As a writer-director, Cosmo Salovaara’s work has been nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award, acquired by MUBI, and premiered at top tier festivals like Tribeca, Maryland and AFI Fest. His clients include Kate Spade, Refinery29, and Interview Magazine. In his digital series The Future is Then and Let Me Die a Nun, Salovaara employed high-stakes satire to respectively critique tech-industry gentrification and aggressive male courtship. His work aims to center underrepresented communities, while teasing the limits of popular gender and genre tropes. He is currently working on a feature about a cancelled man, and another about an anti-aging blood transfusion app called DRAWN. His scripts have participated in Fantasia’s Frontières Market and the Gotham’s U.S. Features in Progress. He participated in the New York Film Festival Artist Academy, and holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University.
113 minutes: the reported chunk of time the average American teen spends on TikTok every day. 82 minutes and 24 seconds: the average runtime of the films I watched at the second annual Los Angeles Festival of Movies.
A four-day affair on the city’s Eastside, LAFM represents a dying breed in the country’s film festival landscape that has long abandoned genuinely independent fare in favor of celebrity-studded, marketplace-friendly titles. Of course, one need look no further than the lone sale out of this year’s Sundance narrative competition to find a considerably denuded emperor.
Being a small, nascent event, LAFM doesn’t carry the (assumed) programming pressures of the Sundance-SXSW-Tribeca triangle; I saw five of the festival’s 12 features and it seems the requirement for inclusion is nothing more than a committed directorial vision. Even if I wasn’t blown out of the water by all five, I enjoyed submitting myself to each of the film’s perspectives, because they all felt specific and personal. I left the final screening thinking about the media silos we find ourselves in online: how algorithmic viewing becomes its own comforting echo chamber. Comfortable in my (subpar) media digest, I forget that the exercise of going into a room, largely blind, and letting go of all expectations for 90-ish minutes is far more nourishing than anything my phone can provide.
My two favorite films of the festival, Dead Lover and Room Temperature, were arguably the most committed to their tones and textures. Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover occupies the coveted overlap in the Venn diagram of DIY camp and technical prowess. A loose play on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with some added gender swapping and fingerbanging, the film stars Glowicki as a stinky, lonesome gravedigger who falls in love with the brother of one of her clients. Co-writer Ben Petrie plays the titular Dead Lover – just one of his seven supporting roles – while Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow round out the cast, with both juggling around four or five parts apiece.
If I were a financier on the receiving end of a pitch that consisted of the phrases “16 mm,” “period piece,” “four actors playing 20 roles,” “minimalist set design” and “Bavarian, Cockney and Jamaican accents,” I might be somewhat reticent to fork over a portion of the reported $350,000 budget. However, Glowicki and co. pull off the intimidating script with aplomb, thanks in large part to the tight editing, sound design and lo-fi in-camera effects, as well as the silly, committed performances. Watching Dead Lover, you sense the filmmakers had a good time making it, but there’s tremendous sweat equity in creating an engaging visual world from what appears to be a black box theater. The seams that show – Glowicki’s own widow’s peak is almost always visible beneath her braided, Tangled-esque wig – are deliberate and winking, signposts of creativity’s delight in limitation.
Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s Room Temperature, the festival’s standing room-only world premiere, was, in some ways, a twisted reflection of the filmmaking process itself. A tonal complement to Cooper’s written work, the film portrays a traumatized family in the lead-up to their annual Halloween-tide undertaking of converting their home into a haunted house.
During the Q&A, Cooper remarked that he and Farley wanted to make a film about house haunts because they are built on the highest of aspirations while almost always turning out as spectacular failures. Setting the cynical, moviemaking parallels aside for a moment, Room Temperature contains enough detailed explanations of the central house haunt’s construction that once or twice I felt like I was bearing witness to a 1st A.D. walkthrough on quaaludes. Let me be clear: that’s not a slight. The film is a durational exercise, one that successfully and tragically conveys that the anticipation surrounding an event often outweighs the excitement of its eventual opening. There is a running gag throughout the film that the house haunts of years past were not actually scary, and Room Temperature is indeed decidedly less interested in horror than it is in the uncanny.
Shot around what appears to be Joshua Tree, the scorched, desolate landscape adds a nice texture of alienation that reverberates through the family at the film’s center, who, at the insistence of the obsessive patriarch, moves out of their home and onto their front “lawn” during the haunt’s construction. The family’s make-up is almost classically nuclear – mother, father, brother, sister – except for an ill-fated French boy thrown into the mix. His inclusion is never explained – my closest guess being that Cooper lives in Paris – but I was grateful just the same because the actor, Ange Dargent, is a revelation.
Cooper and Farley decided on the title of Room Temperature as a directive for the actors’ collective register, and some take to the deadpan better than others. (Stanya Kahn, who plays the mother, has tread similar – albeit more physically comedic – tones in her own work.) Still, they are helped along by Cooper and Farley’s discerning use of close-ups. Much of the film is shot in medium and wide shots and so when the camera moves in tight, we feel reason to really listen in to the monologue in question. The patient, confident shot language suggests that even though something may be shot on digital, it needn’t be covered to death.
No Sleep Till, the latest from the much-appreciated L.A.-based collective Omnes Films and first-time feature director Alexandra Simpson, also tracks the lead-up to an imminent event – a Florida hurricane – but I found myself in perpetual search of a through line to grasp onto. The film unfolds as a series of laconic vignettes about several different characters, but only two friends (Jordan Coley and Xavier Brown Sanders) who decide to skip town possess any sense of personality and agency. The rest of the thinly sketched characters are overshadowed by images – neon motel lights rippling over breaking pool water, twisters in the distance – that are beautiful but work almost counter to the film’s broad scope. The film’s narrative structure suggests that Simpson is caught between explorations of specificity and universality, while her visual sensibility points toward the former as her driving rudder.
Somewhat similarly, Virgil Vernier’s Mille Cent Milliards vacillates between overt capitalist critique and heartfelt gestures toward the strange porousness of class lines. The film feels more effective when in the latter groove, and it spends the majority of its 77 minutes depicting the relationships between Afine, a teenage, Black male sex worker; his maybe-former client/friend, a Serbian immigrant trying to start her own crystal business; and the pre-teen progeny of a wealthy Chinese family whom they are tasked with babysitting. Mille Cent Milliards is set in Monaco at Christmastime, and Vernier delights in highlighting the principality’s many garish, near-Floridian malls and affects. The film’s overarching message on the emptiness of consumerism and transactional relationships is not entirely new, but it is intimately rendered and provides un-sensationalized access to Afine’s comings and goings in a way that is unfortunately rare for the subgenre.
The fifth film I caught was Will, a restoration of Jessie Maple’s 1981 drama about an ex-basketball star trying to kick a heroin habit while he houses a preteen proxy for his younger self, affectionately called Little Brother. Maple was the first Black woman admitted to the camera operators union in the ’70s, and was reportedly inspired to make the film for her own brother, who was struggling with addiction. Her tenderness and care for the characters is palpable and the dynamic between the eponymous Will (Obaka Adedunyo) and Little Brother (Robert Dean) feels almost parallel to Gena Rowlands and John Adames’ rapport in 1980’s Gloria, with Dean expounding upon Adames’ too-big-for-his-britches bit. At one point, Will claims he doesn’t need anything outside himself to kick his habit – he got himself into this mess, he’ll get himself out of it, etc. – but of course it’s his reflection in Little Brother, his need to live out a positive example in the face of systemic oppression, that saves him.
There were plenty of other talks and films I wanted to see – particularly the closing night selection, Neo Sora’s dystopian teen drama Happyend – but LAFM has an egalitarian policy toward press: if a screening is sold out, it’s really sold out. Many other festivals wouldn’t dare.
