LETTERS @ 3 AM

From The Land of Coming Events

Authors

  • David de Rozas Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37522/k074zh19

Keywords:

cinematography, urban, poetics, place, walking, process cinema, ethnographic observation, Los Angeles, the everyday, critical documentation

Abstract

I arrived in Los Angeles in 2013 as an immigrant student, and Downtown and its communities became my anchor for understanding who I am in this city and in a new country. By 2017, I witnessed the district entering another wave of urban redevelopment, promising revitalization while threatening its low-income immigrant communities and long-standing family businesses. Through walking, filming, and building relationships with residents, I began documenting these transformations, seeking to create a counter-affective map of the district. LETTERS @ 3 AM merges diary, community collaboration, experimental ethnography, and 16mm film to portray Downtown Los Angeles as a multidimensional character that resists the city’s drive to forget.

Author Biography

  • David de Rozas

    David de Rozas (b. 1979) is a filmmaker, media artist, and educator based in Los Angeles. His practice investigates the politics of memory, focusing on places, bodies, and materialities as sites shaped by historical authority, regimes of truth, and institutions of power. His award-winning films have screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, Kassel DocFest, and the Smithsonian African exhibited at MoMA (New York), Getty PST, the Visual Arts Center in Austin, and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. De Rozas has been a Flaherty Seminar Fellow (2019), a VIA Art Fund Production Grantee (2020), an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), and a USC Annenberg Fellow since 2023. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Media Arts and Practice program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. American Film Festival. Recent projects have been  exhibited at MoMA (New York), Getty PST, the Visual Arts Center in Austin, and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. De Rozas has been a Flaherty Seminar Fellow (2019), a VIA Art Fund Production Grantee (2020), an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), and a USC Annenberg Fellow since 2023. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Media Arts and Practice program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Downtown from Lincoln Heights’ Hill Top View. August 2024.

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Published

2025-12-11

Issue

Vol. 2 (2025): Extending the Echoes: Ways with Documentation for Artists Doing Research

Section

Articles