The Wonderfully Quirky Film Track tells stories that play with our heads by throwing out unexpected arcs.

View all 2022 films here: https://pdxff.com/films Click on individual films for all showings and to purchase tickets or CONTACT heather @ portlandfilm.org for Media pass

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ASSETS

Image Assets Shorts:

brother | ScanNcut DX SDX2250D (Disney Edition | Extended Version )
Neo-Animism – Luck is Alive
Don’t Believe What They Told You
Cut Your Carbon Bigfoot-print
SUPER VACCINE VATO
4:00 AM
We Are Available
CDPH Holiday Vaccine Awareness Stories
FIND YOUR GREATNESS
ANOTHER STORY
VISIONS
Emmit Fenn – Who Dat
Glass Ship
Hospes
Dead Axel
Raul Playing Game
A Street Cat Named Desire
Deferment
Nebby
The Merry Makers

Image Assets Features:

Antarctica
Catching Air
Catwalk 2: The Comeback Cats
The Long Isolation
Circus of the Scars – The Insider Odyssey of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.
Doctor Who Am I
Living With Chucky
Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters
Spook Show 17
ZERIA
A Pity

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Summaries:

ANOTHER STORY (with Esperanza Spalding) – Gystere and Esperanza are going to the center of the earth to confront the intergalactic colonizer. Musical Short. Directed by Adrien & Anthony Peskine. 5.55 min. France. West Coast Premiere

VISIONS – Composed of intimate interviews, VISIONS is kaleidoscopic portrait of three artists. A first-generation American Congolese illustrator, a Chicanx musician and a Vietnamese visual and textile artist. A hypnotic short documentary, that explores their journeys and focuses on the elation of these creatives making their art. Documentary Short. Directed by Karina Lomelin Ripper. 9.55 min. USA. Portland Premiere

Defrag ‘Glass Ship’ – Glass Ship is a narrative music video for IDM/electronic artist Defrag. It navigates a space between two disparate worlds, following a man haunted by the specter of a strange being in a black void that somehow influences his reality. Directed by Sam Balcomb. Performed by Defrag. 3.00 min. USA. Festival Premiere

Emmit Fenn – ‘Who Dat’ – Music Video performed by Emmit Fenn. Directed by Patrick Jean. 2.50 min. USA. Festival Premiere

Hospes – A film about appearing “racially ambiguous”. Performing a choreography of resistance, a scaffolded amalgam of body pieces tries to remain whole in an environment programmed to disassemble it. Animation Short. Directed by Stephanie J Williams. 11.50 min. USA. West Coast Premiere.

Raul Playing Game – RAUL PLAYING GAME finds its awkward, titular protagonist Raul alone at a bar, looking at Instagram pics of his ex-wife. When his date Valerie finally arrives, we’re introduced to Lefty and Righty, the two animated personifications of Raul’s personality and inner-thoughts that inhabit a dorm room inside of his mind, and ‘play’ him as if he’s a role playing video game. As the duo debate between various dialogue choices and actions for Raul to say to Valerie in conversation, anxious Lefty wonders whether or not to reveal Raul’s forbidden secret: that he is bisexual. Sexually impulsive Righty decides its best not to tell her, as according to him, cis-women don’t like bi dudes and think they’re untrustworthy. Suddenly, Craig appears, and Lefty and Righty realize that they accidentally scheduled two dates at the same place at the same time! Craig sits at the other end of the bar, and risk-taking Righty convinces Lefty to ‘live a little’, convincing him to secretly continue both dates, simultaneously. Raul Playing Game is like Pixar’s INSIDE OUT… but for adults, and unapologetically queer! Narrative Short. Directed by William D. Caballero. 19.50 min. USA. Portland Premiere

A Street Cat Named Desire – A tourist in New Orleans becomes prey to a cat-obsessed bartender whose designs seem to go beyond the typical one-night-stand. Narrative Short. Directed by Eric Pierson Layer. 15 min. USA. World Premiere

Deferment – In an attempt to pay her student loans, a recent college graduate caters to a man with a cow fetish after answering a Craigslist ad. Narrative Short. Directed by Lilly Lion. 8.35 min. USA. Festival Premiere

Dead Axel – Despite the sudden zombie crisis, practicing figure skating must goes on!’
The mother blocks the rink due to the sudden zombie incident and makes Ayoung keeps focusing on her figure skating practice. During practice, Ayoung’s rivals Yoojung and Yoojung’s mother knock on the blocked link window. The mom thinks hard seeing Ayoung’s practice. Narrative Short. Directed by Chanyoung Kim. 25.25 min. Republic of Korea. Oregon Premiere

Nebby – Narrative Short. Directed by Stephen Turselli. 14.30 min. USA. World Premiere

The Merry Makers -The Merry Makers is a TV show where JS and Fred, two likeable yet slightly irreverent tinkerers, work on awesome projects and show young people how to make tons of practical stuff while cultivating their curiosity and know-how! TV Series. Directed by Jean-Sebastien Busque. 16 min. Canada. Festival Premiere

Antarctica – Life-long friends Kat and Janet see everything flipped upside down as they hit senior year. Once shy Kat is now popular and hooking up at parties, while misfit Janet is put on a strange medication for her “bad behavior.” Things get even odder when Janet meets a cute boy who might be a time traveler, and Kat’s panicked parents send her off to sex rehab. Can anything make life in the suburbs normal again?. Narrative Feature. Directed by Keith Bearden. 80 min. USA. Oregon Premiere

Catching Air – A documentary about the community and creativity of Air Guitar! Documentary. Directed by Jamie Hitchings. 87 min. USA. US Premiere.

The Comeback Cats – tells the larger-than-life story of the people – and the and cats – in the competitive cat show circuit. Members of the cat community are enjoying their newfound fame, following their appearance in the first Catwalk documentary. As the film becomes an internet sensation, however, allegations emerge about one of the hobby’s most prominent members – Kim Langille. Documentary. Directed by Michael McNamara and Aaron Hancox. 63 min. Canada. Festival Premiere.

The Long Isolation (2021) – 1940s Los Angeles. A place where the sun shines too bright, the rain falls too hard, and Jewish detective and caterer Marlowe Phillips gets more than he bargained for as he sets out to solve the case of the missing Fishfeld – coming up against femme fatales, the Polish Mob, murder, and his own demons. He finds himself battling feelings of being trapped and isolated – from his past in a German POW camp to an impending marriage to his long-suffering secretary. When classic noir collides with the remote technology and green screen of these socially-distanced times, the result is this deadpan homage to “Lady in the Lake” — all shot from the Detective’s POV. And all shot during the worst days of the pandemic — with each actor isolated — yet pushing the boundaries of zoom, editing, art direction, and comedy, to create a seamless noir that could only be made in these Covid times. Narrative Feature. Directed by Deb Lacusta & Dan Castellaneta. 78 min. USA.

Circus of the Scars – A sensational circus sideshow act explodes out of the Pacific Northwest and revives a lost art form for the 1990s grunge rock scene. Here they recount the faintings, bannings and inner struggles of non-stop touring around the world. Circus of the Scars introduces you to bizarre humans that caused a sideshow sensation in the early 1990s. You will enter their world where a faint was always better than a standing ovation. Documentary. Directed by Chicory Wees. 95 min. USA. West Coast Premiere.

Doctor Who I Am – Documentary filmmaker Vanessa Yuille (in her debut feature) follows friend and co-director Matthew Jacobs (British writer of the 1996 TV movie Doctor Who) as he is reluctantly pulled back into the fandom that rejected his work 25 years earlier. The journey not only becomes hilarious and emotionally perilous for the duo but also reveals a touching and quirky face-off between the American Doctor Who fans and Matthew himself. Documentary. Directed by Vanessa Yuille, Matthew Jacobs. 80 min. USA. West Coast Premiere.

Living with Chucky – A filmmaker who grew up alongside Chucky the killer doll seeks out the other families surrounding the Child’s Play films as they recount their experiences working on the ongoing franchise and what it means to be a part of the “Chucky” family. Documentary. Directed by Kyra Elise Gardner. 105 min. USA. Portland Premiere.

Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters – A feature length documentary about Mike Mignola and the creation of his comic book universe centered around Hellboy. Documentary Feature. Directed by Kevin Konrad Hanna & Jim Demonakos. 98 min. USA. World Premiere.

Spook Show 17 – To soothe his insecurity, an egotistical innovator decides to make a reality show about how he and his business savvy wife lead a misfit crew to create the craziest, most technologically elaborate haunted house in the galaxy: The 17th Door. TV Series. Narrative Short. Directed by Robbie Luther & Wyatt Barclay. 50 min. USA. Festival Premiere

Zeria – Gaspard is the last man on Earth. Zeria, his grandson, is the first human to be born on Mars.
Gaspard tells him about his life, his fears, his loves… in the hope that Zeria will come to see him before he dies… Zeria would be the first human being to return to Earth without having ever known it…Narrative Feature. Directed by Harry Cleven. 61 min. Belgium. West Coast Premiere

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