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Is there some basketball game going on next to the L.A. Film Festival?

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When it decided to move downtown, the Los Angeles Film Festival wanted to attract heat. On Thursday night, when the festival kicks off its latest edition, it will get what it wants. There will be heat. Maybe too much heat.

An unlikely confluence of events will ensure that downtown Los Angeles is congested in ways that downtown is, well, rarely congested.

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When organizers pull the wraps off this year’s festival with the screening of Focus Features’ Sundance hit ‘The Kids Are All Right’ (followed by the after-party on the event deck at L.A. Live.), the Lakers will be playing an all-important Game 7 of the NBA Finals at Staples Center, heightening the crowds and traffic. Adding to the tumult: Video game conference E3 will be wrapping up at the nearby Los Angeles Convention Center.

The Lakers won’t pose a traffic problem to festgoers on the way in; the screening begins at 7:30, when Kobe Bryant and Paul Pierce will be well into their shot-making, and Ron Artest and Big Baby well into the elbow-throwing. But the game should end about the same time as the screening, creating a logjam of Gasol-like proportions. And even if the Lakers win, that could well mean looting, fires and other vandalism, as it did last year after the men in purple and white took the title (and that game was on the road).

For their part, festival organizers tried on Wednesday to put a happy face on the crowd control issues. ‘Tomorrow night is a great celebration of two homegrown loves: cinema and the L.A. Lakers,’ said festival director Rebecca Yeldham. ‘There’s nowhere else to be tomorrow night, and we can’t imagine a more thrilling start to the 2010 L.A. Film Festival.”

Organizers obviously couldn’t have known what a hothouse downtown would be on that night when they chose to open the festival on this night. (Well, they knew about E3, but couldn’t have known about the Lakers.) And the Los Angeles Police Department does promise an increased presence, say our colleagues at the L.A. Now blog. But any way you slice it, it will be a pretty jammed scene.

Then again, LAFF and new host AEG say they want the remade program to look more like Sundance, Toronto and other world-class festivals. And what’s a world-class festival without the choking crowds.

-- Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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