Notes From The Program Director | Week of February 23rd, 2024

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Notes From The Program Director

Week of February 23rd, 2024

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

February 23-29, 2024

Hello, everyone!

The Taste of Things and the Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge continue this Friday for one more week, and we were also able to add one last encore screening of The Zone of Interest on Friday afternoon.

And, as the Oscars ceremony approaches, I’m also delighted to say we have yet another marvelous Oscar-nominated film joining us this week with master filmmaker Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days.

Perfect Days is, quite simply, a lovely, lovely film, and it follows the unlikely character of a public-toilet cleaner in Tokyo. He lives a very simple, almost Spartan, life but spends his days savoring each individual moment, however mundane, and following a similar rhythmic routine each day: tenderly watering his plants, getting a coffee from the local vending machine, getting in his van, going from public toilet to public toilet, carefully cleaning each, having his lunch in the park, taking photos of things he finds interesting, listening to his favorite music on well-worn cassette tapes on his drives, getting dinner at a local diner, going home, selecting a book from his wonderfully large literary library, reading under the light of a single lamp before falling asleep on his mat on his floor. And repeat. The gentle, careful rhythm of his days is interrupted when his teen niece arrives, unannounced and clearly in some kind of trouble, and asks to stay with him, but it is she who joins the peaceful rhythm of his days, rather than she who disrupts his.

It's a film about the small, quiet pleasures of life even amidst past or present pain, and it basks in the small delicate joys of human connection. It's a celebration of the teeming life all around us. It's a warm hug of a film.

We also have a stacked line-up of special events this week with something for everyone:

Our Indie Lens Pop-up series--featuring 60-minute films from PBS’s award-winning Independent Lens catalog--returns this month with Breaking the News, a film many of you may remember from Doctober 2023 as one of our most popular selections. Breaking the News tells the story of a small but determined group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists who in 2020 decided to challenge the system and start The 19th* , their own news organization, guided by the question, “which American stories are not being told?” Their mission was guided by the fact that hundreds of small decisions are made every day in newsrooms, decisions that determine which stories are told and whose stories are told. And when those rooms are largely dominated by a white male status quo? Inevitably one perspective dominates. With The 19th* , these journalists were determined to change that and offer readers news stories from other American perspectives.

Join us on Saturday, February 24, 10 am, for our FREE screening

We also have two very special events this week featuring the local filmmakers among us, the Guerilla Film Project on Sunday, February 25 and Storyteller’s Seasonal on Wednesday, February 28.

Started in 2005, the Guerilla Film Project is a 65-hour filmmaking competition for high school students designed for budding young filmmakers from across the Northwest. Over Presidents’ Day Weekend, student teams gather and race against the clock to write, shoot, cut and edit a three minute film in under 65 hours. All film entries are required to use a specific line of dialogue, select props, and a particular type of film shot. Films are then viewed by a jury of film professionals, and prizes are awarded at the screening for the filmmakers, their families, and friends. It’s a joy for us again this year to celebrate the young, aspiring filmmakers among us!

Likewise, the Storyteller’s Seasonal provides a space for local filmmakers, student to adult: it is a quarterly, hour-long event that consists of 5-minute films submitted from DIY filmmakers from our area. The Seasonal is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate and cultivate the visual storytelling of filmmakers at all levels and to provide a venue where these storytellers can share their ideas in a supportive, fun, and low-pressure environment. All are welcome to submit films -- see the Storyteller’s Facebook page for more info -- or to come see the filmmaking talents of our community! Tickets are just $7.

Also screening on Wednesday, February 28 at 7:45 for a one-night-only event, we have Ava DuVernay’s new film, Origin , and accompanying the film for this special event is a recorded introduction and Q&A with DuVernay herself. Many of you may already know the acclaimed book the film is based on: Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origin of our Discontents, where Wilkerson posits that " racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system. Wilkerson describes caste as an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources. 'Caste , [Wilkerson says,] focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that."

The book is deeply compelling, a new way of thinking about race and racism, and while some filmmakers might have chosen to make a documentary from the book, DuVernay has uniquely adapted the book into a narrative film. The film depicts the author Wilkerson--played beautifully by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor--and her personal journey of discovery in writing the book, and it effectively outlines the book itself by way of that personal story. As such, film critic Robert Daniels finds DuVernay’s approach and the overall film to be "a dense, forceful masterwork, and, quite simply, the most radical film of DuVernay’s career,” and Richard Brody writes, “It’s hard to recall a movie made for general audiences that takes ideas so seriously, that makes the pursuit of them appear so thrilling .” And indeed, like the book, the film is densely packed with ideas, and it will leave audiences discussing it long after the credits have rolled.

Our third and final film in the From the Mind of Jordan Peele series, Nope, plays on Thursday, February 29 at 8:00 pm. It’s been utterly thrilling so far to see Peele’s films -- Get Out, Us -- on the big screen again, and this final entry in the series should prove to be marvelous. Professor Felicia Cosey, who gave us a wonderful introduction to Get Out , complete with beautifully illuminating contextual information and even an Eddie Murphy joke, will be with us again to talk about Nope before we watch the film. Felicia tells me Nope is her favorite Jordan Peele film, so I’m all the more eager to hear her insights and watch the film with them in mind!

Finally, last but definitely not least, the much-anticipated sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s breathtaking 2021 epic Dune: Part One, Dune: Part Two, will be opening with us for a preview screening on February 29, 8:15 pm. Early reviews of Dune 2 are ecstatic, so the two-year wait seems poised to pay off: Katie Walsh writes, Dune: Part Two is “ A spectacular feat of science-fiction filmmaking, marrying immersive world-building with engrossing storytelling”; Michael Phillips notes, “What Villeneuve and company achieve in Dune: Part Two is every bit as impressive and, in its peak imagery, hypnotic as part one”; Peter Bradshaw writes, “This is a real epic and it is exhilarating to find a film-maker thinking as big as this”; and David Fear says, “ Villeneuve has outdone himself. More importantly, he’s done justice to the scope and scale and sheer weirdness of a stoner-lit touchstone’s back half without, pun intended, sanding away its edges.” It sounds glorious.