This Is Not A Fiction Film Festival

Schedule of Events:

11:00 AM: THE BEAR

Acclaimed director Jean-Jacques Annaud (IN THE NAME OF THE ROSE, SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET) brings his talents to family adventure films in his 1988 classic THE BEAR. Set in British Columbia in the 1880s, the film tells the story of a bear cub and an adult grizzly as they navigate the treacheries of the wild and the encroaching dangers of hunters on the horizon. With its stunning natural cinematography and incredible animal performances, THE BEAR is a breathtaking experience in nature on film.

FORMAT: DCP

DISTRIBUTOR: AGFA

COUNTRY: France

Location: Egyptian Theatre

Cost: $12.00 (member) ; $17.00 (general admission)
Ticket prices include a $2.00 online booking fee.

12:00 PM: FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL

FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL interweaves the stories of four obsessive men, each driven to create eccentric worlds of their dreams, all involving animals: Dave Hoover, a lion tamer; George Mendonça, a topiary gardener who has devoted a lifetime to painstakingly shaping bears and giraffes out of hedges and trees; Ray Mendez, who is fascinated with hairless mole-rats; and Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who has designed complex, autonomous robots that can crawl like bugs without specific instructions from a human controller. Starting as a darkly funny contemplation of the Sisyphus-like nature of human striving, the film ultimately becomes a profoundly moving meditation on the very nature of existence.

FORMAT: 35mm

DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics

COUNTRY: USA

Location: Los Feliz Theatre

Cost: $17.00 (members-only)
Los Feliz 3 | Q&A with filmmaker Errol Morris

3:00 PM: THE EMPEROR'S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON

In Japanese with English subtitles.

Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II. Hara’s unforgettable subject and collaborator in THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is Kenzo Okuzaki—a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly anti-establishment agitator—who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men while stationed in New Guinea.

FORMAT: DCP

DISTRIBUTOR: Janus Films

COUNTRY: Japan

Location: Egyptian Theatre

Cost: $17.00 (member) ; $22.00 (general admission)
Ticket prices include a $2.00 online booking fee.

3:00 PM: This Is Not a Fiction 2025 Shorts Program

“Movie and Sound,” Dir. Daniel Contaldo, 11 Mins, Italy

World Premiere

In an industrial area by a Tuscan river, a solitary figure approaches a mysterious building. The footage halts and rewinds, revealing a film lab where a technician watches the same scene on an analogue projector. The hidden operations of a Tuscan film laboratory are unveiled, capturing the intricate process of celluloid film development. From the darkroom shown with an infrared camera, to the baths that develop the film and reveal a latent image, to the scanner that converts the image on the film to a digital image; the machines come alive. In the yard, Czechoslovak wolves are raised by the lab’s owners.

FORMAT: 35mm

“Light, Protect Me from Oblivion,” Dir. Camilo Barria, 7 Mins, USA

West Coast Premiere

Through the use of a fictional device—a portal, a sorceress—life is imagined as a moment encapsulated inside the flash of an instantaneous photograph to present fragmented biographic elements—a disintegrated family, rootlessness, the scar of a suicidal attempt, two loyal companions, the promises of a new land—subverting the idea of a home movie and transform it into a pilgrimage tool of self-discovery, mimicking the fragile nature of memories. Originally conceived as a contemplative project to explore displacement and belonging, it evolved into a six-month expedition compiling images that evoke the antagonistic feelings of being deprived of a place in the world while realizing life’s transient beauty.

FORMAT: DCP

“Questions for Memories,” Dir. Anderson Matthew, 13 Mins, USA

Four friends reflect on a road trip through Mexico, sifting through fragments of super 8mm, evoking questions of home, family and the textures of memory itself.

FORMAT: DCP

“Lizzy,” Dir. Susanna Wallin, 15 Mins, USA

L.A. Premiere

“Lizzy” is the result of the days spent in the aftermath of the death of a neighbour, who passed in the house where she had lived out her whole life on the Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida and who left behind an electric organ addressed to the filmmaker, without a note. To receive it was like a wild riddle. How might one story continue in the hands of another? What powers organize the telling? Through weaving indoors with outdoors, dust with swamp, celebration with critique, the film traverses binary notions such as self-world, truth-fiction, witnessing-imagining and nature-experience among others.

FORMAT: DCP

“Marine Layer,” Dir. Mia Hagerty and Aric Lopez, 8 Mins, USA

World Premiere

Marine Layer takes audiences through a cinematic experience to reveal the ways in which our current world has become radically transformed by pollution. With a focus on Ormond Beach in Oxnard California, the film blends bold camera perspectives with expressive sound design and textural music to show a world that may already be in the depths of a pollution crisis.

FORMAT: DCP

“ZØØ,” Dir. Andrew Schrader, 9 Mins, USA

In the spirit of Luis Buñuel’s LAND WITHOUT BREAD, ZØØ is a surrealist documentary following a group of zoo animals plotting their escape—and the deranged zookeeper determined to stop them.

FORMAT: DCP

“What I Had to Leave Behind,” Dir. Sean David Christensen, 9 Mins, USA

A visual memoir taking place one afternoon moving out of his old apartment, writer/director Sean David Christensen blends together hand-painted animation, miniatures and an original jazz score to craft a story about letting go of the past.

FORMAT: DCP

“A Hand to Hold,” Dir. Reed Martin, 23 Mins, USA

In the heart of Los Angeles, two members of an innovative Street Medicine team devote their livelihood to helping their unhoused patients receive care, hope, and connection.

FORMAT: DCP

“Considering Cats,” Dir. Matthew Newby, 12 Mins, USA

A short, experimental, documentary shot at the Long Island Pet Expo in 2023. Take a moment to consider the cat.

FORMAT: DCP

Location: Los Feliz Theatre

Cost: $10.00 (member) ; $15.00 (general admission)

6:00 PM: HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT

In English and German with English subtitles.

A personal essay about the United States, viewed through the life and work of a movie actor. Henry Fonda and the roles he played merge into a dazzling and conflicted figure. A very private man who thought he had “no good answers to anything” becomes the unlikely motor of a parallel history.

His voice, recorded during his last interview in 1981, and his onscreen avatars guide us through America’s past and present -on a road trip from the village of Fonda, NY, across the Midwest to the Pacific; from 1651 to the 1980s and the presidency of another movie actor. It takes many places and times and characters to imagine an invisible republic -the United States of Fonda.

FORMAT: DCP

DISTRIBUTOR: The Film Desk

COUNTRY: Austria/Germany

Location: Los Feliz Theatre

Cost: $12.00 (member) ; $17.00 (general admission)
Ticket prices include a $2.00 online booking fee.

7:00 PM: THE THIN BLUE LINE / A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

THE THIN BLUE LINE, 1988, Dir. Errol Morris, 102 Mins, USA

Among the most important documentaries ever made, THE THIN BLUE LINE, by Errol Morris, erases the border between art and activism. A work of meticulous journalism and gripping drama, it recounts the disturbing tale of Randall Dale Adams, a drifter who was charged with the murder of a Dallas police officer and sent to death row, despite evidence that he did not commit the crime. Incorporating stylized reenactments, penetrating interviews, and haunting original music by Philip Glass, Morris uses cinema to build a case forensically while effortlessly entertaining his viewers. THE THIN BLUE LINE effected real-world change, proving film’s power beyond the shadow of a doubt.

FORMAT: 35mm

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, 1991, Dir. Errol Morris, 84 Mins, Janus Films, USA

Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs. An adroitly crafted tale of personal adversity, professional triumph, and cosmological inquiry, Morris’s documentary examines the way the collapse of Hawking’s body has been accompanied by the untrammeled broadening of his imagination. Telling the man’s incredible story through the voices of his colleagues and loved ones, while making dynamically accessible some of the theories in Hawking’s best-selling book of the same name, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME is at once as small as a single life and as big as the ever-expanding universe.

FORMAT: 35mm

Location: Egyptian Theatre

Cost: $12.00 (member) ; $17.00 (general admission)
Ticket prices include a $2.00 online booking fee.

10:00 PM: Cinematic Void Presents “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” / HATED: GG ALLIN AND THE MURDER JUNKIES

“Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” 1986, Dirs. John Heyn and Jeff Krulik, 17 Min, USA

A look at the wild scene outside a Judas Priest concert.

FORMAT: DCP

HATED: GG ALLIN AND THE MURDER JUNKIES, 1993, Dir. Todd Phillips, 52 Min, Soundview Media Partners, USA

Punk rocker GG Allin indulged in shocking behavior before his death by a drug overdose in 1993.

FORMAT: DCP

Location: Los Feliz Theatre

Cost: $10.00 (member) ; $15.00 (general admission)

Locations:
- Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028
- Los Feliz Theatre, 1822 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027