MM: The festival’s Portland Lens section doubles down on the fact that regional films and filmmakers are a vital part of PFF’s overall model. How would you describe the filmmaker-to-filmmaker dialogue that you’re seeing emerge by way of this focus on regional programming?
JL: Our festival is really the only one in Portland that brings people outside of Oregon, outside of the Northwest, from New York, from all over the world, and allows them to network, to mingle, to make relationships, to build a community with locals in Portland. The Portland Lens came out of, first of all, the fact that we wanted to do a panel. We’ve never seen this done before, but we wanted to bring six to seven Portland feature directors together. The idea here was: Why don’t we screen movies from these directors every day for the festival, so people can not only talk to them, learn about them, and have some sort of networking session after the panel, but also see their work on-screen. So, we combined those filmmakers with the submissions, the new submissions that we got this year an we built this Portland Lens around that conversation.
MM: If a moviemaker is reading this and intending to target Portland Film Festival as one they want to compete at, in any of the categories for which you’re holding competitions, what would you tell that person are some of the key attributes of this year’s competing films?
JL: That’s a good question. Every year, it’s such a battle about which films we want to put in competitions, and it usually comes down to the films that make the best or the strongest impact on our programmers. People that are world-premiering with us will most likely have a chance of being in competition with us, but we don’t always require that. We’re not like Sundance or TIFF where you have to world premiere with them to be able to screen. We just want to screen great movies. We like to get a mixture of different types of movies and we don’t want the same movie made six times differently for our competition. So, we try to show films that address different issues from different perspectives, but will ultimately be entertaining and something that people can watch. It has nothing to do with who the director is, but the story that they tell.
A speed dating-style networking event from the 2016 Portland Film Festival. Photograph courtesy of Portland Film Festival
MM: To what extent does Portland Film Festival see itself as its own market, or as having a direct relationship to the marketplace, as opposed to being solely a place where folks go to see movies? Is this a festival where up-and-comers can expect to take a lot of meetings?
JL: Unlike most regional festivals, we have a really heavy industry attendance through which working relationships are built. I don’t think that anything will ever replace Sundance, TIFF or Cannes. Those are huge institutions that spent millions of dollars every year to ensure their location in the industry. But I think what’s different from us and them is you’ll actually get to talk to people. What I would like to argue is that you’re likely to build better and stronger relationships with people, whereas in those other markets, you tend to be lost in the city. At ours, you definitely get to meet and talk more with these professionals than you would get in those place. You go to Sundance and you talk to someone for two minutes and they run off, whereas in our festival it’s a bit slower paced, but that’s more important than having a 10 seconds with the most important producer in the world who’s not really going to remember you. Here, people are going to remember who you are.
We also do speed dating-style film industry networking, and we we basically bring all the industry filmmakers aboard. This year, we have the producer of Portlandia, and we have 20 tables and somewhere between 100 and 200 filmmakers and industry people, and we go around and just meet each other. We get a couple kegs of beer. It’s a great way to get to know people. On Monday, before the speed networking, we have three or 400 Portlanders show up. This year we have 360 champagne glasses waiting for people… and 160 Dixie cups, in case there’s more. Got to keep it a little weird, y’know? MM
Portland Film Festival 2017 runs from October 30-November 5, 2017. For more information, visit their website here.
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