Tacoma Film Festival celebrates 20 years of local and international cinema
The Tacoma Film Festival provides an opportunity for community members to experience independent cinema from around the world.
By Ella Walken
On Oct. 22, the 20th annual Tacoma Film Festival will commence. The festival will feature documentaries, short films and narrative feature films from the Puget Sound and beyond. The Grand Cinema will host most of the festival’s screenings with a few taking place at The Blue Mouse in Proctor and McMenamin’s just down the street from The Grand.
The Tacoma Film Festival will kick off the event with a 7 p.m. screening of “Time Warp,” a feature documentary by Allison Berg which follows a performance of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in a small, conservative Wyoming town. The documentary is a tale of courage and hope in the face of bigotry produced by theatre greats such as John Cameron Mitchell and Billy Porter.
Per the Tacoma Film Festival website, guests are encouraged to wear their “Transylvanian best” in the theme of “Rocky Horror” and attend the opening night after party at The Poet, an event venue next door to The Grand Cinema.
On Friday, the first full day of the festival, screenings begin at 11:45 a.m. and continue until midnight. Films such as “The Hand That Feeds” and “Ways of Seeing” will begin in the morning. That afternoon, a film called “Ephemera” will have its Pacific Northwest premiere at 2:30 p.m. at The Grand Cinema.
“Ephemera” follows Tori and Asher, a pair of strangers who spend a night wandering around Shanghai together. The film has earned comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy and is described as “a minor-key miracle for queer romantic cinema.”
The first full day of the festival will end on a very different note from the tender romance of “Ephemera” and show a late-night screening of a short film collection called “Sorry For Laughing.” This collection of shorts was curated by Neiko Will and advertises itself as “Late night comedy so dark, you’ll feel almost bad for enjoying yourself.” Filmmakers of the shorts in this collection are scheduled to attend the screening and give a post-show Q&A session.
On Saturday, the full day of screenings will conclude with “Matapanki,” directed by Diego “Mapache” Fuentes, a narrative feature from Chile following a young man in the suburbs who gains supernatural powers after he takes a swig from a “bottle of unknown origin.” “Matapanki” utilizes a lo-fi, mixed media approach to its visuals, promising to “melt your face off” in just 65 minutes.
Just before the final screenings, the 20th annual Tacoma Film Festival will wrap up with an awards ceremony on Oct. 25 at 2:30 p.m. The ceremony is open to the public. Jurors will award filmmakers with prizes such as Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary Short and Best Pacific Northwest Feature.
The last screening of the festival will be “Everything Beautiful is Far Away,” a 2017 science fiction feature film directed by Peter Ohs. “Everything Beautiful is Far Away” had its Washington premiere at the Tacoma Film Festival nearly 10 years ago. Since then, Ohs has gone on to direct “Erupcja,” an internationally distributed feature film featuring pop superstar Charli XCX. The festival is bringing back “Everything Beautiful is Far Away” to celebrate Ohs and his Tacoma Film Festival success story.
Tickets for the Tacoma Film Festival can be purchased on The Grand Cinema website or at the box office. Tickets range from $15 to $25 depending on the screening. More information about films and showtimes can be found on The Grand Cinema Website.
