The Portland Underground Film Festival Brings the Weird and Neglected to the Clinton Street Theater

A weekend of films made between the cost of somewhere between beer money and five large comes to the Clinton.

(courtesy of puffpdx.org)

By Andy Kryza

It's never been easier to make a low-budget, experimental film. In a way, that's made it nigh impossible to get one actually seen.

Once, directors' bizarre, surreal statements made the rounds in niche theaters after generating buzz. Today, digital technology means anybody can make a film, and those budding filmmakers must compete for Vimeo views with thousands of others who shoot, edit and distribute strange pieces of art on their phones.

That makes the Clinton Street Theater's Portland Underground Film Festival, or PUFF, which kicks off this Friday, all the more essential. It sifts through the internet chaff—the only distribution venue for so many indie experiments—to bring a carefully curated series of shorts and features to the big screen.

The festival includes features like Tel Aviv-set found-footage romance Spiral and the Portland-shot thriller 11:58, plus political, horror, comedy and abstract shorts. Student films, foreign oddities, passion projects, and works by first-time amateurs share the screen, under the sole criterion that they cost somewhere between "beer money" and $5,000.

Is it a mixed bag? With 14 hours of footage, of course it is. This is, after all, a fest that includes some dude shooting snow from his window on an iPad. But that shouldn't be a deterrent. This is the fest where three minutes of onscreen Google searches in the wake of Alton Sterling's murder stands tall alongside PBR-drenched punk-rock music videos, computer animation of the Painted Hills, a teenager's David Lynch-inspired nightmare, and a comedy about bros getting high and finding their spirit animals. Discovery is half the joy.

"Experimental work can open you up to thinking in different ways. Different synapses are firing," says Lani Jo Leigh, who took over the historic Clinton five years ago and transformed it into Portland's most bracingly diverse theater. "Getting shorts seen is next to impossible. Unique voices are getting silenced more and more, and we need to resist that."

Outside of short-run screenings of Oscar-nominated shorts, overshadowed blocks in festivals, and NW Film Center's showcases, experimental film and shorts are doomed to obscurity. For every director who gets a break, there are millions hoping for just a dozen views.

Does that mean PUFF—resurrected last year after a two-year hiatus in response to the demise of Experimental Film Festival Portland—is 14 solid hours of enlightenment?

Well, no. But considering how quickly the films—the majority of them local—will probably get lost to time, having a program of hand-selected works in one place sure beats the hell out of scanning YouTube hoping to find something magical. You're almost guaranteed to discover a gem in the fray, and unearthing those nuggets of greatness is the whole point.

"Some of it may seem incomprehensible, and that's OK too," says Leigh. "The rawness and the unique ways of expressing things is what I find important. Trust me, you'll like this!"

See It: The Portland Underground Film Festival begins at 5 pm Friday, April 7. See cstpdx.com for a full schedule and tickets.

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