Please join us for the premiere of Castle of Enchantment, a film by Weston Lyon & Karolina Lavergne. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Sterling Wells and the filmakers, moderated by Ana Iwataki. In the ruins of a once-fabled Los Angeles castle, a painter works beside an abandoned pool while a ghost endlessly rebuilds what was lost. Castle of Enchantment is an excavation of place, history, and the shaping of one's legacy. Castle of Enchantment is a short narrative film set on the former site of a visionary vernacular residence in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles. Built by Milt Hopkins for his wife Josie in the 1950s, the home—locally known as the “Castle of Enchantment"—was a handmade fortress constructed from salvaged materials from the 101 freeway expansion. It was demolished in the 2010s. The film unfolds in three parts: 1. Archival Introduction – An overview of the castle’s historical and emotional legacy, blending found materials, photographs, and city records. 2. Plein Air Painting – Artist Sterling Wells paints on-site in the Castle’s decaying swimming pool. Shot like fiction, these scenes explore art as witness and process. 3. The Ghost of Josie – A spectral narrative of Josie Hopkins, the woman for whom the castle was built. Embodied by a contemporary actor, her ghost lingers—haunting, rebuilding, and narrating the castle’s forgotten past. Blurring documentary and fiction, the film is a layered portrait of Los Angeles mythologies Ana Iwataki is a curator, writer, and PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. Karolina Lavergne is a Los Angeles-based artist working primarily in text and video. Her practice explores the overlap between still and moving images as a means to contruct-and disrupt-one's experience of time. She holds an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design. Weston Lyon is a filmmaker and photographer living in Los Angeles. His work has been in exhibition and screened at the Torrance Art Museum, 2220 Arts & Archives, Deslave Tijuana, Human Resources LA, as well as film festivals in the US and abroad. Image: Weston Lyon & Karolina Lavergne, still from Castle of Enchantment, 2025