Festivals

Though established and led by a team of Armenian Americans in Los Angeles, the ARPA International Film Festival treasures the second word of its name. For 22 years now, the festival has brought films to Los Angeles from various parts of the world with a focus on social justice.

Cinema Italian Style is the annual showcase of new movies from Italy presented by the American Cinematheque and Luce Cinecittà. This year the festival is dedicated to Lina Wertmüller.

Those of us who regularly attend the Mumbai Film Festival know how to deal with the shortcomings of Mumbai when making the 24-hour trip from Los Angeles. Aside from the jet lag, you steel yourself for the 95-degree heat, allow hours of lead time to battle the horrendous traffic, and then strive for a zen state of mind, because if you don’t, the sweltering, noisy, overcrowded city bursting at the seams will strain your last reserves and turn you into a gibbering wreck.

On this year’s opening night, Vladek Juszkiewicz, founder and director of the Polish Film festival in Los Angeles, announced that this 20th year  of service to the community and to this city will be his last. “Support the festival as much as you can”, he said as he stepped down from the podium.

The Lumière film festival celebrated its 10th birthday in Lyon, France and did so one year ahead of the 125th anniversary of the invention of cinema itself by its namesake brothers in this very town, in 1894. The idea behind the Thierry Frémaux-directed festival is, in fact, to celebrate film in the very birthplace of the medium: the workshop where the two industrialist brothers developed the first camera capable of producing moving images still stands and is now part of the Lumière Institute complex housing screening facilities, an archive, book store and the stately Lumière mansion which today houses the Lumière museum and doubles as festival headquarters (future plans also include a larger, more modern, Renzo Piano-designed cinema museum to be built).

Long lines snaked around the Lumière Institute theater, buzzing with anticipation for the upcoming screening. You would have been hard-pressed to guess that the excitement was for a 1926 silent film – but that is the Lumière Festival in a nutshell.

The 30th edition of the New Orleans Film Festival kicked off Wednesday night with Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Sadly, the film’s stars could not make it but that didn’t stop the city from having a party that started out a little differently from the years before: the normally bustling Roosevelt Way in front of the legendary Orpheum Theater, where opening nights are traditionally held, was unusually quiet.

A partnership of the Goethe-Institut, Friends of Goethe in Southern California and the American Cinematheque produced the 13th showcase of new German films in Los Angeles, this past weekend, October 11-14, 2019. Although Germany yields a considerable number of films annually and holds one of the biggest European film festivals, the Los Angeles event seems to be marked by a “less is more” attitude, and has remained unaffected by the ambition to match the surrounding Hollywood flare.

Now in its 10th year, the Oaxaca Film Festival in Mexico has grown into an exciting event for movie lovers and filmmakers. During the opening ceremony, held at the Macedonio Alcalá Theater, filled to the rafters with participant and public, festival director Ramiz Adeeb Azar thanked recently deceased artist Francisco Toledo for hosting the first screenings at his cine club El Pochote (named after the sacred Mayan Tree of Life).

2019 has been a golden year for Arab cinema. A record number of films from Arab countries were premiered in major international film festivals, such as Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto, and collected an unprecedented number of accolades.