SATURDAY
SEPT 5
WILD FIRES
AND WILD LIVES
STORIES OF RESILIENCE
with Q&A SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00 THEATER I
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REMEMBER HERE
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 4:00 • USA
Director: Mike Marshall
"Remember Here" documents the aftermath of the January 7, 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA, USA. Using pastel chalk and drone cinematography, the piece captures both the physical devastation and emotional journey of the affected community.
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RETURN TO THE EARTH
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 6:59 • USA
Director: Amy Smyth
This intimate micro-documentary tells the story of Betty Seaman—a mother, builder, and teacher—who constructed her family's cob home with her own hands. What began as a quest for affordable, sustainable shelter grew into a living classroom for resilience and community.
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BIG ROCK BURNING
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 27:49 • USA
An intimate documentary exploring the resilient spirit of Malibu's Big Rock community as they rebuild from the ashes of the devastating Palisades Fire. The film captures the raw aftermath of a harrowing night when residents were left to fend for themselves after officials deemed the area too dangerous to enter. With no help coming, neighbors turned into first responders.
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FISH FOR THE FUTURE
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 5:02 • USA
Director: Matthew Benton
Multiple agencies and volunteers come together after the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, CA to rescue an endangered fish population before they are threatened to be completely wiped out by an upcoming mudslide.
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BEARS IN HOT TUBS
Saturday sept 5 at 12:00
RUNTIME: 17:00 • USA
Directors: Claire Musser, Maddie Bear
Bears in Hot Tubs is a tender, emotionally resonant short film co-created with Maddie Bear and her wild kin, who move through the suburban landscapes of Los Angeles with curiosity, intelligence, and quiet grace. From soaking in backyard tubs to wandering garden paths, these black bears are not intruders; they are neighbors, navigating a world remade by human presence.
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REGENERATION
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 9:20 • USA
Director: Kyle Jonah Ruddick
Regeneration is a short dance film that pays homage to the capacity of the human psyche and spirit to metabolize destruction into full bloom. Shot in the ashes of the Santa Monica Mountains in the weeks following the fire, the film captures a dancer amongst the desolate beauty of LA’s scorched terrain as she and it metabolize destruction back into full bloom.
YOUNG
FILMMAKERS
SHOWCASE
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00 THEATER II
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TREE OF LIFE
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 6:12 • Croatia
Director: Jana Bedić
The Tree of Life is a poetic experimental short film that explores the relationship between memory, existence, and time. Narrated by a spectral voice drifting through the misty landscapes of a swamp, the film blends voice-over, rhythmic music, and cinematic imagery of nature to visualize inner emotions and transformation.
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THE SILENCE THAT FOLLOWS
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: :4:07 • USA
Directors: Raina Ventana Del Gatto
A teenage boy drives deep into the isolated chaparral, carrying a mysterious bag he’s desperate to get rid of. The voices in his head haven’t always been there, but now they won’t stop, growing louder as he reaches a barren hollow in the earth. Determined to bury whatever is inside, he begins to dig, trying to silence both the voices and his rising panic.
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LIVVY ARE YOU THERE?
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 7:18 • USA
Director: Synnove June
Ridden with guilt and grieving the loss of her childhood friend, Gia fights for a second chance in the only way she can - by bringing her friend back from the dead.
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WTF?
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 1:50 • USA
Directors: Gigi Nettleton, Lola Stieg, Lila Vidinsky, Coco Yuster
Four girls wake up in a barn and are chased by a strange man.
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THE STAND IN
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 8:57 • USA
Directors: Kody Hinnant, Ben Sowden
A wannabe actor who can't seem to land any roles finally nabs a high-paying gig when he's asked to portray the co-worker of a dead man at his funeral.
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LIP SYNC
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 3:14 • USA
Directors: Amelie, Harper, Isla M, Maria, Maxine, Olivia
New chorus students run into unexpected challenges.
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TOOTH FAIRY, INC.
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 12:00
RUNTIME: 11:20 • USA
Director: Max Zou
SPINS SOME DEEP VINYL THROUGHOUT THE DAY AND NIGHT
SHORT
NARRATIVE
SHOWCASE I
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00 THEATER II
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Drip
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 15:22 • Colombia
Director: Vicente Gónzalez
Violeta and Cristian are in love, but starting to hate each other. During the pandemic, they live in Violeta's mother's luxurious apartment, surrounded by dirt, disorder, and lack of affection. A water cut, caused by unpaid bills, forces them to confront their privilege and emotional neglect.
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Empathy Rehearsals
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 20:00 • Italy
Director: Jacopo Cullin
Tommy is the school bully, convinced that strength and fear are the only ways to earn respect.After yet another act of aggression, the principal forces him to attend a theater workshop.There, he meets classmates he once ignored and, through acting exercises, is pushed to step into their shoes.
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Uniformed
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 24:58 • Brazil
Director: Dan Biurrum
A gay military police officer, Gustavo lives two irreconcilable realities. In a world where the uniform condemns him to hiding, he feels his true nature being crushed by fear. But for how long is silence a shield, and when does it become a weapon?
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Like Friend like Deer
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 12:59 • Iran
Director: Malek Eghbali
Like Friend, Like Deer tells the story of a wildlife ranger in a critical situation who kills an illegal hunter during a confrontation. This short film explores the deep connection and hidden similarities between humans, animals, and the environment they share.
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Family Dinner
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 5:30 • USA
Directors: Henry Behel
In a near-future food-starved America, Mia (Tyner Rushing - It: Welcome to Derry, For All Mankind, Stranger Things), returns home for a sumptuous family dinner in the wake of her grandma's death.
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La Guaricha
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 22:12 • Colombia
Director: Diana Giraldo
Isabel has chosen to settle in a remote place, far from and hidden from her enemies, with the sole intention of putting an end to her life as a killer and outlaw. Adopting a new identity and devoting herself to farm work won’t be enough to escape her dark past.
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Kind Mother
THEATER II SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 1:00
RUNTIME: 14:58 • USA
Director: Clare O'Connor
An estranged mother arrives at the silent retreat that her daughter is attending. When the two women engage in an unusual - and fantastical - power struggle, limits are tested, generational trauma is brought to light, and together they must grapple with mortality and forgiveness.
FORK IN THE ROAD
with Q&A SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 2:00 THEATER I
Directors: Jonathan Nastasi, Vivian Sorenson
Fork in the Road follows small farmers, visionary chefs, and innovators working to heal the land, improve our food systems, and transition toward a regenerative future for both people and the planet.
AI & the Creative Soul: A Salon Discussion
Saturday SEPT 5 AT 3:00-4:00 Theater II
The panel does not attempt to defend creativity as a purely human trait, nor to settle the question of ‘AI, good or bad’. It begins with the reality that we are entering an emergent and radically expanded creative universe, increasingly shared with highly capable nonhuman intelligence.
The inquiry is one of reorientation: finding new ways to make and express, new forms of authorship and collaboration, and new meaning in the act of creation itself – all while reckoning with how this new creative landscape will reshape access, agency, ownership and power.
As the boundaries of human creativity become destabilized, we are left with a deeper question: Why is the creative soul driven to make in the first place – and what might we discover about ourselves as the very meaning of creation begins to change?
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Urs is a creative director, designer, filmmaker and cultural producer whose work spans design, advertising, film, architecture and the visual arts. He founded the Topanga Film Festival in 2005 and the Topanga Film Institute in 2011, creating a forum for independent filmmakers and artists to explore and showcase work at the intersection of story and technology.
His work increasingly explores the rapidly evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and human creativity, with a particular interest in how AI is changing not only the tools of creation, but our concepts of authorship, originality, collaboration and creative identity.
Across disciplines, Urs’ work is driven by an interest in how narrative and technology shape the ways we live, create, communicate and understand ourselves.
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De Kai is a pioneering AI researcher who’s instrumental in conceiving and building the web’s first global online language translator, a breakthrough that helped give rise to Google Translate, Yahoo Translate, and Microsoft Bing Translator.
He holds a joint appointment as Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, and serves as an Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society.
For decades, De Kai has explored what machines that learn language reveal about human minds — and what our creations, in turn, are teaching us about ourselves.
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Jonathan is the founder of EQTY Lab, which builds tools to reinvent trust in AI, and the founding director of Starling Lab at Stanford, where he leads applied research at the intersection of AI, cryptography, and human rights.
At Stanford, he teaches the university’s first course on digital authenticity and provenance: the questions of who made what, and how we know. He has co-authored standards adopted across industry and civil society, including by foundational AI models from OpenAI and Google.
A former producer and writer on HBO’s Silicon Valley, Jonathan brings both a storyteller’s eye and over two decades of experience at the intersection of technology and governance to the questions of authorship, ownership, and the powers that will shape this new creative landscape.
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Alexander Tarrant is a psychotherapist and artist based in Topanga Canyon, where he practice a relational, body-centered approach rooted in Somatic Experiencing.
As a conceptual artist, he created The Outsource Show, a collection of paintings commissioned from non-painters that questioned where authorship resides and probed those boundaries long before generative AI entered the creative workflow.
As a therapist, he works daily with how people metabolize change, rupture, and the loss of familiar identities.
The Art of the Score: A Composer's Panel
Saturday SEPT 5 AT 4:00 - 5:00 Theater I
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Andrew is an Emmy- and Guild of Music Supervisors Award–nominated music supervisor and creative director at Konsonant Music. His credits include The Man Will Burn (HBO), The Vow Part II (HBO), all three seasons of I Think You Should Leave (Netflix), It's What's Inside (Netflix), Sugarcane (NatGeo, Academy Award–nominated feature), Ascension (Paramount+, Academy Award–nominated feature), and Mistress Dispeller (Oscar shortlist, Criterion Channel). He has lived in Topanga for 28 years with his wife, where they've raised children, chickens, and goats.
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As a drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Dickies in the 1980s, Cliff began exploring new technologies of that era. In the late 80s, a tape Martinez had put together made the rounds, leading him to score an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. That recording ended up in Steven Soderbergh’s hands and Martinez was hired to score the famed director’s first theatrical release, 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape. Martinez’s long standing relationship with Soderbergh has continued through the years and they have worked together on eleven theatrical releases including Kafka, The Limey, Traffic, Solaris, Contagion and the critically acclaimed TV series The Knick. In high demand for decades, Martinez also scored 3 films for Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon), as well as film for Robert Redford, Harmony Korine, and Todd Phillips, to name a few. He has won countless awards as a film composer and in 2012, as an original member of the Chili Peppers, he was inducted into the Rock n Roll of Hall of Fame.
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Jeff is an established and award-winning composer for film, TV and video games, as well as a recording artist and music producer. He left school to work in pop music production, but quickly focused his efforts on film and television music, most notably collaborating with other composers such as Hans Zimmer, Philip Glass, Mark Isham, Lisa Gerrard, Basil Poledouris and others before working on his own solo projects. He has worked with esteemed directors including Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Barry Levinson, Mark Pellington, Wan Kar Wai and many others.
He is a recipient of two HMMA Awards, A Game Audio Guild Award, and several ASCAP Film & Television Music Awards. Beyond many soundtrack albums, he has released several albums of his own solo music. His book “The Reel World: Scoring For Pictures” (2023) has been a best seller in its category.
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Composer Sean Callery recently received two Emmy nominations for his composing work on the 2025 Netflix hit series The Beast in Me, bringing his career total to 19 Emmy nominations and 4 wins and placing him among the most nominated composers in television history.
Raised in Rhode Island, Callery studied piano performance at the New England Conservatory of Music before moving to Los Angeles, where he mentored under veteran composer Mark Snow (“The X-Files”). He honed his craft under Mr. Snow’s tutelage and over the years would become life long friends.
Throughout his 29-year career, Callery has become known for his dynamic and evocative scores, composing music for acclaimed series including Homeland, 24, Bull, the Sherlock Holmes series Elementary, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, Bones, and Designated Survivor, among others. His credits also include the Liam Neeson thriller The Marksman and the video game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing. His work on 24 earned him three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series, while his fourth Emmy came for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for Jessica Jones.
More recently, Callery completed work for the score to the first season of the ABC hit series "RJ Decker" and the Fox anthology series, "Accused". He also composed for the Paramount+’s Halo, earning widespread acclaim for capturing the epic, immersive quality of the iconic video game franchise while bringing a fresh cinematic dimension to the series.
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Alvaro is a Venezuelan-Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, and bandleader. His work spans screen, concert, and popular music, drawing from old-school orchestral craft, Latin American roots, and jazz. He has contributed to more than 60 film and television projects, including Disney’s Encanto, Bardo, and Nyad. A Latin Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated producer, he has released ten albums and worked with a wide range of artists. He studied composition and orchestration with Giampaolo Bracali, a disciple of Nadia Boulanger.
SELL OUT
with Q&A SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 4:00 THEATER II
Directors: Nicholas Jude Holden, Joshua Ashy Holden
A neurotic novelist can’t tell if his biggest problem is the blank page,
his Southern family —or his best friend’s off the rails political campaign.
❋
TOPANGA
MUSIC SPOTLIGHT
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SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 5:00 THEATER I
Friends Of “Reply Guy” ❋ The Candies “Midnight” ❋ Muriel “Est-ce Que Tu Reçois”
❋ Ny Oh “Conduit” ❋ Will Worden “King of the Road” and “Broken Wings”
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SUMMER TOUR
with Q&A SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 5:00 THEATER I
Director: Mischa Richter
Young Jerry and Annie as they chase Dead and Company's final 2023 tour in a questionable camper van, organizing their lives around the music with intensity.
WILD
PATHWAYS
Food & Ecology Films
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 6:00 THEATER II
Join us for an immersive, multi-sensory exploration of natural systems through food & nature films. After the screening, guests will enjoy a wild food grazing table and apothecary bar.
SHORT FILM THEATER I
KOSTIA
Director: Elliott Thornton RUNTIME: 4:54
SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 7:00 THEATER I
After failing a drug test on the eve of a tournament, an aging professional tennis player finds twilight turning to dusk all too quickly.
DANTE: 500 MILES ON PSYCHEDELICS
with Q&A SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 7:00 THEATER I
Director: Fernando Gonzalez
A man runs 500 miles through the desert using psychedelics to test his limits.
Battling inner demons and harsh terrain, he seeks redemption while proving human potential
is boundless and challenging stigma around unconventional healing.
INVITE ONLY
SPECIAL
SCREENING
with Q&A SATURDAY SEPT 5 AT 7:00 THEATER II
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