Yahoo Lifestyle Roll Camera: Inaugural Ladyface Mountain Film Festival Set To Open Thursday In Agoura Hills, Just Outside L.A.
America’s newest film festival is about to get underway, in Hollywood’s backyard.
The Ladyface Mountain Film Festival in Agoura Hills, about 30 miles to the west of the movie capital, opens Thursday with a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie.
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“The community out here is excited about celebrating arts and documentary and getting together,” says LMFF program director Joe Litzinger, who cofounded the festival with Ally Erush. “We’re very excited to have Sugarcane be our opening doc… I’m excited about all of our films.”
The inaugural event, which runs through Saturday, will showcase 18 features and shorts, all nonfiction, from the Oscar-shortlisted The Quilters to Crows Are White, winner of numerous awards around the world, including the Jaipur International Film Festival in India, the Bali International Film Festival, and Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland.
The festival takes its name from Ladyface Mountain, the 2,000-foot-high volcanic ridge that dominates Agoura Hills. Nature, in fact, constitutes a key thematic element to the program, notes Litzinger, who knows something about the great outdoors as the executive producer of the long running NatGeo series Life Below Zero and its spinoffs. Among the films in the lineup is Hidden in Plain Sight, a documentary shot in the Santa Monica Mountains that “follows a group of cyclists on a transformative two-day bikepacking journey… uncovering the region’s stunning beauty and their own resilience.” Harvest, meanwhile, centers on Trappist Cistercian monks who make wine in the Northern Sacramento Valley.
Along with nature, Litzinger cites community and passion as other thematic pillars of LMFF. “The goal of this festival is to bridge the gap between a typical documentary film festival crowd and the community crowd,” he tells Deadline. “The documentaries that we chose, a lot of them have very, very important topics, but they’re also entertaining and engaging and usually have some kind of positive message or experience.”
He adds, “We also have a lot of programming that we’re doing for kids. And the idea is also to introduce and share my love for documentary filmmaking and documentaries to a crowd that may or may not necessarily seek out documentaries.”
Launching a film festival presents any number of challenges, like choosing a final program from among more than 130 submissions.
“Narrowing them down has been tough,” Litzinger concedes. “We’re not Sundance and we’re not Santa Barbara, even though we’re sandwiched in between [those festivals]. So, we wanted to give filmmakers who don’t have the opportunity to screen their work at Santa Barbara or Sundance or any of the, call them, ‘major festivals.’ Other than our opening night film [Sugarcane], a lot of our films haven’t had the opportunities at these big festivals.”
Among big challenge: finding a screening venue for the films.
“We are at the Agoura Regency, it’s a Regency 8, used to be a Mann 8. Two days after our festival, the theater closes forever,” Litzinger says. “It’s been open for 30-something years and it’s been the go-to theater… We got lucky that we got right in under the wire, but we weren’t sure until last minute where our home was going to be in terms of the theater.”
The recent L.A. wildfires also complicated preparations for the festival.
“On a personal note, we were counting on those two weeks to plan and had to evacuate for a couple days in Agoura. But fortunately, we’ve been pretty lucky. We just lost power for a couple days. But the festival itself has not been affected,” Litzinger notes. “All the filmmakers that we’re flying in are still very excited to come. They’re asking a lot of questions about the fire, like, ‘What is still available to see and is there still smoke in the air?’ and those kinds of things.”
Litzinger says he will evaluate the inaugural event based on a few criteria.
“I think the first level of success is how the filmmakers feel about their experience screening their work here,” he says. “And I think the second is do the community or the people who are attending the festival feel that they had a good time, that they learned something, that it was exciting, that it was a benefit to the community. And from what we’re hearing already, people are very, very excited about the benefit that it has to the community. A lot of people are like, ‘Thank you. I wanted something like this in the area.’”
Plans are already underway for the second edition of the Ladyface Mountain Film Festival.
“We’re hoping to build this into something that is a yearly event in the community,” Litzinger shares. “We do want to expand this and then potentially have year-round programming – that’s one of the things we’ve heard from people in the surrounding communities, Calabasas, Malibu, Westlake, that they want this kind of programming and these kinds of films… We have a lot of people saying they’re interested. I think the vision of having an event like this for this community, I believe is something that can be sustainable year after year.”
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