The Moveable Fest

As anyone who lives in Los Angeles already knows, it is best to keep your distance from Hollywood Boulevard where a cavalcade of superhero impersonators, street vendors, panhandlers and throngs of tourists make for one of the craziest streets to navigate in town, yet it was always going to be a central locale in “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” when director David Wain and co-conspirator Ken Marino are drawn to madness for their comedies and not only would they venture into the...

Eran Riklis may have been an unusual choice to direct “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Israeli by birth and British-trained as a filmmaker after spending much of his early life abroad in North America and only hearing of the Islamic Revolution on the news, yet like so many that picked up Azar Nafisi’s bestselling novel, he couldn’t help but be moved by the idea of stories that transcended cultural borders.

Extenuating circumstances prevented Jessica Earnshaw from being at the premiere of “Baby Doe” at SXSW in 2025, though producer Holly Meehl Chapman made sure she was there nonetheless, beaming her in on FaceTime after the film had concluded.

A phone cord is made to look like bondage in the opening scene of “Night Nurse,” wrapped around a body in which a young woman is describing the pain of being involved in a car accident and politely pleading with someone on the other end of the line to wire the cash needed to keep her out of prison.

With the amount of attention that the civil rights movement in the United States received during the 1960s, it could be easy to overlook the broader struggle for equality that had been going on elsewhere in North America, though “True North” illuminates how it was no less fervent or necessary up in Canada.

Language is often quite literally at the center of “MexicanAmerican,” with director Eddie Sánchez placing subtitles in the middle of the screen as his parents will tell the story of their family in Spanish, their primary tongue, while the translation to English isn’t always only for the benefit for audiences abroad, but for the filmmaker himself when he was raised across the border from them, perhaps geographically within a few hundred miles but by all other measures a world away.

The title of “Matininó” starts out as a mythical place, the name of an island that’s said to be comprised of all women “where nobody lives with fear,” as someone is told as she’s handed a book, but it gradually becomes real in Gabriella Diaz Arp’s nonfiction/narrative hybrid.

“Sometimes it’s hard to talk about the moment I like decide to film with someone because it’s instinctual where I’m like, ‘I can see the scenes.

The idea for “Camp” had been kicking around in Avalon Fast’s head for a while, but the writer/director had been careful to never let it solidify. “There’s a thing there that I’m building off of and then the things that transpire in my own life, the feelings I feel, they’re brought into these films and they become deeper and more personal as I continue creating,” Fast says of their second feature that unfolds over a summer at a retreat for the young.

Carla Simón has been building to the climax of “Romería” ever since she first picked up a camera, with her latest being the culmination of one of the greatest runs of three consecutive films that anyone has ever had. With “Summer 1993,” “Alcarrás” and now “Romería,” the director has chronicled her youth, growing up in the care of others than her parents who passed away before she turned six, a pair of Bohemians who contracted AIDS likely through intravenous drug use.