Andres Garza and Francisco Romero

Sunday May 19, 2024, 7:00 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Filmmakers Andres Garza and Francisco Romero, & Programmer Diego Robles

Including the World premiere of Francisco’s two films - Filter and Self Portrait!

Tickets: $15 general, $8 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

Films about Los Angeles are seldom about the ordinary, everyday lives of people who are born, raised and reside in the region. Narrative films often bend to expectations that a film must be about the extraordinary. What is lost when these films are realized is not only nuance and artful interpretation, but the history and perspectives of those whose lives are not deemed worthy of narrative treatment.

Progress (2003) is a rare example of Los Angeles neorealism that takes the commonplace as its subject and presents a version of Los Angeles rarely seen in film. Andres Garza's portrait of a young Mexican American working as a busboy and aspiring to become a writer in a working class suburb extends the geography and tradition of films like The Exiles, Killer of Sheep and Bless their Little Hearts into the early 2000s. 

Upon its release Progress was met with some resistance, as it was neither accepted into a single film festival nor shown outside of small circles. Today it represents an important and underrepresented side of Los Angeles filmmaking. While most films go big, making life bigger and better than real life, Progress goes small, representing life in all its mundanity.Even more, the film casts a light on people who are seldom acknowledged in mainstream cinema, but who nevertheless make up a large majority of the people who reside in the greater Los Angeles region.

Progress was produced as a thesis film in the Film/Video Program at the California Institute of the Arts in 2003. It has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, CalArts and Colgate University. In 2004, the film was chosen by Thom Andersen to be a part of the Los Angeles Plays Itself program at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which showcased Los Angeles films and filmmakers.

Twenty years after its release, Filmforum welcomes Progress for a special screening and conversation with the filmmaker. The evening will also feature two short films by fellow CalArts alumni, Francisco Romero. Garza writes of Romero’s films: “During our time at CalArts, Romero and I lived together, and we’d often have these long, all night conversations about film, art and music. We came from different areas of Los Angeles, and had our own unique perspective of the city, but we shared a common interest in the kind of art that resonated with us and the ideas we were looking to explore in our own work. Out of these conversations emerged several short films that we made independently of one another, but were in a way an extension of our ongoing dialogue. The short films we made during this time felt like exercises or ways of asking, ‘Does this work?’ Progress emerged from these conversations, and so Romero’s short films are not only beautiful and noteworthy in their own right, but they were important to the making of the film.” 

Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.