LA Rebellion at LEFFEST

The informal collective of filmmakers of color—they weren’t all Black, as Julie Dash pointed out in a 2016 interview with Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice—studied together in the 1970s and lent their hands to the making of each other’s films. “These artists were dropping personal, uncommercial work that was a counterpoint to the blaxploitation movies crowding movie houses at that time,” wrote Craig D. Lindsey in the Voice in 2018. “While those pulpy popcorn flicks had Black stars righteously entertaining Black audiences, the inventive, low-low-low-budget films of the Rebellion—inspired by film movements coming out of Europe, Latin America, and, of course, Africa—were for-us-by-us films with a neorealist bent. They were honest, political, and fiery as hell—just like the era from which they emerged.”

The Portuguese Riviera will be swarming with talent in the coming days. Further confirmed guests include David Cronenberg, Jerzy Skolimowski, Olivier Assayas, Abel Ferrara, Alexander Sokurov, John Malkovich, and Angela Davis, the subject of two new documentaries screening at the festival. A thematic program will tackle that eternal bugaboo of a question: Am I Guilty. Curators Alexei Artamonov, Denis Ruzaev, and Ines Branco Lopez have put together an eclectic program that begins with Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and includes films by Barbara Loden, Thomas Heise, Robert Kramer, Jules Dassin, and Nobuhiko Obayashi.