WHEN I THINK of difficult locations for staging a film festival, Los Angeles doesn't spring to mind. Ouagadougou, or Arlene's Grocery on the Lower East Side, or a former mining town in Utah – maybe. But the challenges of getting international audiences and prints to Burkina Faso (site of the biannual Fespaco) or making a nightclub-movie house out of a former grocery store (which completed its fourth annual "Arlene's Grocery Picture Show" this year) must pale compared to the challenge of turning the eyes of the United States' most film-frenzied city toward international and independent film productions and finding them a place to park. I was standing in front of the Sunset 5 multiplex shopping mall when a passerby asked me what everyone was lined up for. When I told her it was the Los Angeles Film Festival, she still had questions: "A film festival – what's that?"

I wasn't exactly sure, as I was soon to be sitting in a fold-out chair in the well of a shopping mall, peeking through throngs of movie- and partygoers descending escalators, while Michael Shultz, director of Woman Thou Art Loosed, stepped to the outdoor stage in the middle of the lobby, after many words had been spoken by Youth Speaks poets and before his 1985 Krush Groove reminded us that the Adidas is forever. But I knew this one had arrived. It holds a unique position on the film festival circuit – as a festival that speaks both to and through L.A., its populism and taste combined in spectacular style – with its Ford Amphitheatre screenings of Zhang Yimou's Hero, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. I was on the documentary jury for the film festival this year and was happy to see there are more than enough amazing nonfictions to go around.

The last time I visited Los Angeles for a film festival, it was the 1998 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, which was ... trying its best. Now under the guidance of Independent Feature Project/Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Film Festival dropped the word "independent" but gained the spirit of it under the new direction of Rachel Rosen – who we all hated to see leave the San Francisco International Film Festival a few years back – along with her colleague Doug Jones (late of Noise Pop). Film fest circuiteers now have one more city on the itinerary. (Susan Gerhard)

Resisting, then submitting, at Frameline

Watching Resisting Paradise, Barbara Hammer's visually arresting experimental film about life during wartime (World War II, that is), last Thursday at the Roxie put a slightly dizzying spin on a celebratory gay pride weekend. Providing slightly more context than the snarky Freedom to Bury stickers plastered all over the Castro District, the film juxtaposes the wartime correspondence between Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard to the south-of-France Resistance activity going on all around them. The two artists meditate on the light pouring in the windows, fret about their artistic failures, and rejoice in their successes; elsewhere in the film, old women who took part in the Resistance describe their own successes, in falsifying identity papers and leading refugees over the mountains to relative safety. It was impossible not to feel enraged by the artists' choices, exposed in their letters and their work – and equally impossible not to feel cattle-prodded in that direction by the filmmaker's own choices.

As the Tranny March headed up Dolores Street en route to City Hall, then, I felt a bit behind the times splintering off toward the Castro to watch a 10-year anniversary screening of Rose Troche's Go Fish (a lesbian date movie, no matter how enjoyable, doesn't light a revolutionary fire in the belly the way it once did). Happily, Troche brought a piece of resistance inside the theater, carrying a sign demanding justice for Gwen Araujo onstage when she stepped up to accept, in tears, this year's Frameline Award.

By weekend's end, I'd given in completely, along with a packed, punch-drunk, hyperkinetic audience howling and stomping in ecstasy over Angela Robinson's festival closer, D.E.B.S. No one could call it a serious work, but you could say it ups Go Fish's ante, queering a genre that encompasses both Spy Kids and Charlie's Angels and offering hope that audiences off all kinds may soon be appreciating teen dyke drama at the multiplex. (Lynn Rapoport)