The 43rd Portland International Film Festival started off stumbling. On the first day of screenings, the projector died at the Cinema 21 location, cancelling the first shorts program of the festival. Though the projector was back up quickly, it was a rough start for an already somewhat questionable year of programming. There were many observations that the overall catalog of films this year was small in comparison to previous years. This year the festival was holding its first competition, however, and many watching the festival attributed the slim offerings to a step up in prestige. Of course, the expectation is that with fewer films comes better quality, and there seems to be some disappointment there as well.
This first film to show as part of the new Future/Future competition was Borrufa(2020) by new filmmaker, Roland Dahwen. Because this was the first year of the competition, and this was the very first film of the competition to show, the expectations were high. Much to the audience’s dismay, the film was not an entertainment film, but an art film. In Valck’s article, they speak about the ‘cultivation of taste’. They argue that the general taste of the festival scene is the rejection of “the cinema of attraction”, or the typical pure entertainment films that come out of Hollywood. They also include a quote from Bourdieu outlining the freedom of these festival artists from their “masters”, or the typical cinema goers and the desire for profit. This point seems contradictory to the reaction of the art film, Borrufa.
More than half of the audience walked out of the film throughout the screening, though more prominently within the first 20 minutes or so. It seems many felt some desire to stick it through even though they clearly hated it, and complaining from various audience members was loud and disruptive. The film’s shot lengths were generally between 3-5 minutes, and the aesthetic was very minimalistic. There was very little dialogue, and often very little movement from the characters in a scene. There was no intention for the film to be entertaining. During the talkback, the filmmaker showed little interest in the actual final piece, but more in the process of creation. This Infuriated some of the audience members who had stuck around this long. Perhaps they had desired some kind of payoff, some explanation for the slow mundaneness of the film. Instead the author essentially told them that their perception of the piece was not important to him. This is a typical artist mentality, the complete opposite of the entertainment industry.
This reaction of the audience to an art film was completely unanticipated. It is hard to believe that film festival goers would be so unprepared for a film that directly opposed the values of Hollywood. By all conception, this is the type of film that film festivals were designed for, and yet it fell worse than flat, it actively enraged the majority of its audience. The announcement of the winners of the Future/Future competition was made just yesterday, and unsurprisingly Borrufa was not one of them.
Children of the Sea(2019) was a Japanese animation film that was most certainly a children’s film. It was unclear what to expect from the film, really, but the idea followed a young girl who felt as if she didn’t belong, she meets strange new friends and they show her a new world, the general youth-aimed story structure. Before the screening the volunteers handed out surveys to complete after the film. Apparently, the screening of this film was sponsored by the Consulate Office of Japan in Portland, and the survey was meant to measure the audience member’s perception of Japan and Japanese culture through the film. It was a strange touch to attempt to grasp Japanese culture through a singular, and rather abstract film. It added a bit of pressure to really connect with the specific location and cultural contexts of the film, which was not entirely necessary and did spoil a bit of the enjoyment. If they had simply given the survey after the film it would not have added that pressure. They also may not have gotten the quantity of responses they were hoping for in that scenario, but there were not many people actually turning in the survey anyways.
Onward(2020) was a second interesting addition to the program, being the opening film to play at the Whitsell for the first full day of the festival. Many questioned the choice to play a major release to open the festival, especially given the timing of the showing which was a day after the film’s release in major theaters across the country. Given the already short supply of films offered by the festival, it was an odd choice to give one of those slots to a film anyone could go see in any theater for the following month or so. Not only that, but the film was played twice in the festival, and tickets for the second showing were more expensive than going to see the film in any big theater.
Rastegar in their piece about curation discusses the practice as a balancing act between “artists and various stakeholders”(182). The addition of Onward to the festival line-up is suggested to be the result of someone from Disney Plus being part of the group of judges for the Future/Future competition. Perhaps in some deal with Disney Plus, the company would only accept this position if advertising was given to their new film. It seems a similar situation in the case of Purple Rain(1984), a Prince movie that is generally available despite its age. This was the result of a guest programmer who curated a set of musical films to run at the festival. The same could go for Children of the Sea, and the festival’s addition of a sponsor through the film. So although these films may appear completely out of place at a glance, the reasoning goes into some of the people that the festival has chosen to work with this year, for various reasons.
The festival was cancelled with 4 full days of programming remaining. This was an unforeseeable event, of course, but it merely adds to the sting of the time-slots taken by the major release films that could have gone to more exclusive films audiences will not have access to, possibly ever. Not only was the early cancellation a removal of content, it was a removal of time. Harbord’s essay examines the importance of ‘time and event’ in the context of film festivals. The smaller Future/Forward Competition was scheduled on one of the cancelled days. This competition was for teenage filmmakers specifically, in contrast to the larger Future/Future Competition that Borrufa was a part of. It is unlikely these teen-made films will ever show in this context again, removing this singular ‘time-event’ from both the filmmaker’s lives as well as the audiences’. Though, Harbord also points out that these unpredictable misfires add to the time-experience, as well as the initial failure of the projector in Cinema 21. Certainly, this festival will be difficult to forget.
Materials Referenced
de Valck, Marijke – Fostering Art, Adding Value, Cultivating Taste: Film Festivals as Sites of Cultural Legitimization
Rastegar, Roya – Seeing Differently: The Curatorial Potential of Film Festival Programming
Harbord, Janet – Contingency, Time, and Event: An Archaeological Approach to the Film Festival
Emma Mayfield (Words: 1174)
PSU School of Film @ PIFF 