The Los Angeles Festival of Movies has begun to reveal the programming for its third edition, including two festival circuit favorites as its opening and closing night selections.
The 2026 edition will kick off with John Early’s directorial debut “Maddie’s Secret,” which earned rave reviews out of TIFF in 2025. Magnolia Pictures will release the film this spring, so the LAFM screening will serve as something of a re-launch to bring the film back into public consciousness.
The festival will close with “Blue Heron,” Sophy Romvari’s acclaimed directorial debut that premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.
Per usual, the LAFM takes place at a variety of venues around Los Angeles, with marquee screenings at Vidiots in Eagle Rock and other programming at 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown, Now Instant Image Hall in Chinatown, and the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz.
2026 will also mark the first LAFM since the festival parted ways with its original sponsor, MUBI, over the distributor’s investment from Sequoia Capital, which has also invested in Israeli defense contractors. Kino Film Collection and Mezzanine serve as presenting sponsors.
The 2026 Los Angeles Festival of Movies will take place from April 9-12. Keep reading for the first wave of announced programming, with language provided by the festival.
OPENING NIGHT FILM
Maddie’s Secret | John Early, USA, 2026, 98m
U.S. Premiere
A beautiful food influencer’s perfect life unravels when her rising fame awakens an adolescent struggle with an eating disorder. Narrative.
Q&A with Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, Pat Regan, and Claudia O’Doherty
CLOSING NIGHT FILM
Blue Heron | Sophy Romvari, Canada/Hungary, 2025, 90m
U.S. Premiere
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island. Their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behavior from Jeremy, the family’s oldest child. Narrative.
Q&A with writer/director Sophy Romvari
After Dreaming | Christine Haroutounian, Armenia/USA/Mexico, 2025, 109m
U.S. Premiere
Co-presented with the Armenian Film Society
Armenia, before peace yet after war. A soldier is asked to take a girl on a road trip to keep her father’s death a secret from her. Narrative.
Q&A with writer/director Christine Haroutounian
Chronovisor | Jack Auen, Kevin Walker, USA, 2026, 99m
West Coast Premiere
A French academic is seduced into a world of untold histories in her scholarly quest to uncover the mystery of a history-capturing camera-like machine created by clandestine Benedictine monks. An academic-noir, armchair mystery in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.
Drinking and Driving | Avalon Fast, Jillian Frank, Canada, 2026, 105m
Early twenties Iris (Jillian Frank) and Palmer (Avalon Fast) never left their hometown. They work at the same restaurant, share the same bed, and both have a habit of drinking and driving. They run into Levi (Ethan Hawksworth), a guy they used to know. They spend time with him and his cousin, Phoenix (Henri Gillespi), in cars, backyards, and other people’s bedrooms. When Levi shares a dream he had with Iris things change between the four of them. The reality of the summer becomes faded, the parties die. The four end in a field of unified confusion.
Q&A with writer/directors Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank
In the Glow of Darkness | Tucker Bennett, USA, 2025, 80m
West Coast Premiere
Intersecting stories unfold in the cyberpunk city of San Zokyo, where a young hacker takes on the corporation behind Meme, a drug that mines users’ psyches to deliver personalized psychedelic trips and hyper-targeted ads. Narrative.
Q&A with writer/director Tucker Bennett, writer/EP/composer Chris Corrente, producer Adrian Anderson, and actors Kat Toledo, Groovin, Lucas Bennett, Samantha Dela Cruz, John Karyus
Isaiah’s Phone | Frédéric Da, USA, 2025, 69m
In April 2022, a student at Millbrook High filmed himself committing a horrific act of violence. His phone was seized by police as evidence. Its contents have remained unseen… until now. Narrative.
Q&A with director Frédéric Da
Selegna Sol | Anouk Moyaux, France, 2025, 50m
West Coast Premiere
Co-presented with El Cine
After several years’ absence, Gibran, a 37-year-old Mexican-American, returns to Los Angeles with the goal of saving up to purchase land in Tecate, the village where he was born in Mexico. As he organizes his departure, he rediscovers the emotional and historical ties that bind him to the United States. Narrative.
Q&A with writer/director/cinematographer Anouk Moyaux and actor/composer Gibran Jimenez Delgado
With Hasan in Gaza | Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, 2025, 108m
West Coast Premiere
Three MiniDV tapes of life in Gaza from 2001 were recently rediscovered. This footage is now a testament to a place and time that no longer exists. Documentary.
Introduction by literary critic Professor Saree Makdisi
RESTORATIONS
Macho Dancer | Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1988, 133m
West Coast Restoration Premiere
Pol moves to Manila for better opportunities after his American lover leaves. However, he gets drawn into the gritty world of gay prostitution and sexual slavery.
Shades of Silk / Ombres de Soie | Mary Stephen, Canada/France, 1978, 62m
West Coast Restoration Premiere
Shades of Silk is a film of mood and memory; two Chinese women, who had been friends in school, are caught between a longing for social stability and something much more fulfilling but frightening and vague in their relationship. A large part of the action takes place in the Shanghai of 1935 although the film was shot entirely on location in Paris.
Screening with short film: Dreams of Passion | dir. Aarin Burch, USA, 1989, 4m
Restoration World Premiere
Dreams of Passion is a sensual exploration of the essence of self and of the intimacy of desire between two Black women as communicated through movement, dance, and imagination.
Q&A with Shades of Silk actor Alexandra Brouwer and Dreams of Passion director Aarin Burch
PART-TIME SHORTS in collaboration with Now Instant Image Hall
Now Instant and the Los Angeles Festival of Movies present PART-TIME, a collection of new moving image works drawn from the worlds of fine art, experimental film, and narrative cinema that impel the structural capacities of the form.
Program 1
Acetone Reality | Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, USA, 12m,
Los Angeles Theatrical Premiere
Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists’ own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith’s teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an “insane, yet validated reality.” Narrative.
Cairo Streets | Abdellah Taïa, France, 19m
West Coast Premiere
January 2007. I am back to Cairo. For Work. You have changed your phone number, Omar. I must find you. I love you… Abdellah. Narrative.
Dooni | Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, USA, 8m
West Coast Premiere
Dooni is the eulogy, voiced by actor Timothy Johnson, of the American soul singer and disco legend Sylvester (1947-1988) as delivered by the gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins. Documentary.
I Dreamed of a Gentle Landscape | Kim Torres, Costa Rica/China, 13m
West Coast Premiere
Through the quiet rhythms of everyday life and her imagination, Chunyan drifts between two worlds— her hometown of Enping, China, and her new home in Manzanillo, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Documentary.
Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. | Mungo Thomson, USA, 2m,
Los Angeles Theatrical Premiere
More than one thousand single-frame images of candles, each a photograph excerpted from reference encyclopedias, production manuals, and how-to guides, mark time’s passage in Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. A solemn and hallucinatory memento mori, Mungo Thomson’s meticulous reanimation of ephemeral photographs evokes a unique experience of duration, a tension between the moving and the still. Documentary.
Program 2
An Impossible Address | dir. Suneil Sanzgiri, USA/India/Angola, 38m
West Coast Premiere
A staccato of images and sounds punctuate a letter, both impossible to compose and deliver. This film culminates over four years of research around the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire, focusing on the life of Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola and was subsequently disappeared there. Scenes of wandering, words of longing, and animations from the architecture of the historic 1955 Afro-Asian solidarity conference in Bandung weave narratives of failure, possibility, and revolutionary desire. Combining the materialist techniques of burying, scratching, and chemically altering 16mm film, and Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of digital animations, 3D scanning, and archival translations, the film wrestles with its own form to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action. Documentary.
The Early Sun, Red as a Hunter’s Moon | Adam Piron, USA/Portugal, 13m
Los Angeles Premiere
The Early Sun, Red as a Hunter’s Moon follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with “hieroglyphic script” that arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm film, the film presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa memory. Documentary-fiction hybrid.
Morning Circle | Basma Al-Sharif, Canada/United Arab Emirates, 20m
West Coast Premiere
A short visceral narrative film unfolds in three parts to describe loss. From our earliest experience of separation to the imperceptible violence associated with integrating to a new country when yours is no longer livable, Morning Circle follows a father and son in their intimate rituals as they prepare to start the day and head to kindergarten. Narrative.
Pilgrims Cartel / Unclassified | Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Mexico, 1m
Los Angeles Premiere
A one-minute entry from the Hauntology Film Archives, a series described as “ghostly and abstracted representations of political and physical landscapes.” Narrative.
ANIMATION TODAY presented by Cartuna
To be announced
FEATURED ARTIST TALKS
To be announced
PRESIDIUM OVERACTIVE presented by Irony Point
To be announced
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