Slamdance Soars West

Just a month after Los Angeles and its creative community were devastated by widespread fires, the Slamdance Film Festival arrived last week for its first-ever edition in the city to uplift a new generation of filmmakers, following three decades in Park City, Utah. At the opening night event at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, festival director Taylor Miller struck an alternately heartfelt and feisty tone, noting recent “unimaginable” events, then declared, “Welcome to Slamdance Los Angeles. Let’s fucking go!”

The week began Feb. 20 at one of the city’s top cinematic venues, a step up in size from its Park City namesake, the charming 310-seat Egyptian on snowy Main Street. Filmmakers, cast, and crew for 146 shorts and feature-length films lined up to be photographed on the red carpet, on their way in to the opening night film, Out of Plain Sight, an alarming documentary about lingering DDT pollution off the West Coast.

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Co-directed by Daniel Straub and Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia, who first broke the environmental scandal on the newspaper’s front page, Out of Plain Sight examines the history and open-ended costs of that contamination. In one moving scene early in the film, a seal suffering from advanced cancer is euthanized on camera, while scientists openly fret over the still-unknown extent of the pollution. 

Slamdance mostly unfolded on the stages of Quixote Studios in West Hollywood. Back in 1995, the festival began in Utah as an act of protest against increasing commercialism at the influential Sundance Film Festival, founded there by Robert Redford. Slamdance has long since outgrown that original impulse, and is now an essential venue for first-time filmmakers and others committed to independent film. In the past, Slamdance helped launch the careers of directors Christopher Nolan and the Russo brothers, and most of last week’s entries were being shown to audiences for the first time. 

“Our mission is to discover new filmmakers, launch careers and new ideas in filmmaking,” said Peter Baxter, Slamdance’s president and co-founder. Moving to L.A., where the Slamdance offices have always been located, was a logical and needed evolution, he explained.

“It’s always been a younger festival,” says co-founder Paul Rachman, a director whose films include the definitive punk documentary American Hardcore. Competition for most categories at Slamdance are open only to first-time directors. “We’re not programming veteran directors who’ve made 10 films, you know? The young filmmakers now want to come to Slamdance first.”

At Slamdance, Under the Burning Sun, a 75-minute drama set on a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like landscape, was written and directed by Yun Xie, making her feature film debut. It follows the desperate road trip of a woman named Mowanza (Stephanie Pardi) to get an abortion after a rape. Along the way, she faces violence, moments of physical and emotional escape, and a daily existence where water is dangerously scarce. 

The charming Alice-Heart is a black-and-white romantic comedy in the indie tradition of lo-fi mumblecore films and the work of auteur Noah Baumbach, as writer-director Mike Macera tells the story of a young Philadelphia woman struggling through college and romance, while failing to become self-sufficient. Shot on a $20,000 budget, it was made by a group of friends and colleagues all in their mid-20s.

Macera wrote the script after spending his last two years at Temple University taking his classes in the isolation of Zoom during the Covid-19 epidemic. “While my classes were online,” he says, “I spent a lot of time watching American indie [films] … all these filmmakers that had this, ‘Let’s just grab a camera and start filming with friends and make something out of it and get to film festivals with it.’”

When his film was accepted into Slamdance, Macera and many of his cast and crew took a cross-country road-trip to L.A. in an Acura minivan, making several stops along the way, including in Nashville, Amarillo, and Las Vegas. Among the group was actor Lissa Carandang-Sweeney, who plays the title role in Alice-Heart.

“As soon as I read this, I wanted to play her,” says Carandang-Sweeney. “I love that she’s abrasive. I love that she’s headstrong. I love that she’s willing to bulldoze people over for her own self-benefit. I think characters like that are really interesting, and hopefully very different from myself.”

A memorable short film at the festival was Apt Mgr from filmmaker Ian MacInnes, whose 14-minute vignette is about a man being stalked by his smitten 85-year-old apartment building manager. The manager is shown driving a sexy sports car, coloring his mustache, roller skating, and generally doing what he can to live as a younger person. The most disturbing part of the film comes at the very end, when it is identified as a “documentary.”

As suggested by its name, Slamdance has a bit of punk rock in its DNA, which often turns up on the schedule. In 2025, one of those films was The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell, from directors Dave Markey and Brian Kehew.

Markey, who Rachman calls “the quintessential L.A. punk filmmaker,” is widely known for his Super-8 alt-rock tour documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke with Nirvana and Sonic Youth. He knew Bartell for decades as a fellow traveler in the L.A. punk rock scene that swirled around bands like the Germs, Black Flag, and Redd Kross. Bartell led his own group called White Flag, and was generally an instigator and prankster in the scene as a super-fan, artist, and label owner of Gasatanka Records, before dying at age 52 in 2013.

Bartell was both beloved and a total mystery to his circle of friends and comrades. He was known for his cop-style mustache, a contrarian look within a punk rock community scarred from frequent conflicts with the LAPD. Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore described Bartell’s appearance as “a gay porn version of a cop.” Or, as Roger Manning of Jellyfish says in the film, “It was the most punk rock statement ever.”

The most fascinating aspect of Bartell was “that there were so many of him that nobody knew them all,” says former Germs drummer Don Bolles, who attended Slamdance, and knew Bartell since meeting the young Germs fanatic from Riverside County in 1978. “Bill was really cool, but he was all over the place. He was good friends with Yoko—my favorite Beatle—and Gene Simmons. He loved Kiss. But he was weird. You never knew if he was lying or not, or just making it up. It didn’t really matter because it was all good-natured.” 

There was also 40 Watts from Nowhere, a first-person account from director Susan Carpenter of her experiences in the mid-’90s launching KBLT-FM, an illegal pirate radio station, in her Los Angeles apartment. The journalist and radio host wrote a book about her experience under the same title in 2004, and created the documentary from extensive video footage shot in the moment by Robert O’Sullivan, guitarist-keyboardist for the band Possum Dixon, who volunteered at the station.

While evading the constant threat of being shut down by the FCC, the station built a devoted following with its hyper-local signal and volunteer DJs that included notable L.A. musicians. One night, the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed an acoustic set over the pirate airwaves for DJ Keith Morris. 

“It feels rewarding because it’s something that I did as a crazy thing that you do in your 20s,” Carpenter said, as she stood in line for the premiere screening. Just ahead of her in line was indie rock icon Mike Watt, another volunteer DJ, in green jacket and floppy hat. “And here I am 30 years later and people have such fond feelings toward it, and now they get to sort of relive it through video.”

Another music-themed doc was DeBarge, from director Matthew Siretta, finding the surviving members of ’80s hitmaking family band DeBarge as they struggle through hard times. Among them is the youngest sibling James, at one time Janet Jackson’s first husband, who now lives in an RV parked on the streets of L.A. While still showing signs of the musical gifts that once made them pop stars, the DeBarge brothers are far removed from their hitmaking years.

Even outside of music stories, documentaries made a strong showing at Slamdance, including Joshua Bailey’s alarming and hilarious Stolen Kingdom, about a group of Disney fanatics who invade areas of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, not open to the public. For some, these urban explorers are trespassing just to satisfy their obsessive love of the theme park, while others steal props and other artifacts to be sold later.

One urban explorer is Richard McGuire, who arrived by boat on Disney’s long-closed Discovery Island while the park was uncharacteristically empty during the coronavirus lockdown. The YouTuber from Mobile, Alabama, camped out for two days and set off an alarm. Police arrived with guns drawn. That same year, former Disney employee Patrick Spikes and a cousin accepted plea deals to avoid jail time after being charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of items from the theme park. 

An especially timely piece was My Omaha, in which director Nick Beaulieu explores the political and racial tensions in his Nebraska home town during an increasingly polarized time in the U.S. Beaulieu grew up in a conservative household, and the film captures his disagreements with his Trump-supporting father. Those conversations only grow deeper after his father is diagnosed with cancer.

“At first it was very much about trying to capture a tale of two cities, from a kind of segregation perspective in Omaha, but then the country just continually started to feel more polarized and more divided,” Beaulieu said after the debut screening. “That’s where it started to become more personal.”

There was a full house in the 400-seat main theater at Quixote for Coroner to the Stars, a film about Dr. Thomas Noguchi, former chief medical examiner-coroner for Los Angeles County, whose work inevitably included many high-profile deaths of celebrities. Even before he rose to the department’s top job, Noguchi performed the 1962 autopsy on Marilyn Monroe. After his promotion, his many cases included the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Manson Family murders, and the drowning of Natalie Wood. He often faced controversy for openly telling the facts as he knew them.

At 98, Noguchi himself was at the documentary’s Slamdance premiere, along with several supporters from his time as coroner. Among them was Star Trek actor George Takei, who became an active Noguchi defender when the L.A. County Board of Supervisors twice considered removing him as coroner. He was demoted from the top job in 1982 but remained with the department for several years.

“He wasn’t a news dog. The work that he was doing was getting all the press,” Takei said as he waited for the screening to begin. “But supervisors have egos. No more needs to be said.”

Noguchi expressed no regrets about the battles he faced. At the post-screening Q&A, Noguchi said, “If I were doing it again, I would do it very much the same way.”

On Wednesday night, Slamdance came to a close with an awards ceremony at the stately Directors Guild of America building on Sunset Boulevard. Leading the Grand Jury awards were Henry Bernadet’s Gamma Rays for best narrative feature and American Theater by Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick for the top documentary prize. The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Under the Burning Sun and Best Documentary Feature to Coroner To The Stars.

Alice-Heart won an honorable mention for the Grand Jury’s best feature, and when the night’s sole acting award was announced, it went to that film’s star, Carandang-Sweeney. As her crew cheered, she ran to the stage to pick up the trophy—a fox with a dog-tag listing the actress’ name and winning category.

At the reception afterwards in the DGA lobby, she cradled the trophy in some disbelief. “This is our first feature, our first festival. We finished shooting in July,” Carandang-Sweeney said. She noted that the apartment in New York she shares with the director and three others of the cast and crew has a wall dedicated to the progress of Alice-Heart. The fox will sit on the table right underneath.

“It’s incredible to get our team back together and celebrate our hard work and to celebrate independent film and everyone’s movie here,” she said. “The festival itself has probably been the best week of my life. It’s just a dream come true really.” 

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