AFI Film Festival ~ November 1st-12th ~ Hollywood

Shining brightly as a major epicenter of film production has, sin duda, given Hollywood its share of terrible, tragic curses such as surgically hacked faces, multiple stab wounds to the back, dreams rerouted to rehab and temp jobs, plus the unwatchable Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

But when the blessings rain, they pour. The flood of films in the American Film Institute's 10-day festival in Hollywood are first-class, with many countries' Oscar entries being screened here first over the festival's ten day run. AFI Festival screenings have, in the past, included our country's first looks at City of God, Tsotsi, Talk to Her, and Hotel Rwanda, among many others. To overlook this festival is to miss out on one of the best benefits of being a resident of this great city.

This is the AFI's 20th year of running their film festival in LA and this is one of its strongest with a competition of features, docs, and shorts from around the entire globe that are chosen by experts as the best and brightest in cinema, both contemporary and past, today.

Including the 24-Hour Movie Marathon, programs of shorts, tributes to stars and directors like David Lynch and Penelope Cruz, along with the cutting edge debuts of so many anticipated films from Bogdanovich's new Directed by John Ford, China's action epic The Banquet, the doc Air Guitar Nation, retrospectives of films like Flash Gordon, I'm Gonna Get You Sucka and Eating Raoul, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, Argentina's Glue, South Korea's The Host, Ecuador's How Much Further, Mexico's More Than Anything in the World, Australia's The Last Days of Yasser Arafat, India's The Journey, the U.S.'s Kurt Cobain: About a Son and Motherland Afganistan, plus tons more. A complete list of films with descriptions can be found here.

Of particular interest to the TACO audience is this Friday and Saturday's screening of NEXT: A Primer on Urban Painting, a film which explores street art in nine different countries. We are also looking forward to David Lynch's Inland Empire, and No Sweat, about garment companies using or rejecting the use of sweatshop labor in Los Angeles, among others.
AFI FEST 2006 runs in Hollywood November 1-12, 2006. Advance tickets can be ordered at 866.AFI.FEST or www.AFI.com, most shows are at the Arclight and tickets are mostly $8-$12.

"AFI trains the next generation of filmmakers at its world-renowned Conservatory, maintains America's film heritage through the AFI Catalog of Feature Films and explores new digital technologies in entertainment and education through the AFI Digital Content Lab and K-12 Screen Education Center."