles on the film, have secured a major spot within the LAFM lineup, previously closing the festival with Conner O’Malley & Danny Scharar’s Rap World in 2024. The success of Dogma 3000 gestures towards the larger ethos of the festival, highlighting how independent producers can fill in the gaps of cultural production that larger studios have failed to satisfy, with Conner O’Malley’s comedy shorts, many of which hosted on YouTube shorts, becoming a mainstay for people of a certain age. A fact that was made clear to me when a blonde sorority girl with vocal fry told me that Conner O’Malley was as good live as he was in the YouTube shorts. That is to say that the work of Dogma 3000 feels uniquely resonant to Gen Z, a jaded generation who’ve grown up in a post modern culture, in part shaped by TV writers like Dan Harmon, where most comedy seems to operate under the smug assumption that everyone already knows every trope, and who’ve decided to instead find solace by blasting their brains with short form video content. In truth Maddie’s Secret is no different, as it operates with a full post ironic understanding of what it’s satirizing, but underneath this lies both a reverence and a pronounced sincerity, which in my eyes is worth celebrating.

Though it’s not lost on me that as film, not just in LA, but in the world has become more marginal, I’m writing to more and more of a niche audience, preaching to an ever shrinking choir. On Lyft to Vidiots I decided to listen intently to the radio and between The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s Stay and Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club I was reminded that the weekend of LAFM coincided with another major event, Coachella, which may be one of the few monocultural juggernauts we still have, and which made my world feel all the more small. If you notice a dearth of young people at LAFM this weekend maybe you can find solace in the idea that they’re off somewhere hopped up on molly at Justin Bieber’s headlining set rather than thinking about what’s probably actually happening. At the LAFM opening party at Grand Star Jazz Club in Chinatown I asked one of the few partygoers my age if he was seeing any movies this weekend, to which he replied “Yeah I just saw The Drama it was awesome” and when I followed up about the actual festival he replied “No, what’s that”. And just when I thought that for movies and mega music festivals, only one of which people in my age bracket seem to really care about, neither the twain shall meet I look at my phone and discover the titular Digger, from Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Cruise’s Digger is at Coachella.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DAY TWO

For those reading these daily recaps for industry scoops and inside baseball indie film jokes rather than thoughtful cultural analysis I am happy to report that on the second day of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies I overheard Matt Grady, the founder of Brooklyn-based film distributor Factory 25 and bad boy of American independent film distribution remark: “Contrary to what people think I like LA”. With that out of the way I was struck yesterday by both the diversity of programming this year and the festival’s continued commitment to platforming local filmmakers from many disparate, seemingly contradictory, circles within the city. An ethos best captured by a curio being sold in the lobby of 2220 Arts & Archives: an encrypted USB from new distributor Video StoreAge which carried the two films that premiered that day, Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming (2025) and Tucker Bennett’s In the Glow of Darkness (2025). Two films that could not be more different, the former an austere Armenian historical film which borrows from the tradition of slow cinema and structuralist filmmaking, the latter a cyberpunk comedy baked in the perma-fried visual language of the internet, with the only connection seemingly being that both filmmakers are based in LA. This unlikely double feature is indicative of the variety of programming one can encounter on an average day at LAFM, which, by virtue of having such a tightly curated selection, has forgone the tight parameters festivals today tend to organize films by, usually through vague selection titles like “Perspectives” or “Midnight Madness” which neatly demarcate exactly the type of film an audience member will see. 

This approach to programming reminded me of a piece by Richard Lorber, the original bad boy of American film distribution, and head of Kino Lorber, and by proxy the head of streamer Kino Film Collection, this year’s festival sponsor titled “Launching Substack With a Controversial Take: Film Is More Than Storytelling” In his debut Substack piece Lorber embarks on a crusade against the idea that cinema as a medium is synonymous with linear storytelling, stating that “If that’s a filmmaker’s main creative objective it risks foregoing the greater non-linear sensory arsenal that can make a cinematic work a truly transformative experience.” Instead Lorber goes to great lengths to suggest how we should see films as Gesamtkunstwerk, a German term popularized by Richard Wagner referring to a total work of art that seeks to engage all of the senses, and a term that helpfully allows us to understand things outside of genre lines. Now I’m not here to play what is and isn’t Gesamtkunstwerk but I think I can safely say that all three films I saw yesterday were Gesamtkunstwerk, as works that defied easy categorization and presented fresh modes of expression.

The first of which was Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza (2025) which had its West Coast Premiere at 2220 Arts & Archives. Aljafari’s film presents three mini DV tapes found from a trip to Gaza from 2001 around the second Intifada and follows the loose narrative of Aljafari searching for a man he met in prison as a teenager. In an introduction by comedian and former director of USC’s Middle East Media Initiative (MEMI) Hisham Fageeh he made sure to stress that With Hasan in Gaza is, by definition, a found footage film, a mode of filmmaking he contextualized within the genres of comedy and horror, tracing its origin to Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and This Is Spinal Tap (1984). By situating the documentary in a familiar strain of mainstream filmmaking Fageeh did not just call upon the audience to separate genre from medium but made them aware of the affective modes in which they view a film, suggesting that found footage usually tends to require active participation from the viewer in disentangling real from fake which creates a sustained tension. Though with regards to With Hasan in Gaza Fageeh’s statement seemed more so aimed at wresting the viewer out of the complacency that usually comes in hand with watching archival material, particularly the, at times, disempowering feeling of viewing a static document of the past, especially in the context of Gaza where one is fully aware of the devastation that is to come. In this way Aljafari’s film operates not just as an invaluable document of quotidian life in Gaza, one that could have only been facilitated by developments in consumer grade digital cameras which made depictions of the quotidian accessible in the first place, but as a very direct representation of how Israel has continued to systematically destroy Gaza and dehumanize Palestinians, rendering the city, as Aljafari declares, the world’s largest prison. Fageeh also made sure to note that what the film captures is a Gaza right before the start of Israel’s blockade on cement and we bear witness to the ways in which Israeli forces dismantle domestic infrastructure which color the edges of everyday life as a family lays out pieces of shrapnel found in their roof for Aljafari to film. Aljafari’s film, in essence, not only serves as a memorial to a Gaza of the past but a document of the horrific cyclical violence Israel has continued to enact on Palestinians for decades with very little recourse.

Following With Hasan in Gaza I caught the U.S. premiere of Armenian American filmmaker Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming (2025), an elliptical road movie that begins in a familiar mould, with a setup that recalls Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and repetitive, regimented imagery reminiscent of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999) before letting of the reigns of narrative altogether and pushing everything to a point of abstraction, a beguiling turn which made the work feel wholly original. The film opens in the aftermath of an unspecified war in Armenia as a young soldier is tasked by a family to flee with their daughter. Though as the film progresses this inciting incident begins to feel more like a pretence to explore imagery that underlies the Armenian imaginary, of marriage, war and family and of disappearance and recurrence in a country marked by constant destruction and reconstruction. As a member of the Armenian diaspora in Los Angeles Haroutounian’s relationship with the country’s history seems to similarly rest in abstraction. In a Q&A with filmmaker Courtney Stephens, Haroutounian stated: “You just hear about the war. And in a way, it’s like the memory of the gulag outlasts the gulag. When the place itself that you’re calling into question seems like it may not be there tomorrow, or whatever remains is part of a larger whole that was taken during a genocide. I’m just using the fragments” Haroutounian’s approach points towards a mode of diasporic filmmaking as obsessed with the texture of second hand memory, both unreliable yet undeniably potent, as much as it attempts to understand the motherland firsthand. To achieve this Haroutounian and cinematographer Evgeny Rodin craft a very specific visual vernacular, one obsessed with imprecision and indeterminacy as every shot seems to be in the process of inching towards focus, an effect that Haroutounian stated was conceived through a “detached photo lens that we were holding in front of the body of the camera.” offering a physical dimension to the filmmaking process despite shooting digitally. The most memorable sequences in Haroutounian’s film seem to move even further beyond the usual reference points of contemporary arthouse filmmaking and into the wheelhouse of structuralist film as we are met with seemingly endless tracking shots moving between doorways and a disorientating rotating landscape akin to Michael Snow’s La Région centrale (1971). Yet the film’s centerpiece is undeniably a continuous, prolonged unbroken shot of a band performing at a wedding which transitions into an equally hypnotic dance sequence centring on a tower of soldiers, moving in sync one stacked on top of the other as the camera spins around them. Just as Haroutounian finds a way to lose herself within images of home, both real and imagined, the audience is invited to wander in the morass of movement and texture. 

Though if you’re going by optics alone, the real triumph of the day was the West Coast premiere of Tucker Bennett’s In the Glow of Darkness (2025), which was the most full I’ve ever seen the 2220 screening room. For years Bennett has been a mainstay within the DIY LA filmmaking community, producing various low budget experimental films like Planet Heaven (2019), being known for his hyperkinetic one of a kind editing style, which he has leant to other productions like Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (2024). Though In the Glow of Darkness represents a remarkable leap in his filmography as a bona fide ensemble epic which juggles dozens of characters and plotlines throughout its 80 minute runtime. It is hard to describe the plot of In the Glow of Darkness, in fact they were giving T shirts to anyone who could, but broadly speaking it follows the various residents of San Zokyo, a dystopian future city of mid rise apartments and crummy AI advertising (which just so happens to resemble contemporary Los Angeles), as they navigate a hyperreal world of capital run amok and corporate overreach intertwined with a deeper conspiracy revolving around a drug called meme, ingested via QR codes, which features unskippable ads before trips. It is fair to say that out of any film at the festival In the Glow of Darkness most deserves the title of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Bennett had written the script for the film a decade prior and had spent the time since piecing it together, stealing shots when he could and slowly assembling his ensemble cast. He was initially put off by how unachievable it seemed in scale but had the fire reignited at him by the omnipresence of mid rise apartment buildings, as he stated to me “Every time I see these buildings I’m like, damn it. Someone’s going to get to that idea before I do” As opposed to most films about contemporary life, which feature such long gestation times that they appear irrelevant the second they release, Bennett has made a film that feels completely in line with our current moment, with an editing style that moves at the speed in which we consume brain rot and a deep understanding of the ways in which the world has been designed for efficiency rather than pleasure, a thought process that accounts for the mid rise apartment as much as the glut of AI generated content we view daily. Bennett’s filmmaking model reflects what has quickly become the de facto mode of production for many independent filmmakers in LA: of weekend shoots that can span years, run and gun on the go shots with no concern for permits, strange plasticky locations from Peerspace and continued collaboration with a whole community of friends. Bennett describes the filmmaking process of being akin to a Katamari ball, one that keeps on rolling as “you just go and collect weirdos. The true freaks find their way to each other. They’re either on a wavelength or they can just smell each other in the wilderness.” Which accounts for the film’s expansive ensemble cast which ranges from long-time collaborators like Groovin, Bennett’s own brother Lucas Bennett, local filmmakers like Devon Daniel Green, alternative musicians like Matthew Danger Lippman and film students like Kabir Malhotra. One such weirdo (I can request to change this in print if he complains) was producer Adrian Anderson (writer-director of Pomp and Circumstance) who had met Bennett at repertory screenings throughout LA and became inspired by his ingenuity and DIY spirit. As he put it succinctly:  “Tucker is my sensei”. In a city where aspiring filmmakers seem to be constantly stonewalled in their careers, whether from a lack of funding, a lack of opportunity, a lack of time or a lack of institutional recognition Bennett offers a refreshing alternative model, that, if you have enough of a drive, you can quite simply just make a movie.