This year’s 44th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (NWFest44), which takes place November 1 to 5, 2017, will present sixteen features and twenty short form works in the film lineup.
Festival film highlights include Portland-based filmmaker Cornelius Swart’s PRICED OUT, a feature-length documentary exploration of the housing crisis in Portland and its disproportion impact on the African-American community; Lucy Ostrander and Don Sellers’ documentary PROOF OF LOYALTY, which relays the story of Kazuo Yamane, a Japanese Nisei, born in Hawaii to Japanese-born immigrants, who, despite suffering prejudice and discrimination after Pearl Harbor, joined up to fight and valiantly serve the US in World War II ; Julie Perini’s THE GENTLEMAN BANK ROBBER: THE STORY OF BUTCH LESBIAN FREEDOM FIGHTER rita bo brown, a portrait of a white, working-class butch from rural Oregon who joined the George Jackson Brigade, a revolutionary prison abolitionist group operating in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, and became known as “The Gentleman Bank Robber”; POW WOW, Robinson Devor’s (ZOO, POLICE BEAT) documentary examining an annual country club party that takes place on former Native American land in the Coachella Valley; director SJ Chiro’s coming-of-age adventure LANE 1974, following life on a commune in Northern California, as witnessed through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl; and Matt McCormick’s BUZZ ONE FOUR, which tells the tale of the director’s grandfather and his involvement in a Cold-War era crash of an aircraft with a thermonuclear payload on board.
In addition to features, the Festival offers up three programs of short films. Shorts I: This is Here and Shorts II: Alliances, comprised of films from makers from across the Pacific Northwest, including festival alums Salise Hughes, Jodi Darby, Vanessa Renwick, Jon Behrens, and others, are joined by Ethnographic Visions: An Extended Shorts Program, which highlights longer, short films by Emily Wahl, Pam Minty, and Lynne Siefert.
Beyond the numerous screenings on offer, the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival also provides opportunities for aspiring and working filmmakers to interact directly with peers and industry professionals through events at the Northwest Filmmakers’ Summit on November 4. A day of guest speakers, panels, and tech demos, the Summit’s aim is to provide information and discussion of issues and trends in independent filmmaking with a focus on regional opportunities and resources. Subjects explored include a presentation on “The Future of Lighting” by Aputure’s Mark Mathers, a panel discussion on cameras and lenses for professional production use, and a roundtable talk on best practices for sound design, working with composers with post-production in mind.
The Summit will also host a VR presentation by Digital One and a special live filmmaking event entitled Moving Picture Oregon in which five groups of filmmakers shoot a roll of Super 8 film based on an artwork in the Portland Art Museum’s Picturing Oregon exhibit. Later that night, the band Party Killer will perform a live soundtrack to the Super 8 films shot at the Moving Picture Oregon event in the Whitsell Auditorium for an event dubbed Party Killer Vs. Kodak.
This year’s Summit also includes a panel highlighting six Trailblazing Women of Independent Animation in the Northwest. Featuring Joanna Priestley, Rose Bond, Joan Gratz, Ruth Hayes, Marilyn Zornado, and Gail Noonan, the panel directly connects to a NWFest44 showing of the participants work, which in turn serves as a preview for a series of Northwest Tracking screenings focusing on each individual participant in November and December.The Gentleman Bank Robber: The Story of Butch Lesbian Freedom Fighter rita bo brown (2017)
The Gentleman Bank Robber: The Story of Butch Lesbian Freedom Fighter rita bo brown (2017)
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44th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival Reveals Lineup, PRICED OUT, LANE 1974, PROOF OF LOYALTY, and More..
This year’s 44th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (NWFest44), which takes place November 1 to 5, 2017, will present sixteen features and twenty short form works in the film lineup.
Festival film highlights include Portland-based filmmaker Cornelius Swart’s PRICED OUT, a feature-length documentary exploration of the housing crisis in Portland and its disproportion impact on the African-American community; Lucy Ostrander and Don Sellers’ documentary PROOF OF LOYALTY, which relays the story of Kazuo Yamane, a Japanese Nisei, born in Hawaii to Japanese-born immigrants, who, despite suffering prejudice and discrimination after Pearl Harbor, joined up to fight and valiantly serve the US in World War II ; Julie Perini’s THE GENTLEMAN BANK ROBBER: THE STORY OF BUTCH LESBIAN FREEDOM FIGHTER rita bo brown, a portrait of a white, working-class butch from rural Oregon who joined the George Jackson Brigade, a revolutionary prison abolitionist group operating in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, and became known as “The Gentleman Bank Robber”; POW WOW, Robinson Devor’s (ZOO, POLICE BEAT) documentary examining an annual country club party that takes place on former Native American land in the Coachella Valley; director SJ Chiro’s coming-of-age adventure LANE 1974, following life on a commune in Northern California, as witnessed through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl; and Matt McCormick’s BUZZ ONE FOUR, which tells the tale of the director’s grandfather and his involvement in a Cold-War era crash of an aircraft with a thermonuclear payload on board.
In addition to features, the Festival offers up three programs of short films. Shorts I: This is Here and Shorts II: Alliances, comprised of films from makers from across the Pacific Northwest, including festival alums Salise Hughes, Jodi Darby, Vanessa Renwick, Jon Behrens, and others, are joined by Ethnographic Visions: An Extended Shorts Program, which highlights longer, short films by Emily Wahl, Pam Minty, and Lynne Siefert.
Beyond the numerous screenings on offer, the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival also provides opportunities for aspiring and working filmmakers to interact directly with peers and industry professionals through events at the Northwest Filmmakers’ Summit on November 4. A day of guest speakers, panels, and tech demos, the Summit’s aim is to provide information and discussion of issues and trends in independent filmmaking with a focus on regional opportunities and resources. Subjects explored include a presentation on “The Future of Lighting” by Aputure’s Mark Mathers, a panel discussion on cameras and lenses for professional production use, and a roundtable talk on best practices for sound design, working with composers with post-production in mind.
The Summit will also host a VR presentation by Digital One and a special live filmmaking event entitled Moving Picture Oregon in which five groups of filmmakers shoot a roll of Super 8 film based on an artwork in the Portland Art Museum’s Picturing Oregon exhibit. Later that night, the band Party Killer will perform a live soundtrack to the Super 8 films shot at the Moving Picture Oregon event in the Whitsell Auditorium for an event dubbed Party Killer Vs. Kodak.
This year’s Summit also includes a panel highlighting six Trailblazing Women of Independent Animation in the Northwest. Featuring Joanna Priestley, Rose Bond, Joan Gratz, Ruth Hayes, Marilyn Zornado, and Gail Noonan, the panel directly connects to a NWFest44 showing of the participants work, which in turn serves as a preview for a series of Northwest Tracking screenings focusing on each individual participant in November and December.
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Julie Perini Wins 2017 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship to Fund ‘The Story of Butch Lesbian Freedom Fighter rita bo brown’
Julie Perini has been selected by The Northwest Film Center, Oregon Arts Commission, and Portland Film Office as the winner of the 2017 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship (OMAF).
Julie Perini is a Portland-based media who works in experimental and documentary film and video, installations, and live events. Originally from Poughkeepie, NY, she has been exploring her immediate surroundings with cameras since age 15 when she discovered a VHS camcorder in her parent’s suburban home. Perini’s work often explores the areas between fact and fiction, the staged and improvised, and the personal and political, often in response to social movements happening locally and globally. Perini’s work has exhibited and screened internationally at such venues as the Centre Pompidou-Metz (France), Artists’ Television Access (San Francisco), Visible Evidence XX (Stockholm), The Horse Hospital (London), Cornell Cinema (Ithaca, NY), Microscope Gallery (New York City), among others. She has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, Signal Fire, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program and is currently employed as an Associate Professor in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University. She has received grants and fellowships in support of her work from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, and The Precipice Fund.
The $5,500 Fellowship award will go towards funding The Gentleman Bank Robber: The Story of Butch Lesbian Freedom Fighter rita bo brown, a feature-length documentary that tells the story of bo brown, a white working-class butch from Klamath Falls, Oregon who was a member of the revolutionary George Jackson Brigade, an underground, militant revolutionary prison abolitionist group based in Seattle, Washington in the 1970s. As a member of the George Jackson Brigade, bo became known as “The Gentleman Bank Robber” for combing her butch style of dress with a polite way of demanding funds from bank tellers, one of the ways the Brigade funded its militant activities to protest military aggression, injustice, and exploitation.
The Oregon Media Arts Fellowship supports filmmakers who have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to the media arts. Jurors reviewed 42 submissions from applicants throughout the state, weighing artistic merit, the potential of the proposed activity to advance the artist’s work, and the feasibility of the projects proposed. The Fellowship is funded by the Oregon Arts Commission and the Portland Film Office and administered by Northwest Film.
The application deadline for the 2018 Oregon Media Arts Fellowships is January 1, 2018