Matthew Eugene Hunsucker
March 16th 2020
Reporting on PIFF 43: Frank and Zed for Prof. Kristin Hole Film Festival studies class @ PSU
At the world premiere of Frank and Zed, at the Portland International Film Festival 43 (PIFF43). We got to see the hard work director Jesse Blanchard and the rest of his team at Puppetcore Films. A film featuring an all cast of puppets telling the tale of two undead who work at just surviving the world. Their uneasy relationship is disturbed as the local village unravels due to fear of a prophecy coming true. The panic of the leadership leads to the death of villagers, and then a mob forms to defeat our principal characters. We get to see the dependence of the characters Frank (a frankenstein monster like creature) and Zed (a reanimated corpse, with a hunger for brains), as they go through a daily ritual. Frank hunts for brains to feed Zed, mostly it’s squirrels. Once he catches and breaks down the squirrels, and Zed has eaten, he helps Frank by hooking him up into an electric chair, so that evenings lighting strikes will recharge Frank’s heart. Over the course of the narrative you get a sense of Frank’s care for Zed. Almost a sense of a responsibility for his care, more than just a selfish need of self preservation. Towards the end of the film you sympathize with Frank and Zed, and begin to wonder who the real monsters of this story are.
The film played at the local Portland’s Cinema 21, which opened in 1925. I think it was a great pairing for this film seeing that the filmmakers are locals of Portland OR. This was the first year that PIFF would also include aspects from another film festival that the Northwest Film Center puts on. Northwest Filmmakers Festival that is normal in the fall. This film festival normally features filmmakers from the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia). This was done in the hope to get some more attention to the local filmmakers.
This reminds of a paper from Liz Czach “Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema”. In this essay she speaks to the idea of what a national cinema is and how that relates to Film Festivals and the aspects of programming film in general the lens of cinema in Canada. She speaks to the ideas of taste and value judgments, and how national art style cinemas may get a pass on some aspects of filmmaking like the quality or size of its budget compared to Hollywood. “Despite the problematic nature of film canons and their exclusionary politics, they can still be an important means to value (as well as evaluate) a national cinema.” (Czach 80) In this game of getting your film seen, we filmmakers must play the system somewhat. Going for a national cinema feel for film, may not make big bucks, but it might help it get seen more.
Six years ago Jesse Blanchard started to work on Frank and Zed. Then PIFF and Northwest Filmmakers Festival were different creatures. Did Jesse seek to have his film entered in both events or just one of them? Much in line with arguments from Czach, I think it could be applied to not only national cinema but also regional cinema. The states and provinces of the Pacific Northwest have a lot more in common with each other than the rest of their own nation states. I would go to say that this can be seen in the films produced by it’s resident filmmakers.
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Source of Information:
Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema by Liz Czach
PSU School of Film @ PIFF 