America’s newest film festival is about to get underway, in Hollywood’s backyard. The Ladyface Mountain Film Festival in Agoura Hills, about 30 miles to the west of the movie capital, opens Thursday with a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. “The community out here is excited about celebrating arts and documentary and getting together,” says LMFF program director Joe Litzinger, who cofounded the festival with Ally Erush. “We’re very excited to have Sugarcane be our opening doc… I’m excited about all of our films.” The inaugural event, which runs through Saturday, will showcase 18 features and shorts, all nonfiction, from the Oscar-shortlisted The Quilters to Crows Are White, winner of numerous awards around the world, including the Jaipur International Film Festival in India, the Bali International Film Festival, and Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland.
The festival takes its name from Ladyface Mountain, the 2,000-foot-high volcanic ridge that dominates Agoura Hills. Nature, in fact, constitutes a key thematic element to the program, notes Litzinger, who knows something about the great outdoors as the executive producer of the long running NatGeo series Life Below Zero and its spinoffs.
Among the films in the lineup is Hidden in Plain Sight, a documentary shot in the Santa Monica Mountains that “follows a group of cyclists on a transformative two-day bikepacking journey… uncovering the region’s stunning beauty and their own resilience.” Harvest, meanwhile, centers on Trappist Cistercian monks who make wine in the Northern Sacramento Valley.
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