Regional film festivals are a gamble. For every uncompromising new vision, there’s an obnoxiously inaccessible art school hack job—and it’s not always clear from the outset which is which. For every thrill you feel when discovering your new favorite filmmaker before they get big, there’s the knowledge that you might’ve just gotten suckered by a one-hit wonder. You can see the most profoundly ridiculous cinematic experiments succeed where they shouldn’t, and then you can see them fail again and again over the course of 120 minutes. It’s fun! But also risky.
Of the handful of local festivals I’ve seen over the years, none have embraced that high-risk, high-reward mentality as much as the indie-focused Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival, put on each year by the Northwest Film Center. This is the kind of fest where every movie on the docket has at least one scene that wasn’t mic’ed or lit properly; where there will, inevitably, be more than a few edits that could have been significantly more elegant; and where just about every film, be it a short or a feature, has a cast member who probably has rich parents, or who at least brought pretty good snacks for the crew, because as an actor, they just aren’t cutting it. But even taking all that into consideration: This year’s Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival offers 14 features. I absolutely loved three of them, I really liked another three, and the rest... well, let’s just say they made some interesting choices.
Those are pretty good odds.