About the film
Joshua Tree, New Year’s Eve:
At the intersection of past and future, a woman with dementia must remember her past mistakes and make amends in order to find peace in the next world.
Los Ageless is based on the graphic novel short story Desert Weekend by Emily Manthei, published in BEYOND SUNSET magazine in 2022.
About the filmmakers
WE ARE A WOMEN-LED CREATIVE TEAM
Writer-director Emily Manthei is the director of award-winning short film VOICE OVER and the 2025 indie darling bicycle film BERLIN LOOP. She’s worked with NGOs to create image films in Central America and South Asia, where she learned to tell quirky, location-bound stories exploring cultural intersections and overlapping identities. She’s an American-born filmmaker and a dual US/German citizen living in Berlin.
With a background in entertainment and human rights advocacy, Farida Rafique brings a wealth of social impact producing experience from films like LOVE LETTERS TO AN ADDICT and Oscar-shortlisted short film BIENVENIDOS A LOS ANGELES. As a SPEC-certified sustainability producer and advocate for diversity and inclusion in cinema, she works for impact in front of and behind the camera.
Jenny Jo Stokka is a creative producer with a passion for international, auteur-driven films. With a background in the fast-paced world of New York advertising and a passion for impact, she’s brought a collaborative leadership style and a business mindset to her work on feature film BERLIN LOOP, documentary feature THE LONGER YOU BLEED, and Cannes Short Film Corner selection PELARGONIA.
ABOUT OUR COMPANY: In honor of the pioneering, curious pilot and UFO-ologist George van Tassel, VAN TASSEL, LLC is the legal owner of the film property LOS AGELESS. Founded by Emily Manthei, Jenny Jo Stokka, and Farida Rafique, the company and its film explore haunting questions of spirit, aging and memory. Parting the veil between material and spiritual worlds, the company's founders, like van Tassel, are interested in the metaphysical, psychic, spiritual, eternal, and philosophical implications of time.
Director’s Statement
Spending time with my grandmother in Desert Hot Springs — between Joshua Tree and Palm Springs — has impacted me since childhood. Watching someone age with joy and vitality, every day until the last, taught me that physical life is only one color on the spectrum of reality. In the desert, you can feel the other colors of that spectrum. It is a place where wisdom and energy from the past - and from older generations - hang in the air like a thick supernatural halo. On the surface, it’s a brutal, dry, intense climate, but somewhere between the air and the land, this place of exile becomes a place of transformation, and transmutation.
As life transforms into death, memory into decay, skin into spirit, something remains: an energy, a life force, an eternal spirit. In a place that blurs the line between reality and dreams, time and eternity, we can explore the liminal space that is the unending present. Using the desert’s intense contrasts, this is a story that shows us that everything belongs — life, death, even afterlife — as one is tested and transformed.