A new film festival to watch

Paula Mejía’s 1500-word deep-dive on LA’s new film festival on the block.

On Saturday night at Los Angeles’s VHS-store-slash theater Vidiots, a sold-out audience gathered for the raucous west coast premiere of Andrew DeYoung’s comedy of errors, Friendship. Starring Paul Rudd and cringe king Tim Robinson, the film had the crowd hooting and howling. The giggly crowd then stuck around for an afterparty held in the theater lobby, which went late into the night. We’d just collectively watched a film about two guys whose budding friendship ruined both of their lives, yet strangers were cutting it up with one another over glasses of house red after the Los Angeles Festival of Movies screening. 

This being LA, the event naturally had star power. Kate Berlant and John Early (who DeYoung has worked with on various projects) were there, Simon Rex and the Daniels too; not surprising, since A24 is releasing the film. D’Arcy Carden rocked a baseball hat paying tribute to LA’s coolest local marionette theater. Many others wore the brown hats A24 distributed to audience members earlier that evening, stitched with the words “Male Friendship” in brat green. I spotted chair pants guy from Jury Duty. I’m fairly certain I saw Elizabeth Olsen for a second. Comedians Mitra Jouhari, Greta Titelman, and Geraldine Viswanathan sat together at the screening, and Patton Oswalt grabbed the mic during the post-film Q&A between DeYoung and Aidy Bryant to pose a question about a scene so wild I wouldn’t dare spoil it. “It’s like being inside of a podcast,” the screenwriter Malloy Moseley told me as we leaned against the popcorn counter. 

I had a revealing conversation with someone about competitiveness between dudes while standing next to them in the bathroom line. Later I found myself amidst a gaggle of tall guys and we laughed at how us over-6-footers gravitate towards the edges of rooms, as though preempting a class picture. The party eventually spilled over to Walt’s, the pinball and hot dog bar a few blocks down. No one was dashing out in a hurry, and everyone appeared at ease. Chatty, even. They seemed willing to entertain the idea of spontaneity—a rarity, if not an impossibility, in this city. I’ve never had more fun at a screening in Los Angeles.

The question of whether or not to attend film industry-adjacent social events in this town typically depends on answers to two crucial questions, in the following order: One, who’s going to be there? And two, what’s the parking situation like? As a relatively extroverted Texan who covers culture and entertainment in Southern California but is neither important nor liquid enough to be a member of the San Vicente Bungalows, these sorts of parties can sometimes feel standoffishly scene-y to me — rank with tepid vibes emanating from a room full of people computing one another's social hierarchies as they scan each other up and down. (Honestly, it’s not that dissimilar from New York parties in that sense.)

Yet, the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, an independent and arthouse film festival that just culminated its second year of programming, is decidedly not that. It does attract producer types and alt-comedy superstars, but also locals passionate about their monthly indie cinema memberships. Taking place over four days and scattered throughout various microcinemas, video stores, multi-purpose spaces, and one Philosophical Research Society located within the city’s east side, LAFM gambled that festival-goers would ride with them during this experiment in street parking availability — and that they could bring back a full-tilt independent film festival to the city after a notable dearth of its kind during the fraught post-pandemic years.

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