(Told in “Twitter” style)

I had a very disparate, fragmented, over-mediated, maybe-a-bit-too-breakneck weekend. In L.A., these seem to be the norm rather than the exception, but this weekend struck me as a particularly postmodern pastiche of way too much that any one mind should encounter in a 60-hour period. To my horror, one of the ways I coped with the weekend was to think in status updates. But since I don’t Twitter and only occasionally update my Facebook status via my phone, I could not publicize my disjointed weekend narrative to the world.

Los Angeles is without a doubt the most visually documented city in the world. But it is also one of the least known or truly understood. What is this place we call L.A.? Besides all the Hollywood stuff, what is its history and culture? How do we make sense of it amidst all the glittered sidewalks, scientologists, palm trees, car chases, sunset strips and skid rows?

This is one of the questions raised each year at the City of Angels Film Festival, held in Hollywood’s Director’s Guild theater and hosted by various Christian universities and organizations in the Los Angeles area. The festival, which got its start after the Rodney King riots brought the city to its knees in 1992, is a distinctly L.A. festival that has always focused on films with spiritual vitality and in recent years has also probed deeper into the heart of the place of L.A.