The LA Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday night with the closing gala of Ponyo, Miyazaki Hayao’s latest. Not being a great fan of animation, Miyazaki, or twee children’s dross I gave it a miss, although I may just be a curmudgeonly old cinephile with no soul. But if I’d seen that I’d have missed the sole screening of United Red Army, which was well worth the effort: a three-hour docudrama about the paramilitary student radical movement in Japan in the sixties and first two years of the seventies, culminating in a recreation of the Asama-Sanso Incident police siege for which the director used and destroyed his own house.

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Ready to laugh your ass off and cry your eyes out? Probably one of the most honest, heartfelt, and feel good movies of the LA Film Festival is After the Storm directed by Hilla Medalia.

The film follows a group of legendary New York Broadway actors Gerry McIntyre, James Lecesne, Randy Redd, who were inspired to help the youth of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The problem is, they didn’t know what to do, so they decided that the best way for help was to do what they knew best, put on a show!

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Wakamatsu Kôji’s United Red Army - the Path to Asama Mountain Lodge was the the final installment of the “films that got away” at this year’s LA Film Festival. Its Japanese premiere was in Yufuin back in 2007 and it has since played to great acclaim in Berlin, London and Turin, finally making its way to the US last night.

The film divides roughly into three sections across its three-hour running time and culminates in the infamous 1972 mountain lodge siege, the last stand refuge of five members of the radical leftist student group, the United Red Army. A title announces at the start that the film is factual, but with fictional elements interposed, and it begins with a dizzying documentary recap of radical student action from 1960 to 1971, comprised of newsreel footage, statistics of actions and arrests, and a frankly bewildering number of name and age captions for the actors and actresses who gradually pop up. From the humble beginnings of objections to raised tuition fees the various student groups combine, divide, get bitten by the bug of communism, fight amongst themselves, hijack aeroplanes, train in Palestine and eventually two of the paramilitary factions join forces to become the United Red Army.

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In association with the estimable Film Foundation, the LA Film Festival presents a spanking new restored print of LA favourite Curtis Harrington’s debut feature, Night Tide (1961). It kicks off like a seaside noir, with sailor Dennis Hopper tooling around the night-time Venice promenade before wandering into the scene at a basement jazz club. Amidst the hipsters and hopheads he spies a mysterious and elegant young woman, who’s scared away by a scary old lady speaking a weird language.

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The retrospective strand of this year’s LA Film Festival focuses on hot rod movies, one each from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I caught cult favourite Hot Rods From Hell (1967), a fairly standard representation of the genre, with cross-generational conflict – “these kids have nowhere to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour” – and bargain basement exploitation production values.

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One of the films I was most keen to catch at this year’s LA Film Festival was the Portuguese hit of the European circuit, Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. I nearly didn’t make it for, in an incomprehensibly idiotic bit of programming, there was less than twenty minutes to get from The Silence Before Bach in Westwood to the Landmark on Pico; it was either that or choose between the second August screening and the sole showing of much-praised United Red Army on Sunday. Presumably I am not the only fan of narrative experimentation faced with this quandary. Bah! But I made it literally just in time, for the charming opening, where a vixen prowls around a chicken coop, takes the plunge and comes up empty-handed (-pawed?).

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One of the best strands of the LA Film Festival is the “Films That Got Away”, featuring titles of recent vintage whose chance for US theatrical distribution seems to have passed. Particularly valuable this year is the presentation of European festival success Die Stille vor Bach, not least since aged Catalan director Pere Portabella has declared that he will never release his films on DVD.

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Fresh from acclaim on the international circuit, Koreeda Hirokazu’s Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) comes to the LA Film Festival. It takes place over one hot summer’s day as a family reunion of three generations leisurely unfolds through eating, chatting and taking a stroll. Much food is prepared, nothing very striking actually takes place, and none of the characters is especially out of the ordinary. This is well-worn territory, both in Japan and abroad, but what distinguishes this film is the skillful and natural way in which relationships, resentments and regrets are revealed, gradually and gently.

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Twenty-something East London comes to the LA Film Festival, via acclaim at Sundance and San Francisco, with Alex dos Santos’s Unmade Beds. We’re introduced first to footloose Axl (Fernando Tielve) , looking like a younger, sweeter Jack White under a mop of unruly black hair, who’s come to London from Madrid to seek out the father he never knew. In between drunken evenings he cannot remember, he thinks he finds him in an estate agent’s (a finely relaxed performance Richard Lintern) and builds a cautiously friendly relationship whilst remaining ambivalent about revealing his identity. Meanwhile, Vera from Belgium (Déborah François) and a young Dutchman (Michiel Huisman) start a hesitant relationship in which they retreat to hotel rooms and fix their meetings time by time, without exchanging phone numbers or even names. Continue Reading