We started our festival-going experience with a very emotional documentary by Rachel Libert called Beyond Conviction. The film is about three groups of people, each going through a program in Pennsylvania in which victims of violent crimes or their family members can arrange to speak with their perpetrators in an attempt to receive “restorative justice”. Libert’s film, which easily ran the risk of voyeurism, instead successfully walked the delicate line between emotional gratuitousness and well-crafted pointed storytelling.

She followed, in the separate vignettes, the victims of three violent crimes as they prepared for and ultimately met the one person in each of their respective lives who had most negatively affected them. But even more powerful was her depiction of the other side of the cell walls. She captured the perpetrators preparing for their time of reckoning with each of the victims. She successfully humanized each of the violent offenders in a light that violent criminals — and each of these three men did very horrible things — rarely receive. Over the course of the film, it became obvious that each of these men were scared straight at the prospect of meeting these people from their darkest past, but also that all three could ask for nothing more than the opportunity to say that they were indeed really sorry about what had happened. This moral and ethical justice, rather than the legal justice that had already been metered out in the form of long jail sentences, had a profoundly positive affect on the lives of all six parties involved.

Technorati tags: beyondconviction, lafilmfest, restorativejustice, rachellibert

Nothing like a long 4th of July weekend and some good flicks to see when it is hot hot hot outside and you don’t have air conditioning in your pad at home. Thanks goodness for the LA Film Festival.

I saw four films this year (Beyond Conviction, The Foot Fist Way, Chalk and Our Daily Bread), not bad since the festival is a straight shot across central Hollywood from my house…which made it tough (ok, impossible) to catch any of the mid-week viewings. In fact, I tried to see one film last Tuesday night…and after an hour in traffic going over the Hollywood Hills from work, I was 30 minutes late and my seats were gone-zo. I was able to get a voucher for the show and cash it in for a later screening of the same film, so all ended up ok though the Film Fest volunteer at the theater — the Tuesday night screening of Chalk — was on a real power trip and was not very friendly to Molly (ah, the power of personal publishing).

Even though it seemed that many of the films had screened at Sundance earlier this year, and the gala films were soon to be opening in theaters nationwide (The Devil Wears Prada and Little Miss Sunshine were the opening and closing night films, respectively), the festival was overall very enjoyable. Westwood is a charming area for filmgoing, with its many classic single screen theaters, and by shutting down Broxton street for the festival they manage to create a true film village feel.

Technorati tags: lafilmfest, lafilmfestival, losangeles