As he took the stage to present the highest honor at the L.A. Film Festival, actor Jon Voight enthusiastically championed the efforts of the local event to promote filmmaking during a challenging time for the arts.

"It's such a splendid thing to have the L.A. Film Festival in our community," Voight said at a gala to fete the festival's award winners at the Hammer Museum Sunday morning. "It gives attention to films and brings filmmakers together to salute them while giving more opportunity for film to appreciated and seen."

Voight and others mingled during an elaborate brunch at the museum, where filmmakers and actors reminisced about the events of the last week and a half.

Voight was on hand to present Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace with the Target Filmmaker Award -- which includes a hefty unrestricted $50,000 cash prize -- for "Wah Do Dem" (What They Do), which tells the story of a boy who departs for a Carribbean cruise only days after his girlfriend dumps him.

It's a film "that could feel anecdontal but through its musical shifts and tone, and its vision of the world as a newly optimistic place, [it] creates a strong and profound emotional narrative," were the words the jury -- which was comprised of producer Albert Berger, "Rachel Getting Married" star Rosemarie DeWitt and film critic Elvis Mitchell.

The fest's other big cash award was for Best Documentary Feature, and it went to "Those Who Remain" (Los Que se Quedan), a portrait of the impact migration has on families left behind in Mexico.

"Frozen River" star Melissa Leo presented the award and said the jury -- which consisted of film critic David Ansen, writer-director Anna Boden and director Darius Marder -- found the picture to have a "generosity of spirit and lyrical grace that illuminates a human landscape with fresh eyes ... [and] reminds us that documentaries can be both journalism and poetry."

Upon hearing their names called, directors Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman shrieked and embraced their families.

"As we were making this film, we were thinking about the audience for our movie," Hagerman said as he accepted the prize. "And the most priceless award any filmmaker can have is sitting side-by-side in a theater with the audience the film was made for."

"The Stoning of Soraya M.," a film about the brutality and violence woman can face in the Middle East, came away with the Audience Award. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh said the award could only help boost the film's opening in 11 cities this weekend and thanked his co-creator and wife as well as actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who "embraced difficult subject matter" almost immediately.

The most comical moment of the event came when high-schooler Sam Rubin won the festival's new Dream in Color Award, which puts a short film from a high school student in the fest. Upon hearing his name called, Rubin dashed on stage, clutched his award and held it over his head. "Thank you, thank you, thank you Los Angeles!" he shouted.

Other awards included Outstanding Performance in the Narrative Competition for Shayne Topp in Suzi Yoonessi's "Dear Lemon Lima," the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's "Soul Power" and the Audience Award for Best International Feature to Eva Norvind's "Born Without" (Nacido Sin).

The L.A. Film Festival, which wrapped up Sunday evening with a showing of Hayao Miyazaki and Disney's animated "Ponyo," kicked off June 18 with the world premiere of "Paper Man."

"We help filmmakers build audiences for their work, because movies don't exist without passionate audiences -- and we're especially grateful for the L.A. filmgoing audience," Film Independent's executive director Dawn Hudson said at the award ceremony.

First-time festival director Rebecca Yeldham -- who last year won an audience prize for her film "Anvil" -- said she'd had an "amazing" first year.

"The LA Film Festival aims to provide the filmmaker and the audience with a passion for film and understanding of the world," Yeldham said. "This is what happens when artists stick their necks out. We're here in dedication to filmmaking."

Sten Iversen, manager of the Montana Film Office, came to the Los Angeles Film Festival this year to launch his new Studio 406 incentive package. A veteran of the festival dating back to its first year, Iversen sees it as the perfect place to sell independent filmmakers on the benefits of filming in Montana.

Just moments after landing at LAX, his beliefs were validated as he spent nearly two hours in traffic trying to get to his hotel. Crews filming in Montana would face no such problems since his incentive package offers free traffic control signage. Traditionally, when production needs to close a street or highway they must rent the signage from a traffic control company.

“In Montana that would take less than 10 minutes,” Iversen said of the 10-mile drive. “Time is money.”

While free traffic signage may not entice the major studios, Iversen has built a package of sustainable incentives for smaller budget projects. It offers standard perks, like tax credits, and more specialized benefits, such as free office furniture and no sales tax.

“For a studio, a $500,000 office space is like ‘so what?’,” Iversen said. “For a $5 million dollar film, that’s great.”

The package’s tax credits are not as high as those offered by other states, but Iversen suspects that given the current economic climate, they are more realistic in the long-term.

“I think we’ll see states with huge incentives have to cut programs,” Iversen said. “Other states are not in good shape financially. We’re in a good state. We are in the black.”

Iversen wrote the first incentive package in 2005 after watching more and more studios choose Canada for film locations. He then revised it two years later, giving bigger tax credits, and this year saw it extended until 2015.

The recent extension prompted Iversen to search for a launching point and he settled on a festival he had been coming to for years. “Sundance is great but I thought it would be better to launch it in is the heart of the business,” he said.

In exchange for a booth and advertising at the festival, the Montana Film Office financed a film financing conference, a major reception and some of the festival.
“It was a nice way of putting out 80,000 images of Montana,” Iversen said.

Montana has served as the location for more than 110 films to date, the most recent of which opens today – “My Sister’s Keeper” starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. With Montana’s long workdays and large production hub in Bozeman, Iversen hopes that number only continues to rise.

Earlier this year, the state showcased its ability to plan an event, hosting the premiere of “Call of the Wild,” starring Christopher Lloyd.

Still, Iversen knows his state only works for certain projects. “If a script calls for Downtown Los Angeles, we can help,” he said. “But if you are looking for unspoiled beauty in the lower 48 [states], that’s what we have.”
 

The LA Film Festival’s “Graphic Explosion” panel featured a quartet of admitted comic book nerds, three of whom have helped translate that passion into filmmaking.

The one-hour panel, held at the Italian Cultural Institute, was moderated by Dave Pifer, owner of Secret Headquarters comic book store in Silver Lake -- but Phifer only opened his mouth to ask the occasional question.

The speakers -- writers Josh Olson ("A History of Violence") and Zak Penn ("X2: X-Men United," "The Incredible Hulk") and co-founder of Radical Publishing Barry Levine (left) -- took the time to set the record straight on the process of adapting comic books.

As comic book fans, they found little to disagree about besides their opinions on the film version of “The Watchmen” (Penn liked it; Levine did not), but they had no problem objecting to almost everyone else.

First, it was people who pigeonhole comic books as a genre. “I hate to call it a genre,” Olson said. “It’s more of a medium.”

Then it was the common perception of comic books. “I really think there’s a notion in peoples' heads of what a comic book means, but it's 25 years old,” Penn said.

A moment later, they even went after other fanatics. “There’s always someone out there who is attached to the worst element,” Olson said. “There’s always a Jar Jar Binks fan out there.”

And finally they settled on their favorite punching bag -- the studios.

“One of the real problems in development is when someone wants to change a script,” Penn said. “Something seems tired, but it’s because they read it last week … 'The Great Gatsby,’ if you had to read it every week for 10 weeks, you’d get sick of it,” he added.

Prominent among their complaints was the one heard most frequently from filmmakers – the studio obsession with the bottom line. Penn winced when he recalled "Elektra," starring Jennifer Garner as a female assassin that he co-wrote. The studio insisted it be rated PG-13 to reach a bigger audience.

“It should’ve been R-rated, like 'Sin City',” he said. “It doesn’t work to have a PG-13 movie about an assassin.”

"The only movies I feel 100 percent about are the ones I've directed myself," Penn added.

While  all of the panelists have enjoyed the benefits of the recent surge in studio movies based on comic books, they were quick to point out that it is not a new phenomenon. “Comics have always been a presence in Hollywood,” Olson said. “They have just become a bigger presence.”

Nor is it a trend that will disappear any time soon.

“There is a surfeit of comic book movies, and it won't stay at this level, but they will always be there,” Penn said. “They have the type of fans that will see a movie six times.”

Of course, this is coming from a group of comic book junkies, all of who attended “ComicCon” well before it became a Hollywood trend. Nonetheless, Penn sought to explain why comic books would always be fodder for movies. After pointing out that a large part of the country’s population grew up on comics, he unfurled his only compliment of Hollywood on the night -- and it was back-handed.

“Hollywood does a lot of things badly, but nobody else makes 'The Matrix' like we make 'The Matrix.'”
 

There were no signs of cutbacks or the recent exec shuffle at the lavish premiere of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," which overtook the streets of Westwood Monday evening with red carpets and life-size replicas of machines from the film, including the Optimus Prime semi-truck. 

Before the screening at Mann's Village Theater, Paramount head Brad Grey took the stage to applaud producer Steven Spielberg and director Michael Bay's latest collaboration. Bay thanked the studio for acting as his "family" for the last three years.    The comment may have been an effort to stifle the rumors of turmoil between the director and the studio after Bay  complained last month in a leaked email to studio heads that he didn't think Paramount was doing enough to promote the film.   "You jumped off a cliff with me three years ago, and a director is only as good as his cast and crew," Bay (pictured right) said as he introduced the film. "When I made this movie it was about having fun. So let's have some fun."    Audience members chomped on popcorn from huge "Tranformers"-themed buckets before heading over to the outdoor after-party, where partygoers were greeted by large metal sculptures and a re-creation of the yellow Bumble-Bee transformer from the film.   Studio execs stood by the bar, stopping continuously by Grey to congratulate him.   Megan Fox (left), dressed in a white grecian-inspired gown, sat in a corner as a number of wide-eyed male fans approached her to eagerly request a photo op. Shia LaBeouf (right) stood nearby, constantly surrounded by a throng of admirers and friends, including "Milk" star Emile Hirsch.    Other cast members also spent the night interacting with the crowd: Josh Duhamel seemed to be continuously posing for pictures, while Tyrese Gibson -- dressed in a flashy red blazer and black bowtie -- bopped his head to the music along Linkin Park's performance. The band performed "New Divide," which appears on the film's soundtrack, as well as a number of their old hits like "Numb."   Other partying stars included Kim Kardashian, Vanessa Minnello and Hef's former Playboy girlfriends Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt.   The event set the stage for the film, which opens wide at midnight Tuesday. The first film earned $708 million worldwide, and a number of tickets for the midnight screenings are already sold out. 

The screening of an Iranian film at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Saturday became the occasion to debate the turmoil happening a half a world away, while serving as a timely reminder of the struggle for women's rights under Islamic regimes in the Middle East.

Based on a true story, "The Stoning of Soraya M." tells the tale of Soraya (Mozhan Marno), an innocent women entangled in an unhappy marriage who is falsely accused by her husband of having an affair with a man in their remote Iranian village.

Soraya's husband schemes with the town elders to make sure his wife is charged with the ultimate penalty - being stoned to death by the whole village. Her only hope and supporter is her Aunt Zahra (Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo), who later boldly shares Soraya's story with a journalist passing through town.

In real life, that journalist was Paris-based Freidoune Sahebjam, whose book of the same name was the first to bring attention to the real Soraya, who was stoned and killed in 1986.

The film is at once profoundly powerful and deeply disturbing: the prolonged and graphic scene depicting stones being thrown at Soraya - bloodied and buried to her waist in sand - elicited audible sobs from the packed audience at the Mann Festival Theater.

"I've seen the real thing on tape and in comparison, the scene in the movie is nothing," said director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who sat alongside Aghdashloo and Iranian writer and scholar Reza Aslan on a panel moderated by "Kite Runner" author Khaled Hosseini immediately after the screening. "I just felt I had the responsibility to not water it down for the people who have died this way."

Shohreh Aghdashloo (pictured right), who received a standing ovation from the audience for her performance, said she immediately wanted to become a part of the film upon hearing about its subject matter because she had viewed an actual stoning on-tape years prior. She recalled the difficulty of shooting such an emotional scene - which took six days to film in its entirety.

"On the fourth or fifth day of filming the stoning scene, I had dust in my eyes, there were angry men stomping on the ground and everyone was chanting 'Allahu Akbar' ['God is great']. It became hard to tell what was reality and what was a dream," she said.

Reza Aslan explained that Islamic law has long struggled with stonings because they are not written about in the Koran. The culture has responded to this problem by making it nearly impossible to be convicted of adultery: one has to be caught during fornication by four men of "blameless integrity" who all witness the act at the same time.

"They've created these obstacles instead of legal scholars simply saying, 'this is absurd,'" Aslan said. "The issue at hand is really more about the way woman get treated - not religion, but women's rights. We're talking about cultural practices - not religion - because there is no such thing as religion separated from culture."

Meanwhile on Saturday, thousands of protesters filled the streets of Tehran, combatting police with tear gas and batons on the seventh day of post-election protests by those who believe President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory was rigged. Reports put the death toll at as high as 150, and CNN said that 19 were killed Saturday.

And in Westwood, demonstrators lined the streets on Saturday, wielding red, white and green flags to show their support for protests in Iran.

"This film is so connected to the extraordinary events occurring in Iran," Hosseini said. "The uprising has a lot more to it than Ahmadinejad. This is years of frustration from a sophisticated society of people finally breaking open."

"Whatever happens, Iran won't be the same after this," Aghdashloo said. "My friends inside the country are telling me this looks like the 1979 year of revolution. We're at the dawn of democracy with more transparency where it's dialogues coming out instead of monologues coming down."

Hosseini was brought to the festival as an artist in residence by LAFF's director, Rebecca Yeldham, and told he could screen any film of his choosing. He initially had reservations about "The Stoning" because he felt it might further promote negative stereotypes about Islam, but said he ultimately couldn't ignore the film's power.

"After I saw it, I felt like the breath had been knocked out of my chest and I kind of wanted to knock somebody out, too," he said. "The film is bold and not willing to sanitize the horrific truth."

"I'm hoping now that the information is out there that together we can end this barbaric form of punishment," Aghdashloo said. She advocated visiting the movie's website to pledge money and support towards stopping the brutal punishment.

But to really make change, Aslan believes the Middle East will have to further its social, economic and political development.

"We have to see what we can do to change the culture and situation, by promoting education," he said. "We have to do more than worry and complain. We can't just sit in a theater and mourn it."

"Paper Man" kicked off Film Independent's Los Angeles Film Festival Thursday evening, premiering to a packed audience of sales agents, indie actors and industry execs at Mann's Village Theater.

"Nobody knows what the times are for independent film, but it's still alive and well, and any film that treats the audience responsibly has a shot," said Kieran Mulroney, the bespectacled half of the husband-wife team that wrote and directed the movie at the after-party at the Napa Valley Grille. 

Mulroney and wife Michele, who have been writing partners for 12 years, are also the writers of Warner Bros’ upcoming "Justice League," though "Paper Man" marks their first stint as directors.

The film tells the story of Richard Dunn (Jeff Daniels), an author who holes up in a seaside cabin to simultaneously battle his writers block and his floundering marriage with his wife (Lisa Kudrow). During his stay, he meets a Long Island teenager, Abby (Emma Stone), and the two bond over their shared loneliness.

Indeed, both have imaginary friends -- Richard's is a superhero named Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), who has lived inside his head since second grade and constantly badgers the writer to evaluate his actions.

Penn Badgley, Christina Ricci (pictured left), Anna Chlumsky and a post-surgery Chaz Bono milled about the overcrowded Mann Village Theater searching for seats before the show began.

But the big stars of "Paper Man" were not in attendance. In lieu of their absence, Daniels (currently starring in "God of Carnage" on Broadway) and Reynolds (whose film "The Proposal" opens this weekend) shot a short clip that aired before the movie. The clip featured the two on the phone, trying to top one another with a comic list of reasons they couldn't attend the fest.

"I'm donating bone marrow," Reynolds kidded. "Yeah, this girl asked, and I'm a match!"

"Nothing makes me happier than allowing filmmakers to birth their film in their hometown," said the fest's new director, Rebecca Yeldham, before the screening. She also thanked Richard Raddon, her predecessor, who resigned last November after it came to light that he'd made a donation to a group supporting Proposition 8.

Film Independent's executive director Dawn Hudson said she was proud to be hosting a festival during a tough economic climates: "Art is not a luxury, even in hard times," she said.

At the after-party, Hudson (pictured below, far left with Yeldham, Kieran Mulroney, Stone and Michele Mulroney) told TheWrap that she chose "Paper Man" as the opening night film late in the game -- viewing it as the filmmakers were still color-timing the movie. 

"It was like we were waiting for that right guy to come along, and then we found him and finally got married," she said. "You really feel the Mulroneys' heart and their personal vision in the film. And that's what this festival is about -- artist-driven films."

This year's 10-day festival will screen 200 films from 30 countries, with fare ranging from big-picture Hollywood flicks like "Public Enemies" with Johnny Depp and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" to a 14-hour Chinese documentary.

"Nobody supports indie film like the L.A. Film Festival does," Kieran Mulroney said, his eyes darting around the buzzing party. "So for us, being a film without a distributor, this is a really big deal."