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If passion and enthusiasm are life's blood for true movie lovers, there's something to get passionate about in Los Angeles, beginning next week. The 4-year-old American Film Institute/Los Angeles International Film Festival-conceived in turbulence, born in confusion, weaned on controversy-has finally come of age.
Gone for now are the days of Icelandic documentaries on servicemen's wives, of Czechoslovakian horror films about vampire automobiles, of Finnish fairy tales, Yugoslavian message movies. In the past, AFI / L.A. FilmFest, at its worst, has seemed like a kindly uncle who let every wide-eyed relative and vagrant into the door-tolerating almost any kind of misbehavior, especially from independent American movies without distributors. But the kindly uncle has grown more selective. At the same time, paradoxically, he's opening up more rooms and lengthening his guest list.
Approximately 200 films from 40 different countries are on the bill this year, beginning with the gala Thursday opening of William Friedkin's new movie, "The Guardian," and ending May 3, with Stanley Donen's great 1957 Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn-George Gershwin musical, "Funny Face." So far, after more than 50 press screenings, the ardor is undampened. Quite the contrary.
What has happened? There's been a radical alteration in the old format AFI / L.A. FilmFest inherited from its 15-year predecessor, Filmex. Gone almost totally are some of the elements that often made Filmex delightful: the classic revivals and historical programs, the Hollywood hoopla, the 50-hour marathons of musicals, Westerns, horror movies. In a period of dwindling revival houses, this is a sad loss. But director Ken Wlaschin and his fellow programmers are finally beginning to realize their dream: to make Los Angeles' local film festival, in the back yard of Hollywood itself, a gathering place and forum for the rest of the world's cinema.
To that end, AFI / L.A. FilmFest is holding seminars with the Eastern European filmmakers, with local independent and with independent black filmmakers based in Los Angeles, while at the same time staging tributes to some revered industry figures: musical legend Donen, producer David Wolper and cartoon pioneer Walter Lantz.
Serendipitously, the theme of this year's festival is Hollywood Glasnost: a celebration of the new democratic reforms and movements in the old Eastern Bloc countries and of the new, less circumscribed...