Tonya Harding Is Getting Her Own Film Festival

It will feature the first public screening of a documentary made by Harding's childhood friend, filmed eight years before the Nancy Kerrigan scandal—plus a straight-to-video action flick starring the skater.

Tonya Harding

2018 is Tonya Harding's year. She blessed the world with the phrase "Oregon was buttheads" in a lengthy, empathetic New York Times profile, and Margot Robbie is up for an Oscar for playing the formerly disgraced figure skater in I, Tonya. Now, Harding is getting her own film festival.   

The Tonya Harding Film Festival, which will be held at the Alberta Rose Theater on March 8, is not just named in honor of Harding, but will screening movies featuring the Portland native.

With only two films in the lineup, it's more a double-feature than a full festival. But one of those films is Sharp Edges, a documentary about Harding that was filmed eight years before the Nancy Kerrigan scandal.

The movie follows a 15-year-old Harding on her way to her first National Figure Skating competition. It was filmed in 1986 by Portland filmmaker and childhood friend of Harding, Sandra Luckow. Made for Luckow's senior project when she was a film major at Yale, the festival will mark the first time Sharp Edges has been screened for a public audience.

Related: Sandra Luckow's New Documentary That Way Madness Lies Looks at a Family Upended by Mental Illness.

Luckow recently gave her critique of I, Tonya to People, but her film will offer rare, first-hand footage of Harding's backstory.  

The other movie in the festival's lineup is Breakaway, which contains Harding's first acting credit. In the straight-to-VHS 1996 action movie, Harding plays Gina, who helps her mob courier friend escape to Tahiti with $1 million worth of mob money.

You can buy tickets for the festival here. If two Tonya films isn't enough for you, Lloyd Center and Hollywood Theatre are in the area and both still screening I, Tonya.

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