Los Angeles Film Festival StorytelLA

Presented by the esteemed Parajanov-Vartanov Institute, Los Angeles Film Festival STORYTELLA will screen and award fiction films in an official sidebar of the institute’s signature annual festival DOC LA, which has traditionally programmed fictional stories alongside the documentary competition.

We are enthusiastic about discovering outstanding fiction films by students, emerging auteurs, and established masters. We are also interested in unusual, strange and unclassifiable films, since the institute that presents the festival is named after the renowned nonconformists Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) and Mikhail Vartanov (1937-2009), who overcame censorship, persecution and low budgets, and earned praise for their daring point of view from many of cinema’s greatest luminaries, such as Godard, Coppola and Tarkovsky, and inspired the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga.

The festival’s programmer is their disciple and UCLA alum Martiros Vartanov who has served as a curator and juror at festivals in Busan and Los Angeles and worked on the restoration of the The Color of Pomegranates selected for Festival de Cannes. He also presents the institute's and the festival's annual awards whose recipients include Academy Award ® winning director Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan, French cinema icon Jean Vigo, Oscar ® winning actresses Emma Thompson, Marion Cotillard, Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren, and Cate Blanchett, as well as Jeff Bridges, Emilio Rivera, Usher, Ice-T, Michael Weatherly, Joe Berlinger, Alfred Molina, Woody Harrelson, Liam Neeson, John Malkovich, Christoph Waltz, William Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Moby, Dennis Quaid, Mark Ruffalo, and Grammy-winning rock band System Of A Down.