Americano

In person: Mathieu Demy and Chiara Mastroianni!

When thirty-something Martin (played by actor-writer-director Mathieu Demy) is summoned from Paris to Los Angeles to settle the estate of his estranged mother, the journey dredges up long-submerged emotions stemming from the time Martin lived in L.A. as a young boy (a backstory beautifully evoked with flashbacks from films by Demy’s own mother, legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda). Going through his mother’s effects, he discovers that she had willed her apartment to a mystery woman named Lola.  His first reaction is to destroy the evidence, but then through a combination of curiosity and guilt, Martin decides to track Lola down. For his first feature, Demy creates a shape-shifting fiction that begins as a kind of memory film and hurtles into a brutal confrontation with a world the young Parisian hardly knew existed. Salma Hayek and Geraldine Chaplin co-star.