The Los Angeles Festival of Movies Returns for Year Two: Fest Founders on Growing an Indie Audience in an Industry Town

Between the American Cinematheque, Quentin Tarantino’s theaters and plenty of other options, an L.A. moviegoer can see a great film on any given night these days. But while repertory programming is in vogue among local cinephiles, premiering indies can have trouble breaking through in the city. The Los Angeles Festival of Movies strives to provide that spotlight.

After its sold-out 2024 launch, the Eastside-focused event is returning with an even more adventurous lineup. Co-presented by non-profit programmer Mezzanine and “The Substance” distributor Mubi, LAFM spans just one weekend, April 3-6. The fest has sold out its all-access passes and has now launched its final wave of individual tickets.

This year’s slate is capped at a compact count of 12 features, plus live-action and animated shorts programs and a series of talks held at the Philosophical Research Society. Film selections include one world premiere in Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s surrealist haunted house movie “Room Temperature,” along with favorites from fests like Rotterdam and Sundance. There are also starry comedies like Tim Robinson’s “Friendship,” from A24, and Chloë Sevigny’s “Magic Farm,” which was acquired by Mubi ahead of its Sundance premiere.

“It is more of a discovery lineup this year. I’m really honored people are going for it,” says fest co-founder Sarah Winshall. “I hadn’t heard of a lot of the films that were playing until we started reviewing options.”

“We’re not trying to be the satellite Sundance or a ‘best of the fests.’ We’re not taking other curators’ work and recycling it. We’re looking at what hasn’t yet made it to L.A.,” says Micah Gottlieb, Mezzanine’s artistic director and the fest’s other co-founder. “Even though we don’t take submissions, we always take recommendations from people that we trust.”

“It’s a solicitation-based festival, more than a submission-based festival,” Winshall adds.

“With a lot of submission-based festivals, it creates a huge volume to consider. Given how small our team is, we can’t realistically give our time and attention to all of those to keep our festival sustainable in terms of labor,” says Gottlieb. “We don’t want to become the kind of festival that charges filmmakers for submissions and uses that as a monetary stream, then pushes that work onto interns or volunteers. That’s part of how a lot of major film festivals sustain themselves.”

After its volunteer-driven 2024 edition, LAFM launched a successful fundraising campaign last fall to reaffirm its audience’s appetite for indies — and to provide a viable financial incentive for its staff’s continued efforts.

“That has allowed us to pay ourselves and everybody that is working for us,” Winshall says. “We went to the community, and we said, ‘Help us make it can happen again.’ You can ask people to work very hard with the promise that something in the future will happen, but you can’t ask them to do that twice in a row.”

The staff now operates out of a small office in L.A.’s Chinatown district — not too far from LAFM’s venues of Vidiots in Eagle Rock, 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown and microcinema Now Instant Image Hall (just a few blocks away in Chinatown). The work space is largely occupied by Winshall’s indie banner Smudge Films, with LAFM becoming a full-time operation at the start of the year.

“Depending on how much money we raise in the coming years, we’d like for the festival to be a little bit larger, to incorporate more films. It’s just a matter of resources and budget,” Gottlieb says.

“Expanding our venues, expanding our footprints in the venues that we were in last year, that all means more work,” Winshall adds. “I’m very, very nervous to grow too fast. It’s a classic track that other places can fall in.”

The North Star remains a communal ambience; as Winshall puts it, “creating a living room for the weekend.”

“This is for film lovers, and not necessarily about the industry or careers,” Winshall says. “Weirdly, there’s becoming a bigger and bigger gap between those two groups.”

---

Are there any lessons you learned from last year’s LAFM that led to adjustments for this second edition?

GOTTLIEB: A big priority is we wanted to have second screenings of films. Given how quickly everything sold out last year, we wanted to make sure that people had more opportunities. We also realized that we could have been better at signaling our standby policy. Almost everybody that came and waited in standby, even for things like “I Saw the TV Glow,” got in. And people can also come hang out. We want to retain that clubhouse vibe that we were able to achieve.

WINSHALL: We’re growing in a way that is a response to the feedback we got. We have a lounge at 2220 Arts + Archives and we’re turning that place into a hub. It happened organically last year, but now we’re giving people a place to sit, food to eat and a way to be comfortable between screenings.

This year’s lineup is largely composed of movies that run shorter than even 90 minutes. Is that a conscious programming decision or is it just the nature of the films that the fest considers?

GOTTLIEB: It does allow us to fit in more films to the schedule, but it’s also just great when a filmmaker can do so much in just over an hour. A lot of people binge-watch 10 episodes of an HBO show that’s a lot of filler, circling the drain. One thing we were also struck by is just how many unique films, by and about Gen Z, are starting to emerge. We have “Debut,” which is by a Gen Z filmmakerr Julian Castronovo, and “Cent Mille Milliards,” about a Gen Z sex worker. And Neo Sora’s “Happyend,” our closing night film, follows Japanese high school students and is explicitly about what it means to live in an authoritarian society — something that I think everybody’s thinking about right now. We hope it comes across why these films feel vital and very of the moment.

WINSHALL: There’s a demographic of young people living here right now and we’re serving them. My parents are coming this year and it’s really fun to think about the program I’ve curated for a boomer versus the program I’ve curated for a high school student. But it will always be an adventurous filmgoer that finds things they love. It’s for people who like movies already. You have to start there.

My read of Los Angeles filmgoing is that repertory programming has become more popular in recent years. Why do you think that is?

WINSHALL: I might disagree. It’s always been here. There was a COVID lull, but when I first moved to L.A. in 2004, I was a young person going to the pre-Tarantino-owned New Beverly every week. And I was not the only one. It was a very lively scene. We’ve emerged with a new landscape of screening options, but I wouldn’t say that the appetite is changed. It’s just moved because of where things are showing. At least, that’s my two cents.

GOTTLIEB: Audiences can also be excited about new movies just as much as they’ve been excited about revivals. We’re trying to link Los Angeles film culture to the broader film culture as much as we can. It includes having films from other fests, but also having films by people like Dennis Cooper, who’s better known as a novelist, and putting him in conversation with Tony Tulathimutte — two authors who are both on the edge of depicting aberrant human behavior and sexuality. It’s exciting to include that extradisciplinary element to this festival.

WINSHALL: Or the talk with Emily Spivack, who wrote “Worn Stories” and is great at identifying innocuous items having meaning, alongside comedian John Early, who is a really articulate movie fan, and Shirley Kurata, a costume designer — it might just be a brown sweater, but that brown sweater changed the movie. [Kurata was an Oscar nominee for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”] We’re trying to hone a way of framing movie fandom that will be really fun. It’s not the kind of panel that I’m seeing at a lot of festivals.

This interview has been edited and condensed.