Léa Moret has travelled far and wide in her roughly two decades on the planet—including throughout Latin America, as chronicled in a self-produced documentary, which premiered on Netflix in August—but she still considers Los Feliz her home away from home.
The 23-year-old filmmaker, who hails from Belgium and now lives in France, moved to West Hollywood with her parents when she was 13. A few years later, they found their way to Los Feliz, where she enrolled at Russell Avenue’s Lycée International (LILA), a local French language immersion school.
According to Moret, after living in Europe, she initially found it hard to adjust to Los Angeles life. But then, she said, “I got to Los Feliz and I was like oh wow, this is a place that I feel actually at home in even in this big city.”
Among Moret’s favorite local hangouts are diner Fred 62, the Los Feliz 3 movie theater and Figaro French bistro, all on Vermont Avenue. She also loves to hike the plentiful local trails.
“Now I live in Paris, and every time I come to L.A. the first thing I do is go straight to Griffith Park,” she said.
But while Moret is no stranger to international travel, her journey to Netflix was an improbable one. It began when she met her best friend Camille Shooshani as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California.
“We met freshman year of college on a bus going to a random party,” Moret recalled. “We were at USC, which had a particular scene—a very big Greek system—but she and I always liked to talk and analyze.”
The night they met, the pair talked for hours as the party raged on around them.
Moret, a computer science and business major, and Shooshani, an English and film studies major, quickly discovered they had much in common despite their different areas of study, and the pair soon became inseparable.
After graduation, their bond would only intensify when Moret convinced Shooshani to accompany her on a journey through the villages, mountains and jungles of Latin America in search of alternative treatments for her cystic fibrosis.
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition with no known cure that damages the lungs and digestive system, leading to an increased risk of infections and an average life expectancy of 37 years—which is steadily increasing as researchers discover new treatments.
Intrigued by an unconventional treatment using magnets that she had once received on a family trip to Mexico, Moret wondered what other health secrets Latin America might have to offer, and she and Shooshani decided to film their quest as both a travelogue and a document of their friendship.
“Camille and I were dreaming about making a film,” said Moret. “Our friendship, we felt, had something special. We had this desire to share our story.”
Additionally, said Moret, the pair wanted to disprove the notion that only certain types of people were allowed to make films, or that studio buy-in was a prerequisite of success.
“Especially today, when there’s so many tools and ways to tell stories,” Moret said, it’s possible for anyone to make a film. Additionally, Moret said, she wanted to show others with cystic fibrosis how full life can be, even with the disease.
“Younger kids that have this illness don’t know what their lives are going to look like,” she said. “They don’t even know if they are going to make it to 23. I’m very lucky that I’m healthy and that I’m doing things and I wanted to show others what was possible.”
Moret and Shooshani raised money through the crowd funding website Kickstarter and began their journey in 2017 through the mountains of Mexico, the Peruvian Amazon and the deserts of Chile, where they met with shamans and experimented with indigenous plant medicines, such as peyote and ayahuasca in search of spiritual awakening and a cure for Moret’s illness.
The pair finished their film, which Shooshani directed and Moret produced, in August 2018. Other than a private screening for their Kickstarter backers, they had no distribution plans.
But when a friend of a friend who works in distribution happened to see the film, she said, everything changed.
“He really believed in it” and agreed to help them.
Ultimately the film was purchased by streaming-giant Netflix, where it premiered on August 2nd.
Now Moret has moved on to a new project—her first novel. Perhaps you’ll spot her working on it at one of Los Feliz’s numerous cafes the next time she comes to visit her parents, who still live in the area.