This Festival marks the sixth year for the City of Angels Film Festival.  Every year we are delighted by the renewed energy, dedication and support from so many of our fellow workers in the “vineyard” of the entertainment industry.  This is a vineyard that urgently needs tending, but which is ripe and full of many fruits.  Our vineyard lies at the intersection between our age's most eloquent art form, film, and our society’s most pressing question: God.  It is indeed a special place.  We are people who love God, love film and love each other.  Simple, direct and most assuredly true.  Your presence here suggests you are ready to fall in love with the eloquence of visual language, with the fragility of being human, and with the awesome possibility of the sacred.

This year's festival Embracing Apocalypse: Visions of Faith and Fear brings together some remarkable films that explore our human response to that moment on our individual or collective journeys when everything seems about to end;  the moment when revelation can occur.  We also offer you a slate of new and provocative documentaries and shorts to compliment the festival’s theme.  Additionally, we welcome the opportunity to participate with the Focolare Movement in the presentation of the Eleventh Annual Luminosa Award for Unity to our great friends and supporters Patt and Jack Shea.  We are honored  by the visit of Cardinal William Keeler and Archbishop John Foley to our festival as well as many distinguished members of the Hollywood community. 

This year in conjunction with the festival, filmmakers and pastors will also be holding a day of meetings as part of the Reel Spirituality conference, and media professionals will spend a morning dialoguing about unity and community as part of Focolare's offering to the festival.  We are also pleased to welcome to this year’s events friends and colleagues from other parts of the country and from abroad who are interested in this very intersection we explore and whose varied voices and presence help to enrich our vision.

We dedicate the Sixth Annual City of the Angels Film Festival to the memory of Julie Banks, who at the side of our founding Chairman Rob Banks, nurtured this dream from the very beginning. Come fall in love, and stay a while...

CECILIA GONZALEZ-ANDRIEU
1999 Festival Chairperson