DTLA Film Festival 10 Years of Cinema Magic Downtown

Wednesday, October 18th, marks the start of the 10 Annual Downtown LA Film Festival, which has screened well over one thousand films and held upwards of two hundred events since its inception in 2008.

Over the course of the decade, the festival has grown alongside the neighborhood it calls home, all in an effort to shine a light on the burgeoning independent film community downtown. Festival organizer Greg Ptacek is candid about the ups and downs of the area, stating: “We feel we’ve grown up alongside downtown. It was the ‘first boom’ when we started in 2008, so we had no problem attracting sponsors, because all the developers were creating new projects. Two years later, all those developers were literally bankrupt… our main patrons had disappeared, but we found smaller businesses to sponsor us and keep the event alive. And now we’re here in 2018, in the midst of the second renaissance.”

Indeed, as an original organizer of the festival, Ptacek is well suited to handle seismic change. Back in the year 2000, the organization initially began its life as the Silver Lake Film Festival, the very first fest of its ilk established on LA’s nascent “east side”. However, after eight years, Ptacek and co. “decided to rebrand…(we) were running out of the screening room as there were only two theaters in Silver Lake and Los Feliz. We had been programming for years in downtown as a ‘backyard’ for our festival, so it was an easy decision to make… downtown was the place to go.” 

Fast forward to 2018, and the DTLA Film Festival is set to make its biggest splash yet with an all-star line-up of content, including thirty narrative and documentary feature-length films, as well as seventy-seven short films, TV pilots, and web-series episodes. What’s more, this year’s festival is breaking ground for inclusivity by allotting a whopping sixty-five percent of its feature selections to films helmed by women directors. “It’s a new benchmark for L.A.,” states Ptacek. “We couldn’t just ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room. After the conclusion of the ninth annual festival…here comes what later became the Me Too and Times’ Up movements. It was obvious to us that we had to address that…and advance the cause of groups normally ignored by Hollywood— specifically women, but also women of color.” 

 

And that’s precisely what this year’s festival will aim to do over the course of five days’ worth of programming. Ptacek offered effusive praise to programming director Karolyne Sosa for her choices and drew particular attention to the films top-lining the opening night, centerpiece, and closing night. “For opening night, (we chose) Waterlily Jaguar,” recalls Ptacek. “A new film by Melora Walters, an established actress who’s now embarking on a directing career.” The movie centers on Bob (James LeGros), a famous novelist best known for pop potboilers, who attempts to write a more serious book, only to fall into a rabbit-hole of obsession that threatens his marriage and his sanity. “The female lead is Mira Sorvino,” says Ptacek. “(She) has been one of the public faces this last year of the Me Too movement.” Similarly, the festival’s centerpiece selection, Holy Lands, also features one of that movement’s most prominent voices in the form of the great Rosanna Arquette, who stars alongside James Caan in director Amanda Sthers’ tale of an estranged Jewish man who moves to Israel and, thumbing his nose at religious convention, decides to open a pig farm— much to the horror of his neighbors. Arquette, who plays Caan’s ex-wife, will also be a recipient of the festival’s Independent Film Pioneer award, offered to performers who have “advanced American cinema through their body of work.”

In addition, legendary actor Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, Caligula) will also be honored with the IFP award, and will see his latest feature— the dystopian sci-fi thriller Culture of Fear — screened as part the festival.

Finally, closing night will be marked by a retrospective showing of the classic 1998 film How Stella Got Her Groove Back. “We selected it because of the women-centric theme,” says Ptacek. “Angela Basset plays an investment banker in San Francisco, and the whole theme is how women…can (balance) a personal life and a career… it was perhaps one of the first major studio releases featuring a woman of color in a contemporary film. In one sense it’s kind of proto-Time’s-Up.”

But the movies themselves are only part of the full DTLA film festival experience. Adjacent to the Regal L.A. LIVE complex where the films will screen sits the historic Figueroa Hotel, which will serve as a base of operations for the festival. “The (Figueroa) just gone under a one-hundred-million-dollar renovation…it’s lovely inside and is our event sponsor,” remarks Ptacek. “One of the reasons we chose the hotel is because it was established in 1922 by a woman entrepreneur for other women….so it’s in keeping with the theme of women’s empowerment.” The Hotel Figueroa will also play host to a daily happy hour mixer networking event— otherwise known as a “party with a purpose— as well as seminars and panel discussions, in addition to their groundbreaking Alternate Reality/Virtual Reality program. 

Curated by Justin Poliski, this program will include conventional VR programs, as well as an AR selection called Portal of The Ages, which involves “putting on a clear headset as you move through space…in the grand ballroom at Hotel Figueroa. There are these giant paintings that are angels of the apocalypse and as you look through the headset, they…come alive in front of you.” Additionally, the program will feature Skybound Entertainment’s Delusions, a “hyper-reality program which…(allows) you to put the headset on and interact with the experience, including actors and…real objects, occupying a private secluded bar overlooking the main lobby.” Finally, the festival will also see the world premiere of Spare Change, a short VR documentary by Danny Oceans, which is “a director’s experience encamping with the homeless on Skid Row… it will have its world premiere party near Skid Row on Thursday (October 18th). The public is invited to the party to experience the VR production.” So, if you’re looking for a progressive film lover’s paradise with a state-of-the-art twist, be sure to check out the Downtown LA Film Festival, which will run from Wednesday, October 17th to Sunday, October 21st, 2018 at Regal L.A. LIVE, Hotel Figueroa, and venues throughout downtown Los Angeles. Check out their website for more information: https://www.dtlaff.com/