The 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival (June 18-28) will likely be remembered as the edition when events off-screen were as dramatic as those on-screen. The current political and cultural climate seemed to affect the workings of the festival and encroach on the usually quiet Westwood Village, home to LAFF for a fourth year. First, controversy shook the festival late last year when its director Richard Raddon resigned from his position after the widely publicized revelation that he had made a contribution to the pro-Proposition 8 campaign to ban gay marriage in California. Film producer Rebecca Yeldham stepped in as the new director in March.

Then, once the festival got underway, hundreds of demonstrators gathered night and day in front of Westwood’s Federal Building in solidarity with post-election protesters in Iran, filling the festival atmosphere with Persian pride and interest. This feeling was no more in evidence than with the bestowing of the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature to Cyrus Nowrasteh’s The Stoning of Soraya M., an Iranian tale whose depiction of violent oppression resonated with the current political turmoil in Iran.

However, it wasn’t until day eight of the festival that the world turned its gaze here, when Michael Jackson died at the UCLA Medical Center, only a few blocks from the heart of the event, and news crews and fans descended to capture the passing of the King of Pop.

Even the festival’s Documentary Competition had its share of drama with the strange case of Bananas!*. Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten captures L.A.-based lawyer Juan Dominguez and the mounting of a class-action suit against Dole Food for its use of pesticides that allegedly made its workers in Nicaragua sterile. But one day before the start of the festival, an L.A. Superior Court judge dismissed a follow-up case and ruled that Dominguez and his witnesses were guilty of fraud and lying under oath, a decision that threw the documentary’s evidence into question. Apparently under pressure from Dole, which threatened legal action, the festival screened the film out of competition, accompanied by a statement that essentially indemnified itself. Although the film is self-defeating by sticking to the prosecution’s perspective, it stands as a fascinating case study in truth and the ethics of documentary filmmaking.

With a somewhat slimmed-down doc competition, the Mexican film Those Who Remain won Best Documentary. Co-directors Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman record the pain of separation by tracking a number of families who stay in their homeland as loved ones head to the U.S. for work. The film ends with a moving depiction of a Yucatan mother and her four children about to embark on the arduous journey over the border. Although the film denies us their fate, the filmmakers provided a moving postscript by surprising the audience with an appearance by the family, now relocated in Southern California.

Serving as a kind of fictional, nightmarish counterpart to Those Who Remain, Amat Escalante’s Los Bastardos follows a pair of Mexican immigrant day laborers, who break into an Orange County home and take its single materfamilias hostage. The film invites comparisons to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, but it works in a more de-dramatized form, relying on the barest storyline and near non-performances. Described by the director as a western of sorts, the film utilizes widescreen compositions and outlaw characters which strangely evoke an abstracted take on the genre, tapping into both the immigrants’ sense of dislocation and American xenophobia.



This year’s International Spotlight focused on a selection of films from the Ambulante Film Festival, a traveling showcase of Mexican documentaries established by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. The Audience Award for Best International Feature went to the Spotlight’s Born Without, Eva Norvind’s portrait of José Flores, an armless dwarf who supports his family as a street musician. The film chronicles Flores’ home and work life and his stint as an actor, which included a role in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. Flores comes off as stoic at first and then emotionally malformed, as the film slowly reveals his string of affairs and his questionable relation to his wife.

The Narrative Competition offered a crop of emerging filmmakers with a sometimes narrow view of the world that seemed limited to stories of failed relationships. In Harmony and Me, director Bob Byington examines the post-breakup funk of his titular hero. Structured as an episodic series of gags and encounters, the film provides little insight into the messy stuff of relationships. More successful was Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace’s Best Narrative winner Wah Do Dem (Jamaican patois for “what they do”), another film about a twenty-something hipster who is ditched by a cute girlfriend (Norah Jones in a single-scene cameo)—here, just prior to their Caribbean cruise. Despite the break-up, Max goes it alone on the high seas, only to be abandoned and robbed in Jamaica. Forced to hitchhike to the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, he encounters locals both wicked and welcoming. The film was shot guerrilla-style with the waning days of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election taking on a ubiquitous presence. As Max assimilates into local customs and as Obama claims victory on TV screens much to the Jamaicans’ delight, the film seems to pitch globetrotting and Obama as the world’s great unifiers.

Rounding out LAFF was the Summer Showcase, a selection of festival-circuit favorites. Aiming for a fall release, documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner’s Sundance-winner We Live in Public recounts the crash-and-burn career of Josh Harris, an Internet pioneer who blew millions on a series of human-technology experiments. First, Harris set up an underground bunker in New York City, where a mini-society subjected itself to interrogations and round-the-clock surveillance. Afterwards, he put his life with his new girlfriend under the watchful eye of an online audience by rigging his New York loft with cameras, which captured the initial blossoming of the relationship and then the squeamish break-up. The documentary’s claim that Harris’ ideas paved the way for our current obsession with living out our lives publicly over the Internet feels overstated, but the film’s exploration of how technology shapes human interaction makes for fascinating viewing.

LAFF itself tried to stay culturally relevant by introducing its own Twitter feed, but really the festival has stayed relevant by balancing the celebrated and the obscure, audience-friendly work and films of uncompromising rigor. Where else can you experience the star-studded premiere of Michael Mann’s John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies one day and then Wang Bing’s Crude Oil, a 14-hour experiment in duration, another day?