By Sam Schrader
March 2020 marked the 43rd year of the Portland International Film Festival, managed and hosted by the Northwest Film Center. While the festival has long been a staple of the local cultural scene, this year things were a little different. For the first time in nearly forty years, the NWFC has a new director, Amy Dotson. Dotson, who comes from an impressive background in independent cinema, comes from New York’s Independent Filmmaker Project, where she served as both Deputy Director and Head of Programming.[1] With a new director comes change to the festival itself. This year the festival combined with the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival, a similar event focused on specifically regional filmmakers. While there was some concern that this would reduce exposure for local artists, the thinking at the top was that the clout of the Portland International Film Festival would overall result in a greater net gain for the filmmakers who would have been featured in the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival. Another significant change came from the inclusion of special events, panels, and for the first time, judged competition; also in an attempt by the organizers to elevate the status of the festival in the global film community. Along with all the practical changes to the festival, the festival worked to re-brand, claiming the rather absurd moniker “Cinema Unbound.” Will this be the new name for PIFF in the foreseeable future, or should we expect a new and meaningless collection of buzzwords every year?
As an international event, film festivals are uniquely positioned to be both cultural hubs, promoting tastemaking and intellectual development of the arts, and also venues for entertainment and spectacle. While the big festivals such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin (which PIFF is trying more and more to emulate) are fairly restrictive for lay people without an abundance of money or connections, in the time since film festivals first began appearing en masse after World War II a remarkable amount of festivals have cropped up around the world varying greatly in size and accessibility, catering to every cinematic niche imaginable. By and large PIFF seems to be concerned with programming what Dorota Ostrowska refers to as the “Cannes film,” or what can more broadly be thought of as a “festival film.” Typically these are characterized by being independent, covering unrepresented narratives or characters, and not receiving much attention beyond the festival circuit (with notable exceptions, of course). This is largely due to the environment of large, high-end festivals which fosters both creative and financial networking between filmmakers and producers of arthouse cinema (Ostrowska 28). In many regards, the “festival film” is hard to describe in clear cut terms, but it’s something that you know when you see it.
In light of PIFF’s clear trend towards programming “festival films,” it came as a surprise to many (and an outrage to some) that PIFF gave up two spots in their opening weekend to Disney/Pixar’s Onward (2020), a film that is, by no stretch of the imagination a “festival film,” and yet… Here it is. As one of the two PIFF events that I was able to attend before the event was cut short, I went into PIFF’s “free community screening” of Onward without any clear expectations, other than a childlike excitement for seeing a new Pixar film. While it was certainly a controversial choice on the part of the NWFC and PIFF, I think that choosing to program Onward as a free screening with an emphasis on community and the resources that the NWFC offers for young, prospective filmmakers served the community and the festival quite well in the end.
Another new development that continues to impact just about every aspect of global life, including the Portland International Film Festival, is the rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) — the virus responsible for the COVID-19 disease. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past two months, you should be familiar with this disease and the havoc that it is wreaking across the world. Due to concerns from public health experts, the 43rd Portland International Film Festival made the decision to close the festival early, cancelling the last several days of programming and events.
Unfortunately, as the name implies, international film festivals attract an international audience. Among those who travel to and attend the big annual festivals, there is a “circuit” of festivals in multiple countries around the world. In Julian Stringer’s “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy,” he cites three distinct definitions of what the “film festival circuit” can mean, the first being a journalistic sense, in which it represents “a closely linked network of interrelated, interdependent events” (Stringer 137). This is all well and good most of the time, but when in times like these that also means that individuals are travelling all over the world from crowded gathering to crowded gathering, acting as extremely efficient disease vectors. Film festivals are excellent venues to exchange and generate cultural capital, but unfortunately that’s not all they can generate.
To anyone who has been paying attention to the spread of the virus and the responses by various governing bodies, the response by PIFF may have seemed like too little too late. Reports suggest that the virus has been spreading through the community for more than a month on the West Coast before it was caught.[2] To ignore the threat of the illness until the last possible minute was nothing short of hubris, and hopefully this will serve as a wakeup call to institutions, both moving forward in the fight against SARS-CoV-2, and in the event of future pandemics. Events and institutions that host gatherings of hundreds of people, like PIFF or Portland State University, are ripe for the spread of infection. It is the duty of these institutions to their communities to be proactive and responsible. It’s frustrating and it’s unfair to have to cancel an event like this, but by making the choice to expose people, they also make that choice for people who would not otherwise have been exposed, especially when a significant portion of the festival’s patrons are over 60 — the age group most at risk for fatal complications. Unfortunately many of us now, in being involved with and studying film festivals, have also been forced to assume the mantle of amateur public health scientists. It’s scary and our futures are anything but certain, however we must lean into this, be proactive, and put the needs of the community above our own.
It will be interesting to see how film festivals and film exhibition more broadly answers the call of the times in regards to remote screenings and the adaptive use of modern technology to those ends. One of the technological devices that festivals like Sundance have been experimenting with recently is the application of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). VR is a fully immersive experience, whereas AR involves an interactive interface which is typically overlaid on real images, such as in smart glasses.[3] This technology is not only being used as a way to enhance the festival going experience, but also as a type of new media that can be used for creative output. In fact one of the events at the Portland International Film Festival this year was a workshop led by Michel Reilhac, who is, according to the PIFF brochure, “a filmmaker and immersive media experience designer [who] curates immersive media content and experiences for the Venice Biennale VR competition and for Seriesmania in Lille” (pg. 7). As Liz Czach discusses in her article “Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema,” film festivals are not just important for the exclusive arthouse community, but can be highly influential in the building and maintaining of a national cinematic output, especially in countries other than the United States, where international Hollywood films dominate the box office. “Programming is about tastemaking,” she says. “The ‘taste’ of the programmer can never be extinguished” (84). In a near-future where anyone with tech savvy can put on a virtual film festival, and anyone with access to the requisite technology can virtually attend the large, previously exclusive festivals like Cannes (or even PIFF, those passes ain’t cheap), the world of film festivals and film programming, as well as interpersonal curation may see a rapid evolution favoring even more diverse and exciting festivals and programming. It will be important not to be overwhelmed by choice or the possibilities of it all, but the personal taste of film programmers will likely shine through brighter and with more influence than ever before. It’s a brave new world, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get better; but they will get better, and I hope I’m around to see it.
[1] https://www.wweek.com/arts/2019/05/07/northwest-film-center-announces-new-director/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/doctor-who-treated-first-us-coronavirus-patient-says-covid-19-has-been-circulating-unchecked-for-weeks.html
[3] For more information about the state of this technology, check out this Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/01/16/pico-north-and-nreal-dominate-xr-at-ces-2020/#54345835fe47
PSU School of Film @ PIFF 