Mike Ott’s Latest Film at the Los Angeles Film Festival

One of the films in narrative competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF), which runs through Thursday, is CalArts alumnus Mike Ott’s (MFA Film/Video 05, BFA 03) Lake Los Angeles. 

The film is the third in Ott’s desert trilogy, which began with Littlerock (2010) and Pearblossom Hwy (2012). Like its predecessors, Lake Los Angeles is set in the Antelope Valley, the high desert just north of Los Angeles. Ott wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator and fellow CalArtian Atsuko Okatsuka (MFA Film/Video-Critical Studies 15). 

From the LAFF:

After crossing into the U.S. with no family to speak of, young Cecilia finds herself in the charge of Francisco, a lonely Cuban immigrant long separated from his own family. Francisco operates a way station for border crossers on the outskirts of Lake Los Angeles, a surreal, desiccated lakebed in the California desert. While he copes with the alienation of living alone in a foreign land and the impossibility of realizing the American dream, Cecilia aimlessly wanders the dusty landscape, accompanied only by her fantastical imagination and distant memories of motherly love.

Writer/director Mike Ott returns to the Los Angeles Film Festival with the final installment of his Antelope Valley trilogy, a poetic tale of two strangers forced to find salvation in the unlikeliest of people and places.

The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. Because of the demand for tickets, the festival has added a third screening at 9:45 pm tonight (Tuesday, June 17) at 9:45 pm at Regal Cinema L.A. Live in Downtown Los Angeles. Lake Los Angeles’s final screening takes place on Thursday (June 19) with only rush tickets available.