While Los Angeles is known around the globe as the undisputed capital of big-studio moviemaking, the city seldom receives the credit it deserves as one of the world’s liveliest centers of independent cinema. Beginning on November 20, “Independent Los Angeles,” the inaugural film and video festival at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, shines the spotlight on the city’s vibrant community of independent film, video and media artists. Curated by CalArts Film/Video dean Steve Anker and faculty member Bérénice Reynaud along with guest curators Cathy Rivera and Irene Kotlarz, the festival offers an eclectic selection of narrative, documentary, experimental, animated and multimedia works by Los Angeles-based artists who pursue their métiers outside mainstream production and distribution. It features the Los Angeles premieres of the award-winning documentary A Certain Kind of Death, directed by Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock, and the must-see counter-cultural exploitation epic Reflections of Evil, by Damon Packard, as well as a revival of Bless Their Little Hearts, the landmark 1984 drama directed by CalArts faculty member Billy Woodberry. The program also includes filmmakers and media artists such as Charles Burnett, Sharon Lockhart, Pat O’Neill, Laura Nix, Mariana Botey, Charles Phoenix, Animal Charm, Britta Sjögren, Michael Webster and Simon Leung; CalArts faculty Janie Geiser and Lewis Klahr; and alumna Christine Panushka. “Independent Los Angeles” opens with a special screening of rarely seen cartoons made by Walt Disney when he was a small independent producer in the early 1920s, and closes on November 23 with program of abstract shorts by the late animation pioneer and CalArts educator Jules Engel, featuring prints fully restored by the iotaCenter.
