LAFF Around the World: Los Angeles Fest Screens Strong International Slate

The Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) launched its 19th edition in a month jam-packed with festivals and showcases around the world. In California alone there was RealScreen West, Frameline and SF Docfest, and further north up the West Coast was the Seattle International Film Festival. Looking eastward, we had AFI Docs, BAMCinemaFest and The Flaherty Seminar. Crossing the pond to the UK, there was Sheffield Doc/Fest, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Open City Docs Festival in London. Throw in a few thousand graduations and weddings, and Father's Day, and you have one insane month of fun!

But LAFF managed to hold its own, with festival director Stephanie Allain and her programming team assembling an impressive slate of docs amid the cinematic offerings—no doc-specific panels, however, and just one panel with more than one docmaker featured. Nonetheless, attendees enjoyed a rich selection of nonfiction that examined the many facets of LA culture, as my colleague Katharine Relth explains in her report, as well as docs from around the world. Unlike the programmatic practice of other festivals, the Documentary Competition wedded domestic and international films, while the International Showcase included both docs and narratives.

LAFF has always presented a strong slate of Latino work. I had not heard of the Albuquerque-based boxer Johnny Tapia prior to seeing Eddie Alcazar's Tapia. The boxer—heavily tattooed, thick around the waist, his visage battered, his best bouts clearly behind him, slumped on the stool in the middle of a dimly lit boxing gym—takes us on a journey through his hard-knock life. Growing up poor in Albuquerque, he endured a lifetime of pain by the time he turned pro: His mother was kidnapped and brutally murder when he was eight, and his life afterwards was a series of struggles with drug addiction and mental illnesses, stints in prison as a dark counterpoint to his triumphs in the boxing ring, in which he earned titles in three weight divisions. The film needed a tighter edit, however; the continuity and flow were, at times, as ragged as Tapia himself in the twilight of his career. And while the footage of his fights was no doubt thrilling, the film was at times over saturated with it, along with the B-roll footage of Tapia contemplating the New Mexico sunset. Crucial information is left out-such as the fact that he had three children. And the most glaring omission of all: he had died in 2012 of a heart attack, something I discovered after the screening, through Google.

The Mexico-US border has served as the setting for many documentaries from both countries over the years. Purgatorio, from Mexico City native Rodrigo Reyes, draws his inspiration from Dante's epic poem of the same name, the second volume of his magnificent Divine Comedy. Reyes takes us on an unsettling tour of both sides of the border, lingering among the cast of characters who figure in this strange, often macabre place. We meet drug addicts; Minutemen who try to foil border-crossers, and activists who try to help them; border patrol agents; would-be migrants, both young and old; coroners; reporters; young children rattling off the names of automatic weapons. The imagery is often indelible—abandoned houses, hotels and whole towns; a boat in the middle of the desert; a dilapidated home for the mentally challenged; a missile silo; a center for the euthanization of dogs; a re-enactment of a 19th century wild west shootout.  Reyes did not aim to make a social issue doc here, even though the issues are implicit. He instead presents a sad carnival of lost souls, a cinematic essay of the damned.

Traveling further south in Latin America, to Chile, the El Pasajero hotel in Santiago is a comparatively sunny place. In Patricia Correa and Valentina Mac-Pherson's The Women and The Passenger (Las Mujeres del Pasajero), the women in question are chambermaids in a de facto sex hotel. As they clean the rooms in their post-tryst states of disarray, the women chat about their work and the wild activities of the hotel guests. And as they wait in the hallway to clean the next room, oblivious to the moans and gasps that fill the air, the chambermaids reflect wistfully on love and marriage, and sex and romance, transforming themselves into sage caretakers of the anonymous passengers who carry out their fervent desires.

Elsewhere around the world, the UK was a source of a number of LAFF selections. Eva Weber, long lauded for the poetic style with which she infuses her short docs, has ventured into new territory with her first feature-length doc, Black Out. Here she travels to Guinea, which is dealing with the struggles of a nascent democracy. Weber trains her camera on students in the throes of exam week, who, because of frequent power outages in their villages, must travel to gas stations and stadiums, where working electricity will afford them valuable study time. Weber opts for voiceovers from them, rather than on-camera commentary, enabling her to pursue the images that speak for a nation in transition.

In the UK itself, and England specifically, filmmakers Andy Heathcote and Heike Bachelier introduce us to Stephen Hook, a dairy farmer whose endearment with his 55 cows might place him in spiritual company with famed horse whisperer (and doc star) Buck Brannaman. The Moo Man profiles a throwback to a bygone era, when independent farmers and bucolic settings inspired Wordsworth and his Romantic era compatriots. Hook fights a modern battle though, struggling financially to maintain his cows, and stake a place in the market for his raw pasteurized milk. But he wages it with good humor and a steadfast commitment to his work. Like many character-driven docs, though, The Moo Man ran a bit too long—and might have made for a more compelling short.  

Another UK native among the docmakers at LAFF, Lucy Walker, has actually lived in LA for a while. Her latest work, The Crash Reel, which airs July 15 on HBO, follows the devastating crash and long, painful recovery of champion snowboarder Kevin Pearce. Combining action and behind-the-scenes footage of Pearce's dramatic rise to stardom with wrenching documentation of his rehabilitation and his family's abiding support, The Crash Reel goes beyond the sports documentary to give us an all-too-human portrait of the often deadly consequences of extreme sports. Pearce, the film proves, is one of the lucky ones, and Walker captures both his stubborn insistence on returning to the high-octane world in which he shined and his eventual resignation to and acceptance of the world, that, thanks to the magnanimous support of his family, he has learned to embrace.

Walker and her team have developed the #LoveYourBrain Campaign in conjunction with the film, which is designed to draw attention to the kind of Traumatic Brain Injury that Pearce endured. The campaign has taken The Crash Reel to colleges, hospitals, veterans hospitals and to other community centers that address TBI. The film makes its commercial theatrical premiere in winter 2014, through Phase4 Films

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.