Los Angeles Film Festival from LA Weekly

Los Angeles Film Festival: Reviews, A to Z

By L.A. Weekly Film Critics

CRITIC’S PICK WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (USA) Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, director Ondi Timoner’s remarkable documentary follows obsessive self-documenter Josh Harris on his decadelong odyssey from multimillionaire Internet pioneer and Manhattan art-world cause célèbre to bankrupt (financially and emotionally), mentally unhinged exile. In 1999, before reality TV boomed or the words MySpace, Facebook and YouTube had entered the lexicon, Harris signed on for privacy-free life by launching the underground art project Quiet: We Live in Public, in which 100 like-minded exhibitionists lived for 30 days in open cells under the constant scrutiny of video cameras and Orwellian interrogators. Timoner (DIG!) was there from the start, and she stuck around for Harris’ equally catastrophic second act, in which he and his then-girlfriend equipped their apartment with wall-to-wall surveillance cameras and proceeded to live their lives, for your viewing pleasure, at the Web site weliveinpublic.com. Harris’ gradual implosion is both repellent and mesmerizing, Timoner’s film unsparing in its scrutiny. She films, therefore he is. (Mann Festival; Sun., June 21, 7:15 p.m.; Landmark, Wed., June 24, 9:30 p.m.) (SF)