A cutting-edge film festival returns, shining a light on two lost works

Los Angeles Times

02-04-2025

Last year, the inaugural Los Angeles Festival of Movies brought a much-needed jolt of energy to the city, conjuring just the right mix of in-the-know hipness and welcoming inclusivity.
Running from Thursday through Sunday, LAFM's second edition aims to keep the party rolling by screening more than 20 films at a circuit of venues all east of Hollywood.
The festival, presented by Mezzanine and Mubi, opens with the West Coast premiere of Amalia Ulman's satirical 'Magic Farm,' starring Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, Simon Rex and Ulman. A special screening of Andrew DeYoung's comedy 'Friendship,' starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, and the closing-night selection of Neo Sora's coming-of-age story 'Happyend' will both also have their West Coast premieres.
The festival will include live-action shorts, a new program of animated shorts and artist talks including novelist-filmmaker Dennis Cooper in conversation with author Tony Tulathimutte, and another with costume designer Shirley Kurata and comedian John Early. Other features in the program include Grace Glowicki's campy horror film 'Dead Lover,' Alexandra Simpson's atmospheric, Florida-set 'No Sleep Till,' Cooper and Zac Farley's unpredictable family story 'Room Temperature' and Charlie Shackleton's self-reflexive documentary 'Zodiac Killer Project.'
'For LAFM, we're always trying to celebrate films that feel personal and are clearly going against the grain of commercial filmmaking in some way,' said Micah Gottlieb, LAFM's co-founder and artistic director, via email from Los Angeles.
But even with the festival's emphasis on new work, its selection of revivals is an important part of the program.
'With revivals, we're trying to make an implicit argument that these independent films — each of them a triumph of strong vision and limited resources — should also be more widely recognized and seen as part of a broader tradition of bold and visionary work,' said Gottlieb.
Among the highlights of this year's program are the West Coast premieres of new restorations of two films from 1981, Jessie Maple's 'Will' and Robina Rose's 'Nightshift.' Both have only ever had limited theatrical distribution and these screenings should bring their filmmakers, both of whom recently died and rarely enjoyed such a showcase during their lifetimes, into a brighter spotlight.
'New restorations are a really important part of this and the L.A. film scene, so we are proud to continue to include a selection to highlight within the larger program,' said Sarah Winshall, festival co-founder, via email.
Among the high points of last year's festival was a screening of Bridgett M. Davis' 1996 film 'Naked Acts,' an exploration of identity and the movies that was initially self-distributed. That film's restoration and release were championed by Maya Cade, creator and curator of the Black Film Archive. Cade will be back at this year's festival to introduce the screening of 'Will.'
'It was an honor to have 'Naked Acts' play at LAFM last year because it felt as if I was on the groundswell of a breakthrough in Los Angeles's film community,' said Cade via email from Los Angeles. 'The festival, even in its earliest iteration, negated so many assumptions about what film gatherings can do in the city where every other part of film creation and exhibition happens. Why couldn't there be a festival too? 'Naked Acts' was so warmly received here because the festival honored revivals alongside contemporary films as the discovery of both exalt us forward to new cinematic possibilities.'
Maple, the first Black woman to join the cinematographers union in New York and among the first Black women to direct an independent feature film with 'Will,' died in 2023 at age 86. Set in Harlem, 'Will' is a story with deep emotional power as it follows a former all-American basketball player (Obaka Adedunyo) who has fallen into drug addiction. With his wife (Loretta Devine in her film debut) patiently by his side, he attempts to get his life back on track, taking in a boy from the streets (Robert Dean) whom he affectionately refers to as 'Little Brother.'
E. Danielle Butler was Maple's assistant and collaborator during the last years of her life and co-wrote Maple's 2019 memoir, 'The Maple Crew.' Butler thinks Maple would be pleased to see her film finding a new, younger audience.
'A lot of the conversations that we had during her latter years were about legacy — what does it mean now?' said Butler in a call from Atlanta. 'And so I think that even though she's not here to see it, I believe that she would be pleased with the opportunity for another generation, a new generation, to take part in it.'
Tony Best is an archivist and contractor with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who conducted an Academy oral history interview with Maple in early 2020 and remained part of her circle.
Best noted the do-it-yourself ethos that ran through Maple's work and life. She opened a coffee shop and bakery to raise money for her films. When she couldn't find places to show her work, she opened a movie theater in her Harlem brownstone, which became a long-running venue known as 20 West that was also part of a distribution circuit and a small archive for other filmmakers.
'With 20 West being in itself a kind of micro-cinema, community cinema, it's interesting that her films are being screened in those spaces now,' said Best in a call from Los Angeles. 'And I know she would really dig that at LAFM. She really believed in the community and how filmmaking can bring the community together.'
The 4K restoration of 'Will' is a joint project between the Black Film Center and Archive at Indiana University and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The 4K restoration of 'Nightshift' was undertaken by the Lightbox Film Center in collaboration with the British Film Institute and Cinenova.
Where 'Will' is told with a straightforward directness, confronting practical realities, 'Nightshift' is a film of ambiguous evocation, existing in an interzone between waking, dreaming and nightmare.
The film follows a London hotel clerk (the monomonikered Jordan, a famed part of London's punk scene) across one very eventful night, exploring a liminal space of nocturnal reveries that seem to open a portal to all sorts of behavior from an assortment of unusual guests including punks, businessmen and magicians.
Rose, who died in January at age 75, worked at the time at the Portobello Hotel in West London. The hotel would close over Christmas and so the production had the run of the place from a Monday morning to a Saturday morning. Filmmaker Jon Jost, who was the project's cinematographer, loaned the production his 16mm camera and donated a stash of high-contrast reversal film stock he had bought on sale at a steep discount, helping give the film its distinctively unreal look.
'The film stock just happened to fit the context of that particular rather funky, slightly old-fashioned hotel,' recalled Jost in an phone interview from India, where he has recently been living and working. 'And the hotel itself was quirky because it was what we would call today a boutique hotel. It was known that each room was its own fantasy. So we shot in different rooms and got the sense of the fantasy. That quality was maybe enhanced by the film stock.'
Charlotte Procter, part of feminist distribution and preservation organization the Cinenova Working Group, first met Rose in 2018 for a screening of Rose's 1977 film 'Birth Rites' and recalled the filmmaker as 'witty and sharp and a little contrary.'
Procter remarked that a 1983 entry in the journals of acclaimed British filmmaker Derek Jarman noted that unlike their European counterparts, most British avant-garde filmmakers went largely unheralded. Among the few names he listed along with his own was Rose.
'He spoke of a deeply personal cinema, shaped by direct experience, often overlooked by the mainstream,' said Procter from London. 'Robina's films embody this — distinct, compelling and often made in collaboration with the people around her.'
The film also serves as a snapshot of the creative and artistic energies of its moment in early-'80s London. Among those counterculture figures who collaborated or appeared in the film are Jost, co-writer Nicola Lane, Jordan (who also appeared in Jarman's 'Jubilee'), filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg, philosopher-activist Mike Lesser, writer Max Handley and poet Heathcote Williams.
The restorations of both 'Will' and 'Nightshift' fit nicely within the broader program of LAFM, providing historical context for the newer films that are the bulk of the festival. That sense of experiencing something special for the first time is part of the key to the event's success, giving off an energy of invention and revelation.
'We were so lucky last year to be able to debut the festival with such a bold program,' said Winshall. 'This year, going into the curation, we followed some of the guidelines from last year, prioritizing premieres for our local audience, keeping things eclectic in content, finding the films from a variety of sources, all the while trusting our curatorial noses. The program is full of discoveries, films I hadn't heard of before we programmed them.'