Mammoth Lakes Film Festival

Eclectic and unpredictable. Those are some words to describe the Mammoth Lake Film Festival this year – but honestly, every year. Whatever film experience you are looking for, you’ll find it here, or you may find something that’s completely outside of your expectations. Either way, MLFF 2018 is a terrific experience, and with Day 3 serving up a full morning-to-night program, let’s take a look.

First up, Shorts Block 2. The Golden People, a spooky-beautiful mockumentary by Victoria Garza, chronicled the story of cult leader BJ Annie, founder of the Golden People. She claims one can live without eating from the nutrients of the sun.  Garza said “I had the idea for a long time, and I wanted the character to express aspects of eating disorders, and I was inspired by Korean social media aesthetics.” The lead was portrayed by a model who had never acted before but fully inhabited the character in a short that was both eerie and compelling.

Flatbush Misdemeanors was flat-out hilarious,  a fresh take on urban life with co-writers, directors,  and stars Dan Perlman and  Kevin Iso. “We originally wrote it as a pilot,” Perlman  said.  Shooting on Sony Alpha over 5 days, the hilarious short is one of three in a  series of short films in this setting online. Perlman riffed on “Those teacher movies that are my guilty pleasure, where the teachers play hopscotch with kids and suddenly they’ve learned pre-calc.”

In Babies, director Yuval Shapira offers the North American premiere of  a mysterious, surreal, and climatically perfect film about a new mother who abandons her child to wander in the streets of the Palestinian Territories outside Jerusalem. “”I started with an idea, a concept, and the character becomes specific. It is to some extent a memory of what a mother is allowed to do or not to do.”

With This My Favorite Mural, director Michael Arcos serves up a witty mockumentary about a German filmmaker hot on the trail of a muralist who designs figurative drawings on the walls of tire stores throughout New Orleans. “We shot on 5D,” Arcos reports. “I knew I wanted to create a fictional immigrant as narrator, and we just walked around and people talked to us with the intention that we would find the actual muralist. But we were met with the hard fact that he was an undocumented alien and could not participate in the film.” All the same it’s a charming “homage to the immigrants around New Orleans.” The Danish film In a Month was the cinematic equivalent of Waiting for Godot, with isolated factory workers seeking to outlast a mysterious darkness, vaguely reassured by a telephone message to “be patient.”

Shorts Block 3 began with a stop-action animation about a babysitting job gone wrong, Hilly and the Baby.

In Coda, director and star Zoe Jarman takes on the topic of toxic friendship at a bachelorette party, “I was thinking of the humor and sadness of friendships and co-dependent relationships. The Mariachi scoring was driven by the music of an LA band, The Blasting Company, and my idea to create the brass and strings the group uses in the film. The title,” she said, “refers to the self-help group CODA, as well as the end piece that can repeat in a musical score.”  A darkly funny and intimate take slightly reminiscent of Bridesmaids, Coda takes a pointed look at female friendships.

In Omikuma, an isolated and icy setting is the backdrop for Alesia Cecchet’s tale of a demon bear chasing horses; two female guardians, and a man partially devoured by a bear. The mix of animation and live action creates a dream-like, visually evocative state.  Cecchet said  “We shot at Lake Ontario at Chimney Bluffs Park. I’ve been obsessed with this idea, which comes from a short story called The Horses.” In the story, horses are lured into a frozen lake, which once plunged into, turns into frozen water, trapping them.

With the animated Cocoon, Cocoon, a caterpillar named Oded defies orders to turn into a butterfly. The caterpillar was based on”The children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” Israeli filmmaker Ori Goldberg reported. “We wanted to give each creature his own design and different material such as clay or paper. It took  to 4 months to complete the animation.”

In Rain, two high school janitors make a love connection.  “I wanted to make something simple with two actors, no budget and very little camera movement. I liked the sound of rain, it brings something magical to it,’ said Austrailian  filmmaker Robin Summons. Awesome Fun TV was essentially just that, as a filmmaker traverses the journey between no-budget internet videos made for fun to getting paid for a soul-less Youtube content channel.

The narrative feature Birds Without Feathers was hard to peg.  The work was preceded by the short Recharge, a black and white Twilight Zone-like  piece which illustartes the director’s love of  “60s television and sci-fi stories. “I essentially found a parallel universe outside time and space.,” director Christopher Meyer related. In the perfectly modulated and moody piece, shot on 16 mm,  a factory-worker turns out to be a robot in a dystopian future.

But back to director/writer/star Wendy McColm’s feature. Birds Without Feathers. ”  guess you have to go through the darkness to get to the light,”  McColm stated. “I was in a relationship that I didn’t know I was getting gas-lit in. And I was in survival mode afterwards, with my sister, and I made a website and then I made a feature.” The director has made 50-some shorts previously, this cathartic work was her first feature, made in a weekend relying on Mesisner acting techniques. A series of vignettes merge into the stories of a group of  people including a Russian cowboy obsessed with Jeff Goldblum (expertly played by Alexander Stasko,) and victimizing caretaker Lenase Day, as a well as a stand-up comic and a moody wanna-be Instagram star.  This is a film that defies categorization as comedy, drama, or confessional.

Beautiful animated fest bumpers, above, include work by Bronwyn Maloney, directly above. 

Solidly in the land of cool genre cinema, The Queen of Hollywood Boulevard is a beautiful, riveting, fully realized genre film, with the titular female heroine taking the part usually reserved for male tough-guy.

The gorgeous action film is the story of Mary, strip-club owner, mom, and tough gal. It was a role written for powerhouse Rosemary Hochschild, the real-life actress mom of director Orson Obiowitz. Obowitz’s debut feature has knocked one out of the cinematic ballpark, with terrific performances and tons of style. “I took photos of the people who lived in Hollywood when I lived there. The characters in the film were based on those photos. The star is my mom, and it puts our history into a different genre,” he laughed. He explained that “It was inspired by films like Thief, by the concept of very strong men in movies. Growing up with a single mom, I thought why can’t women be just as bad ass.” Hochschild adds “A lot of the character is an extension of my mother in South Africa, and the dark side of myself.”

There is an element of camp to the film which director Obiowitz says  reflects “what we wake up to walking around Hollywood.” Dancers and strippers were cast from the actual Hollywood scene. “Capturing LA, I was in a hurry to do it. It’s gentrifying so quickly.” The film was shot on Alexa in under 12 days, and looks like a million.

And, when the final film screened, as the moon passed through clouds outside the theater, attendees and filmmakers at this still-intimate and filmmaker-centric festival headed over to Mammoth Lake’s shiny bowling alley for some LED-lit bowling and pizza and beer.

If you want to achieve a real-life strike, come on up to Mammoth Lakes for MLFF, which runs through Sunday and is sure to include more fascinating film experiences you just won’t see anywhere else.

Genie Davis; photos: Jack Burke