Dated: 5 May 2006

Posted by chicago underground

Good article on the PDX Film Festival in Portland. If you live in Portland you should go:

Above all, underground cinema Matt McCormick directs Portland’s experimental film explosion, culminating in this week’s PDX fest Sunday, April 23, 2006 KRISTI TURNQUIST

The Oregonian

Like our fondness for books, coffee and microbrews, loving movies is apparently in Portlanders’ DNA. Either we’re born with it or come down with a raging case of cinemania the instant we move into an Oregon ZIP code.

Film festivals seem to pop up every other week. And Portlanders are nothing if not eclectic: Why else would we stand in line to see popcorn blockbusters at Regal multiplexes, explorations of existential angst at Cinema 21 or slices of Uruguayan life at the Portland International Film Festival? As the saying goes, if you project it, we will come.

As varied as these objects of our big-screen desire are, there’s still another category of film out there, one that gets less attention, maybe, but with an equally devoted group of fans. One in which 400 audience members look through customized View-Masters to watch the tale of a frustrated cockroach yearning to break out from under the fridge. Or a filmmaker shoots the crowd as they come into the theater, develops his film during the first half of the show and screens it during the second half. Or viewers gaze at colorful abstract images, not sure whether they’re seeing landscapes, an extreme close-up of the human elbow or somebody’s bedroom wall.

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