Author: Doug Cummings

My final wrap-up of the Los Angeles Film Festival:

Daratt (Dry Season)

Continuing my exploration of the excellent New Crowned Hope series, I caught up with Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s entry from Chad, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last year. The filmmaker builds off the themes of vengeance and forgiveness in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito by setting his story during the period following the Chadian civil war, when universal amnesty was officially declared. Rejecting that policy, an elderly man whose son was murdered during the conflict asks his grandson to avenge his father, and …

More from the Los Angeles Film Festival:

Copacabana

When Argentine filmmaker Martin Rejtman was asked by a television station to document a large community event, he settled on something he knew little about–a Bolivian music festival in Buenos Aires, and its surrounding immigrant culture. A filmmaker noted for his highly scripted fictional features, Rejtman approached the task with an entirely new conceit: look, listen, learn, record intuitively, and discover a form later.

The resulting film is a wide-eyed exploration of the Bolivian experience that seems like a traditional documentary turned inside out. Beginning with the Nuestra SeÒora de Copacabana festival, …

The Los Angeles Film Festival is well underway, and this the second year the festival has been held in Westwood Village, an outdoor entertainment plaza featuring several movie palaces and a plethora of eateries between UCLA and the largely Persian neighborhood to the south. The location continues to work beautifully–far better than the scattered set-up of previous years. Sunny and breezy, with temperatures hovering between the upper 70s and lower 80s, it has been downright refreshing to stroll (or run, as the case may be) between venues.

The festival’s newest venue is Landmark’s “national flagship” theater at the Westside Pavilions …