The 2010 LA Film Festiva is over, the awards have been given out and Downtown LA will once again be the dirty area of the city it once was. Below we list all the main awards, the first of which are the most important (I think) the Audience Awards. Everyone attending the film is handed a piece of paper and able to rate the films 1-4 (one being the lowest and then the highest) while walking out of the theaters. Then we have the big money winners and other jury picks.

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More or less at its halfway mark, the LA Film Festival continues without me, but before I left I caught Orly, one of those festival films common to the experience: small, with a potentially interesting conceptual slant, unlikely to get any sort of wide release and a film one is glad to have seen, but which one is unlikely to urge anyone else to seek out.

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For those who caught the hugely entertaining Mirageman a couple of years ago, the appearance at this year’s LA Film Festival of the same Chilean team’s Mandrill was cause for excited expectation that was pretty much fulfilled.

As the earlier film was a loving, tongue-in-cheek homage to the ’70s exploitation action film, so too is Mandrill, casting the hugely-appealing Marko Zaror this time as an eponymous Bondian hitman, inspired equally by fictitious movie super-agent John Colt (with highly amusing and spot-on film clips) as by the childhood murder of his parents. Unfortunately for him, the daughter of his long-sought target is a beautiful and feisty young woman who provides him first with the challenge of seduction and subsequently that of staying alive.

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Monsters, is a pleasant surprise from the LA Film Festival this year and reminder that quality doesn’t always come with money. The film is reminiscent of many monster/horror films gone by, but brought together in an organic way that makes it an entirely new beast. The film truly abides by the indie spirit — it cost what most studio films would spend on Starbucks in a day and as the Director Gareth Edwards told us after the screening its entire cast and crew could fit into one mini-van, they had one Sony EX3 camera, no lighting, no “script” and no idea as to where they were going to be shooting until they got there nor what they would be adding later with special effects.

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One of the most intriguing titles in the Los Angeles Film Festival this year was The Life of Richard Wagner (1913), possibly the very first feature-length biopic, directed by Carl Froelich who’d go on to make the first German sound film Die Nacht gehört uns;  produced by OskarMesster, a towering figure in production and innovation in early German cinema who built the country’s first studio; and starring Guiseppe Becce, who became one of the first (and most prolific) composers working specifically for film (Caligari, Der müde Tod, Der letzte Mann).

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It’s clear that the LA Film Festival is feeling the budget cuts. Aside from the lack of food and beverages at the venue, they moved the festivals from the clean streets of Westwood to Downtown LA, a notoriously conspicuous part of the city. For the most part the festival is rather safe, you park in one big structure and stay within the safe walls filled with mainly only filmmakers and the usual film crowd surrounded by security. The decision didn’t strict me as entirely insane until I heard this…

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A real treat at this year’s LA Film Festival was the screening of a restored print of Satyajit Ray‘s masterful Jalsaghar (The Music Room – 1958). It was presented in conjunction with the Academy who have undertaken the sterling work of restoring the entirety of Ray’s oeuvre; they have made great strides since it was discovered when preparing the presentation for his honourary Oscar in 1993 that what few prints of his films could be found were in a deplorable state, with many elements missing or irreparable.

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One of the most intriguing – and strangely unheralded – events at this year’s LA Film Festival was the North American premiere of South Korean film critic Jung Sung-il’s staggering debut, Café Noir. It’s staggering in part because it runs over three hours, is filled with long takes and defiantly devoid of action, yet thought-out to the minutest degree. There were plenty of walkouts but even in the emptiest-seeming shots, there’s something that nags at the interest, a suspicion that Jung will come up with something really arresting. That happens, as it turns out, in the quietest moments, and perseverance and attention are rewarded by a rich and deceptively detailed tapestry of a film…

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The LA Film Festival‘s splendid Leopoldo Torres Nilsson retrospective continues with what is sometimes referred to as his masterpiece, La Mano en La Trampa (The Hand in the Trap), winner of the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1961. Continuing the close collaboration with his novelist/screenwriter wife Beatriz Guido, it’s a sexual horror story that centers on a convent school girl home for the holidays. She becomes fascinated by her reputedly freakish half-brother who’s kept locked upstairs. But it turns out to be something altogether different…

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