The inaugural World Culture Film Festival kicks off in Los Angeles on Thursday, a four-day event “dedicated to screening films that inspire, educate and celebrate diverse cultures.”
WCFF will kick off with Oscar-nominated director Pawo Choyning Dorji’s drama-comedy “The Monk and the Gun.” The Bhutanese filmmaker, who was nominated for the 2022 Academy Award for Best International Film for “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” will participate in a Q&A following the screening of “The Monk and the Gun.”
The festival will culminate Saturday with Wim Wenders’ Oscar-nominated “Perfect Days,” a drama about Hirayama (Yakusho Koji), a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo, a city known for its cleanliness.
“Perfect Days” Neon/Everett Collection
“Hirayama clearly finds joy in doing his job well,” The New York Times wrote in a rave review, “but there’s more to his life than work, and there’s more to this film than a simple celebration of manual labor.”
WCFF’s program includes more than 60 films from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Inspired by the peaceful message of spiritual leader and humanitarian Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the festival “promises uplifting entertainment with stories from around the world that raise human consciousness through the art of cinema,” the release states. The event is organized by the Art of Living Foundation, an international NGO founded by Ravi Shankar, in partnership with USC.
“The World Cultures Film Festival is about celebrating films that uplift the human spirit and unite people from all walks of life,” Ravi Shankar said in a statement on the WCFF website.
LR World Culture Film Festival Executive Director Sage Saraiya and Annabel Munro. Courtesy of Pavel Safonov
The films in the program will be screened at the University of Southern California’s Ray Stark Theatre and the newly reopened Old Downtown Independent Theatre, as well as online through streaming platform EOFlix. WCFF is under the direction of Jatin Chaurasia, CEO of Sumeru Inc. and Sumeru Studios, filmmaker Annabelle D. Munro, and filmmaker and visual artist Seji Saraiya. Munro and Saraiya serve as executive directors of the festival and collaboratively created the event’s program.
“We are thrilled to present our inaugural World Cultures Film Festival, hosted by the Art of Living Foundation in partnership with the University of Southern California,” Munro and Saraiya said in a statement. “The overwhelming response from filmmakers around the world has been nothing short of inspiring. We are especially grateful to have been entrusted with the vision of such an extraordinary and kind soul, one of the most influential humanitarians of our time. WCFF wholeheartedly invites everyone from around the world to join us in celebrating film as a powerful medium for envisioning a better tomorrow.”
“Dosh” WCFF
The WCFF program will feature both fiction and non-fiction films, features and shorts. In addition to The Monk and the Gun and Perfect Days, highlights include Our Voice, Our Heart by Justin Grant and Lawrence Goode (2024 Asia-Australia Golden Documentary Award winner), Dosh by Radha Mehta (2024 Slamdance George Starks Spirit Award winner), Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World by Julio Palacios (2024 TriBeCa Best Documentary Short winner), Crown by Dash Koros, Harry Holland’s Last Call starring Tom Holland, and Common Ground, a documentary about soil health and regenerative agriculture starring Jason Momoa, Rosario Dawson, Donald Glover and Ian Somerhalder.
Joe Buffalo, NewYorker.com/Luminus Films
The program includes 11 films by USC students. Other short films at WCFF include Dame, a fictionalized portrayal of Elizabeth Taylor’s efforts to return to work after the tragic death of her husband, Mike Todd. The documentary short Joe Buffalo, directed by Amar Shebib, tells the story of a Native Canadian man who was an exceptional skateboarder but suffered psychological trauma as a boy from being sent to a notorious “residential school” that attempted to erase the culture of children of Native American descent. Joe Buffalo won the Audience Award at SXSW, Best Native Short Film at the Bend Film Festival in Oregon, and the Special Jury Prize for Best Native Film at the Cordillera International Film Festival in the Reno-Tahoe region of Nevada.
In addition to films, WCFF will host a host of special events and industry panels, including a live script reading of the screenplay “Logic of Love” by director and producer Barnett Bain (What Dreams May Come, The Celestine Prophecy), a festival directors panel, an environmental panel and a storytelling panel with Vernon Foster, Gil Junger (10 Things I Hate About You) and Sebastian Siegel (Grace and Grit).
The inaugural festival’s jury includes Brazilian-American community impact producer Sandra de Castro Buffington, former Miss India and actress Manasvi Mangai, writer/director and president of Filmmakers Alliance (Los Angeles) Jacques Telemaque, filmmaker and brand strategist Anusha Srinivasan Iyer and Alex Moreno, executive producer and founder of The Flow Project.
Check out the full program here , and check out the trailer below for a look at many of the films that will be screening at the inaugural World Culture Film Festival.