The Los Angeles Competition of Motion pictures has begun to disclose the programming for its third version, together with two competition circuit favorites as its opening and shutting night time picks.
The 2026 version will kick off with John Early’s directorial debut “Maddie’s Secret,” which earned rave critiques out of TIFF in 2025. Magnolia Photos will launch the movie this spring, so the LAFM screening will function one thing of a re-launch to carry the movie again into public consciousness.
The competition will shut with “Blue Heron,” Sophy Romvari’s acclaimed directorial debut that premiered on the 2025 Locarno Movie Competition.
Per regular, the LAFM takes place at a wide range of venues round Los Angeles, with marquee screenings at Vidiots in Eagle Rock and different programming at 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown, Now On the spot Picture Corridor in Chinatown, and the Philosophical Analysis Society in Los Feliz.
2026 can even mark the primary LAFM because the competition parted methods with its authentic sponsor, MUBI, over the distributor’s funding from Sequoia Capital, which has additionally invested in Israeli protection contractors. Kino Movie Assortment and Mezzanine function presenting sponsors.
The 2026 Los Angeles Competition of Motion pictures will happen from April 9-12. Preserve studying for the primary wave of introduced programming, with language offered by the competition.
OPENING NIGHT FILM
Maddie’s Secret | John Early, USA, 2026, 98m
U.S. Premiere
A wonderful meals influencer’s excellent life unravels when her rising fame awakens an adolescent wrestle with an consuming dysfunction. Narrative.
Q&A with Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, Pat Regan, and Claudia O’Doherty
CLOSING NIGHT FILM
Blue Heron | Sophy Romvari, Canada/Hungary, 2025, 90m
U.S. Premiere
Within the late Nineteen Nineties, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant household relocate to a brand new house on Vancouver Island. Their recent begin is interrupted by more and more harmful conduct from Jeremy, the household’s oldest youngster. Narrative.
Q&A with author/director Sophy Romvari
After Dreaming | Christine Haroutounian, Armenia/USA/Mexico, 2025, 109m
U.S. Premiere
Co-presented with the Armenian Movie Society
Armenia, earlier than peace but after battle. A soldier is requested to take a lady on a highway journey to maintain her father’s dying a secret from her. Narrative.
Q&A with author/director Christine Haroutounian
Chronovisor | Jack Auen, Kevin Walker, USA, 2026, 99m
West Coast Premiere
A French tutorial is seduced right into a world of untold histories in her scholarly quest to uncover the thriller of a history-capturing camera-like machine created by clandestine Benedictine monks. A tutorial-noir, armchair thriller within the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.
Consuming and Driving | Avalon Quick, Jillian Frank, Canada, 2026, 105m
Early twenties Iris (Jillian Frank) and Palmer (Avalon Quick) by no means left their hometown. They work on the similar restaurant, share the identical mattress, and each have a behavior of consuming and driving. They run into Levi (Ethan Hawksworth), a man they used to know. They spend time with him and his cousin, Phoenix (Henri Gillespi), in vehicles, backyards, and different folks’s bedrooms. When Levi shares a dream he had with Iris issues change between the 4 of them. The fact of the summer time turns into pale, the events die. The 4 finish in a area of unified confusion.
Q&A with author/administrators Avalon Quick and Jillian Frank
Within the Glow of Darkness | Tucker Bennett, USA, 2025, 80m
West Coast Premiere
Intersecting tales unfold within the cyberpunk metropolis of San Zokyo, the place a younger hacker takes on the company behind Meme, a drug that mines customers’ psyches to ship personalised psychedelic journeys and hyper-targeted adverts. Narrative.
Q&A with author/director Tucker Bennett, author/EP/composer Chris Corrente, producer Adrian Anderson, and actors Kat Toledo, Groovin, Lucas Bennett, Samantha Dela Cruz, John Karyus
Isaiah’s Telephone | Frédéric Da, USA, 2025, 69m
In April 2022, a scholar at Millbrook Excessive filmed himself committing a horrific act of violence. His telephone was seized by police as proof. Its contents have remained unseen… till now. Narrative.
Q&A with director Frédéric Da
Selegna Sol | Anouk Moyaux, France, 2025, 50m
West Coast Premiere
Co-presented with El Cine
After a number of years’ absence, Gibran, a 37-year-old Mexican-American, returns to Los Angeles with the purpose of saving as much as buy land in Tecate, the village the place he was born in Mexico. As he organizes his departure, he rediscovers the emotional and historic ties that bind him to the US. Narrative.
Q&A with author/director/cinematographer Anouk Moyaux and actor/composer Gibran Jimenez Delgado
With Hasan in Gaza | Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, 2025, 108m
West Coast Premiere
Three MiniDV tapes of life in Gaza from 2001 had been not too long ago rediscovered. This footage is now a testomony to a spot and time that not exists. Documentary.
Introduction by literary critic Professor Saree Makdisi
RESTORATIONS
Macho Dancer | Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1988, 133m
West Coast Restoration Premiere
Pol strikes to Manila for higher alternatives after his American lover leaves. Nonetheless, he will get drawn into the gritty world of homosexual prostitution and sexual slavery.
Shades of Silk / Silk Shadows | Mary Stephen, Canada/France, 1978, 62m
West Coast Restoration Premiere
Shades of Silk is a movie of temper and reminiscence; two Chinese language girls, who had been associates in class, are caught between a eager for social stability and one thing far more fulfilling however horrifying and imprecise of their relationship. A big a part of the motion takes place within the Shanghai of 1935 though the movie was shot fully on location in Paris.
Screening with quick movie: Goals of Ardour | dir. Burch Middle, USA, 1989, 4m
Restoration World Premiere
Goals of Ardour is a sensual exploration of the essence of self and of the intimacy of want between two Black girls as communicated by motion, dance, and creativeness.
Q&A with Shades of Silk actor Alexandra Brouwer and Goals of Ardour director Aarin Burch
PART-TIME SHORTS in collaboration with Now On the spot Picture Corridor
Now On the spot and the Los Angeles Competition of Motion pictures current PART-TIME, a set of latest shifting picture works drawn from the worlds of fantastic artwork, experimental movie, and narrative cinema that impel the structural capacities of the shape.
Program 1
Acetone Actuality | Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, USA, 12m,
Los Angeles Theatrical Premiere
Photos cascade and collide in Acetone Actuality, as animation, discovered pictures, and the artists’ personal video recordings crash towards a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the character of which means. Throughout Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith’s teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colours, and cryptic iconography represent an “insane, but validated actuality.” Narrative.
Cairo Streets | Abdellah Taïa, France, 19m
West Coast Premiere
January 2007. I’m again to Cairo. For Work. You will have modified your telephone quantity, Omar. I have to discover you. I like you… Abdellah. Narrative.
A ship | Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, USA, 8m
West Coast Premiere
Dooni is the eulogy, voiced by actor Timothy Johnson, of the American soul singer and disco legend Sylvester (1947-1988) as delivered by the gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins. Documentary.
I Dreamed of a Mild Panorama | Kim Torres, Costa Rica/China, 13m
West Coast Premiere
By the quiet rhythms of on a regular basis life and her creativeness, Chunyan drifts between two worlds— her hometown of Enping, China, and her new house in Manzanillo, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Documentary.
Time Life Quantity 15. Monument to a Interval of Time in Which I Lived. | Mungo Thomson, USA, 2m,
Los Angeles Theatrical Premiere
Multiple thousand single-frame pictures of candles, every {a photograph} excerpted from reference encyclopedias, manufacturing manuals, and how-to guides, mark time’s passage in Monument to a Interval of Time in Which I Lived. A solemn and hallucinatory memento mori, Mungo Thomson’s meticulous reanimation of ephemeral images evokes a novel expertise of period, a rigidity between the shifting and the nonetheless. Documentary.
Program 2
An Unimaginable Tackle | dir. Suneil Sanzgiri, USA/India/Angola, 38m
West Coast Premiere
A staccato of pictures and sounds punctuate a letter, each unattainable to compose and ship. This movie culminates over 4 years of analysis across the bonds of mutual wrestle for freedom that developed between India and Africa towards the Portuguese empire, specializing in the lifetime of Sita Valles, an Angolan-born physician and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation motion towards the Portuguese in Angola and was subsequently disappeared there. Scenes of wandering, phrases of longing, and animations from the structure of the historic 1955 Afro-Asian solidarity convention in Bandung weave narratives of failure, chance, and revolutionary want. Combining the materialist strategies of burying, scratching, and chemically altering 16mm movie, and Sanzgiri’s signature visible language of digital animations, 3D scanning, and archival translations, the movie wrestles with its personal kind to check the efficacy of phrases and pictures in occasions of wrestle, mourning, struggling, and motion. Documentary.
The Early Solar, Pink as a Hunter’s Moon | Adam Piron, USA/Portugal, 13m
Los Angeles Premiere
The Early Solar, Pink as a Hunter’s Moon follows this temporal custom in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday’s “The Approach to Wet Mountain,” a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their good friend after 20 years, and a historic try to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with “hieroglyphic script” that arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial Faculty despatched from a reservation within the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa scholar named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm movie, the movie presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa reminiscence. Documentary-fiction hybrid.
Morning Circle | Basma Al-Sharif, Canada/United Arab Emirates, 20m
West Coast Premiere
A brief visceral narrative movie unfolds in three elements to explain loss. From our earliest expertise of separation to the imperceptible violence related to integrating to a brand new nation when yours is not livable, Morning Circle follows a father and son of their intimate rituals as they put together to start out the day and head to kindergarten. Narrative.
Pilgrims Cartel / Unclassified | Los Ingrávidos Collective, Mexico, 1m
Los Angeles Premiere
A one-minute entry from the Hauntology Movie Archives, a sequence described as “ghostly and abstracted representations of political and bodily landscapes.” Narrative.
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