Rebecca Yeldham, the Los Angeles Film Festival's nurturer in chief

"We suddenly saw this is about the whole experience, about connecting the audience and community with the subjects and filmmakers," recalls Yeldham. "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" finally hit theaters this April. These days, Anvil, the band, is about to open for AC/DC in two stadium shows, and Yeldham, a 41-year-old Australian, has taken over the reins of the multimillion-dollar Los Angeles Film Festival, which this year runs Thursday through June 28 in Westwood Village (and is co-sponsored by The Times).

Yeldham is one of the few producers -- perhaps the only producer -- ever to oversee a major film festival, and she arrives at a time of tumult for both indie film and film festivals in general. The past year has produced a game of musical chairs in the film festival world, with Sundance's longtime head Geoff Gilmore going to run the Tribeca Film Festival and Kent Jones of New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center and Christian Gaines of the American Film Institute both left their posts for new environs.

The transition at LAFF was the most explosive, as the former director, Richard Raddon, chose to resign his post last November after it became public that he had donated $1,500 to California's anti-gay-marriage initiative, sparking an outcry in L.A.'s creative community.

According to Dawn Hudson, the head of Film Independent, which runs the festival and the Independent Spirit Awards, the LAFF board quickly focused on Yeldham, who had started out as a Sundance programmer and was characteristically outspoken on where she thought the festival should go.

"We asked her to think about doing this job, and how does the festival fit in to these times," Hudson says. "Times are tough. Resources are scarce. There's a lot of free-floating anxiety. People want to come together even more. They want something to be experienced that they can connect to and connect to other people through."

"I was feeling it as a producer among my filmmaking peers, just this despondency," says Yeldham, who officially signed on to head the festival in March. "We were in this post-sky-is-falling moment, and so many filmmakers I knew were struggling to find the means to get their stories out. My peers are looking to make intelligent, adult, original stories. Then to see those stories fall flat when they come to market and not find their audiences, it's so depressing. What we're building is not just a platform for new work, but also a platform for community, to exchange ideas on how to invent new paradigms to get our work out there, because the system is not working."

On a recent weekday morning, Yeldham, dressed in a long, orange tunic, spoke with forthrightness mixed with a puckish sense of humor. She never thought she'd end up in the film business because that's not what good Australian girls were raised to do. Yet after dropping law studies to attend Brown, she quickly adopted the American ethic of following your dreams and wound up first at Sundance, later running the American wing of the venerable British production company Film4 and finally producing such films as "The Kite Runner" and "The Motorcycle Diaries."