NON-PROFIT ORG U.S.POSTAGE PAID PORTLAND, OR PERMIT NO.664 The Festival Program Welcome to the Northwest Film Center’s 39th Portland International Film Festival. This Festival program is arranged alphabetically by film title followed by the shorts programs, with showtimes and locations listed at the end of each film description. Our short films programs follow the feature listings. Festival Venues Advance Ticket Outlet Regal Fox Tower 10 World Trade Center Roseway Theatre 1119 SW Park Avenue at Main 846 SW Park Avenue at Taylor Theater 7229 NE Sandy Blvd near Fremont (inside the Portland Art Museum’s 121 SW Salmon Street at 1st Avenue Mark Building) Empirical Theater (Building 2, upstairs) Northwest Film Center Cinema 21 at OMSI Moreland Theatre Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park Avenue at Madison 616 NW 21st Avenue at Hoyt 1945 SE Water Ave 6712 SE Milwaukie Ave near Bybee (inside the Portland Art Museum) Tickets General: $12, PAM Members Student/Senior (65+): $11, Silver Screen Club Friend: $9, Ticket Package: 10 films for $100. Tickets on sale February 1-27. Online: nwfilm.org. Walk-up: daily noon-6pm at the Advance Ticket Outlet. Phone: daily noon-6pm at 503-276-4310. Day-of-show: If tickets are still available, tickets can be purchased at the Advance Ticket Outlet until three hours prior to showtime, then at the theater’s box office beginning 30 minutes prior to the screening. Even if advance tickets are sold out, rush tickets are offered a few minutes prior to showtime. To purchase tickets or learn more about the Festival details visit the Advance Ticket Outlet or at: nwfilm.org AD AW DV FF PIFF After Dark Animated Worlds Documentary Views Films for Families For the cinematically adventurous, and In addition to the 20 animated shorts, our This year’s festival boasts 17 fresh Film lovers of all ages will be charmed by for the nocturnally inclined, PIFF After Festival presents four animated features perspectives on the world we live in and these films suitable for younger viewers. that have charmed audiences and critics the fascinating people and stories that Dark offers special treats for devotees of Sponsored by the Lamb Baldwin Foundation. genre films that push boundaries. worldwide. surround us. Sponsored by LAIKA. Sponsored by Delta Airlines. ND ON OS SC New Directors Opening Night Film + Party Oscar Submissions Short Cuts PIFF 39 features 22 feature films from The Northwest Film Center and Umpqua PIFF 39 brings the Portland premier of PIFF 39 boasts 8 shorts programs new makers whose first films hold Bank invite you to join us Thursday, 22 films submitted for Best Foreign featuring 54 memorable snapshots from promise for great films to come. February 11 after the screenings of The Language Film Oscar. around the world and here in Oregon. Fencer at Fox Tower and the Whitsell Sponsored by the Henry Lea Hillman, Jr. Foundation. Auditorium to celebrate the opening of Sponsored by the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation. this year’s Festival. Tickets: $25. Co-hosts: Voodoo Doughnuts, Scandinavian Heritage Foundation, Elk Cove Vineyards, Montinore Estate and Sierra Nevada Brewing. 2 OS OS OS ND DV 7 Letters 100 Yen Love 600 Miles Above and Below VARIOUS DIRECTORS | MASAHARU TAKE | JAPAN GABRIEL RIPSTEIN | MEXICO NICOLAS STEINER | SINGAPORE SWITZERLAND “Play video games with your nephew, pick Winner of the Best First Feature Award at Seven of Singapore’s most illustrious up junk food, and pass out reading the Berlin Film Festival, 600 Miles is a Nicolas Steiner’s sublime exploration of filmmakers, including Boo Junfeng, Eric manga. Such is the life of Ichiko Saito, a riveting thriller about gun trafficking lives lived on the fringe is set in a Khoo, K Rajagopal, Jack Neo, Tan Pin Pin, 32-year-old living with her parents and between the United States and Mexico seemingly apocalyptic world that happens Royston Tan, and Kelvin Tong, have recently divorced sister. When their how the war against drugs has ruined to be our own. Living above ground, April gathered their creative storytelling and working class home gets too small for lives on both sides of the border. Arnulfo dons a spacesuit to simulate life on Mars filmmaking talents to create a one-of-a- both sisters, her mother pushes Ichiko is a low-level Sinaloa cartel operative who as part of a remote science program in kind anthology that pays tribute to into the world and she gets a job at the moves weapons illegally to Mexico. All Utah, while Dave has left modern society Singapore’s 50 years of independence. nearby konbini. She befriends a gruff appears to be going well but, for an abandoned military bunker in the The resulting film, 7 Letters, offers amateur boxer but cruel reality soon unbeknownst to him, he is being tracked California desert. Meanwhile, finding thought-provoking pieces that revolve pushes her to don the gloves herself. As by American ATF agent Hank Harris. shelter below in Las Vegas storm drains, around tales of lost love, identity, familial Derek Elley of Film Business Asia writes, When an attempted arrest goes wrong, are Lalo, Rick, and Cindy, who contend bonds, traditional folklore, community, ‘Ando triumphs in [this] quirky tale of a Harris is kidnapped and spirited across with frequent, dangerous flooding to and more. The seven “letters” to social misfit’s transformation, exceeding the border to Mexico. When things get survive on their own terms. “…[Above and Singapore are fascinating vignettes all expectations in a physical performance desperate for both of them, the two will Below] treats its subjects with a dignity reflecting the personal and poignant of absurd comedy and deep pathos.” need to trust one another to get out alive. that transcends judgment and a poetic relationship the directors—all award- —Japan Cuts. (113 mins.) (85 mins.) sensibility that ranks it among the year’s winning filmmakers—have with the most remarkable cinematic discoveries. 2/12 5:45 | Whitsell Auditorium 2/20 8:45 | Cinema 21 country they call home. (116 mins.) —Variety. In English. (110 mins.) 2/18 5:45 | Cinema 21 2/22 8:30 | Fox Tower 2/25 8:30 | OMSI 2/14 1:00 | Cinema 21 2/27 12:30 | Fox Tower Sponsored by Consular Office of Japan in Portland. 2/24 8:30 | Whitsell Auditorium AW FF ND OS AW FF ND Adama Aferim! April and the Arabian Nights: Volume 1, SIMON ROUBY | FRANCE RADU JUDE | ROMANIA/CZECH Extraordinary World The Restless One REPUBLIC/FRANCE The year is 1916. Adama is 12-years-old CHRISTIAN DESMARES, MIGUEL GOMES | PORTUGAL/FRANCE/ and lives in a remote West African village. Jude won Best Director at the Berlin Film FRANCK EKINCI | FRANCE GERMANY/SWITZERLAND When his elder brother Samba suddenly Festival for this visionary historical epic vanishes from the village, Adama decides — a European “Eastern” to an American 1941. Napoléon V is the ruler of an to set off in search of him. He is Western. In the principality of Wallachia, alternative France, and without modern “An up-to-the minute rethinking of what it accompanied by a griot (a mysterious life is more Dark Ages than Age of technology, the world runs on coal and means to make a political film today, bard) called Abdou. They travel by car, Enlightenment, even in 1835. Constable steam. Scholars keep mysteriously Gomes’s shape-shifting paean to the art of ship, and train, finally reaching war-torn Costandin and his son have been disappearing, and a young girl named storytelling strives for ‘a fictional form from Europe where they learn Samba is a dispatched by a nobleman to track down a April goes off in search of her scientist facts.’ Gomes turns actual events into the rifleman with the French army and has runaway slave accused of seducing the parents who vanished. Accompanied by stuff of fable, and channels it all through been sent to the front line. Adama follows landowner’s wife. Foul-mouthed and her talking cat Darwin and a young rogue the mellifluous voice of Scheherazade, the him to a small town in north-eastern quick-tempered, Costandin rides named Julius, she braves mysteries and mythic queen of the classic folktale. Volume France: Verdun. A vibrantly animated roughshod on the local peasantry in his danger in order to discover the truth. 1 alone tries on more narrative devices than journey of initiation for a boy guided by search, explaining to his teenaged son Winner of the Crystal for Best Feature most filmmakers attempt in a lifetime, love for his elder brother. (82 mins.) 10+ that he’s upholding the social order. But Film at the 2015 Annecy Animation mingling material about unemployment and Festival, April and the Extraordinary 2/14 1:00 | Fox Tower Costandin’s righteous indignation, fuelled local elections with visions of exploding by racism, gives way to a moral crisis, as World is a visually striking, original, and whales and talking cockerels. It is hard to 2/20 3:30 | Cinema 21 his son’s inquisitiveness leads him to dynamic animated sci-fi adventure based imagine a more generous or radical question whether justice is truly being on a graphic novel by Jacques Tardi. approach to these troubled times, one that Sponsored by LAIKA and TV5MONDE. served. (108 mins.) (105 mins.) honors its fantasy life as fully as its hard realities.”—New York Film Festival. In 2/13 6:15 | Whitsell Auditorium 2/13 1:15 | Fox Tower Portugese, French and German with English 2/17 6:00 | Fox Tower 2/22 8:30 | Roseway Theater subtitles. (125 mins.) Sponsored by LAIKA and the French American International Sponsored by the Romanian American Society.