The City of West Hollywood plans to celebrate its upcoming 30th birthday with a special West Hollywood film festival.
Under a proposal by city staffers developed with Mayor John D’Amico and Councilmember John Heilman, which will go before the City Council for approval on Monday, the city would screen West Hollywood-inspired films, videos and other media at the film festival and make them available in a special West Hollywood Room to be created at the city’s public library.
The WeHo@30 festival will incorporate other projects currently in development. They include:
• “10 Years Later: Revisiting in a New Land.” In 2003 the city helped fund a project in which Russian-speaking teenagers documented their lives with photographs. The “10 Years Later” project would include a contemporary look at their lives and those of other Russian-speaking immigrants.
• “Young City at War: Stories from West Hollywood during the AIDS Epidemic.” This project, proposed by the Lavender Effect, will present oral interviews with six to eight people about how they responded to the AIDS epidemic.
• “The Long Road Home, Soviet Union to West Hollywood.” This project would add interviews of holocaust survivors, veterans and others who are or have ties to immigrants from the former Soviet Union to an existing documentary produced in 2005.
• The West Hollywood Room. The city will seek a curator for historical materials that will be archived in this room at the West Hollywood Library.
Residents of the area known as West Hollywood made four unsuccessful attempts to incorporate the area as a city to avoid annexation by the City of Los Angeles. They finally were successful when the Coalition for Economic Survival, which was focused on rent control, banded together with the city’s gay community, seniors and Russian-speaking immigrants to win support on Nov. 29, 1984 for incorporation.
