This year’s LA Film Festival is proud to host selections from Ambulante, the traveling film initiative established by Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal to promote documentary culture from across Mexico. I tend to avoid documentaries in favour of features, but even if it meant a mad dash from the Landmark to Westwood thanks to a previous late-start screening, I was not going to miss Nacido Sin.

The subject is José Flores, born into extreme rural poverty without arms (and some toes) and standing about 3 feet tall. My interest in him came about due to his role as the id of the Christ-figure in Alexandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973), and he went on to have a fairly extensive screen career; quite aside from his arresting appearance, self-possession and strength of personality made him a pretty good actor. But he has now returned to his first profession as a street musician, playing the harmonica and the rubbing the “guiro” with a road attached to his foot (he also has rather a nice singing voice).

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Film festivals can be pretty serious affairs, and the LAFF is no exception, so it’s nice to take a break now and then for something more lighthearted. Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell The Dead is a rollicking comedy about a pair of 18th-century grave-robbers, affectionately evoking the parochial camp of Hammer Horror, with a dash of Monty Python silliness.

The cartoonish tone extends from the extravagantly grotesque rival gang up against which Grimes and Blake (Larry Fessenden and Dominic Monaghan) repeatedly butt, via occasional dissolves to comic book graphics, to the central conceit, whereby selling the undead proves more lucrative than robbing regular corpses. It’s told in flashback from Blake’s execution cell, the episodes related to cheerfully hammy priest Ron Perlman over a bottle of whiskey.

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The LA Film Festival brings us a bold local product (from Mexico), Los Bastardos. Jesús and his younger friend Fausto (estimable first-timers Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa) are Mexican day labourers in LA. They wait with the others outside the downtown Home Depot, go on a job, drink beer in the park. So far so usual. Except they’ve a sawn-off shotgun in their backpack and they were picked up already that morning for a “quick and easy” job about which they’ve agree not to blab. Something is afoot.

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Already a circuit hit at locations from Thessaloniki to Toronto, via Karlovy Vary and Venice, Claire Denis’s latest comes to the LA Film Festival. 35 Rhums is a quiet film of little incident but deep emotion; that it was inspired by Ozu’s similarly restrained film of a familial bond, Late Spring, comes as no surprise. Joséphine and her father Lionel live together in the Parisian apartment where she grew up, forming a family with neighbour Gabrielle, who carries a torch for Lionel, and Noé, whose easy relationship with Jo seems to have been prevented from blossoming into partnership by his inaction and the comfort of familiarity.

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The first thing to know about Historias Extraordinarias is that it is four hours long. The second thing to know is that it is fantastic; but despite protagonists named X, Z and H and next to no dialogue, this is no meditative long-take art-house endurance test; until the gentle wind-down ending it doesn’t flag for a moment. The dialogue replaced by an almost non-stop voiceover narration and from the opening line, it’s like one long shaggy dog story; or rather, as the title states, several stories. The Grand Prize winner at Buenos Aires and now a stand-out favourite at the LA Film Festival, it has been likened by some commentators to Out 1, presumably for its duration and for the plot motor of text-bound mysteries that fizzle out to loose ends; others cite Borges and his labyrinths but it’s more basic and humanistic than either, glancing off the Chinese box structure of The Saragossa Manuscript to reach back to The Thousand and One Nights and the pure pleasure of tall tale-telling as an enjoyably exaggerated distraction from real life.

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Coffin Joe comes to the LA Film Festival! For those unacquainted with this legend, Encarnação do Demônio may prove something of a bafflement, though longterm fans will be well used to that. Briefly, José Mojica Marins was once the most famous man in Brazil thanks to his creation and alter ego Zé de Caixão, star of film, comic books and even a limited edition Volkswagen. Clad in top hat, black cloak and wicked 4-inch fingernails (Mojica’s own), Joe is beyond good, evil, God and the Devil (though he tends to the last), the embodiment of amoral existentialism with a strong streak of sadism, railing against the oppressions of society (chiefly drugs and the police) whilst merrily beating, raping and murdering in pursuit of a suitable mate to perpetuate his bloodline.

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My first feature proper at the LA Film Festival was a rather nice if safe trip back to 1970s Paris: Stella is eleven years old and starting a new term at a new, posh school. How she got there we do not know – her parents run a café and boarding house for welfare cases and cheerful lowlifes – and she is out of her depth socially and academically: she has no friends and no interest in or understanding of her schoolwork, though she can beat the café patrons at cards and knows all about football. Gradually, however, friendship grows with a round little redhead, Gladys, top of the class, and Stella finds she enjoys reading, devouring Balzac and rather touchingly moved by Duras.

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Those present at the Ford Amphitheatre last night for one of the LA Film Festival’s special event screenings, 13 Most Beautiful, were lucky enough to be treated to an introduction to by none other than Factory Superstar Mary Woronov. The programme is made up of 13 of Warhol’s 500+ screen tests (shot between ’64 and ’66, with subjects ranging from random passers-by to Dali and Dylan), accompanied by live music from Dean & Britta. The story Mary told of her own test was apparently typical: she was sat on a stool at one end of the factory while Warhol and coterie retreated to the other, talking amongst themselves, leaving her unsure of what to do faced with the staring camera for an interminable five minutes.

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