The 10th POWFest Celebrates Women Filmmakers With 78 Films Over Four Days

This year's guest of honor is Cheryl Dunne, the first out, black lesbian filmmaker to make a film about black lesbian women.

(courtesy of powfest.com)

Portland plays home to film festivals large and small, but most don't regularly attract major Hollywood names like Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen) and Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, the good Point Break). But POWFest isn't most Portland film festivals.

POWFest—an acronym for both Portland Oregon Women's Festival and Power of Women Festival—is a four-day extravaganza of  78 films whittled down from over a thousand entries. Starting March 2 at the Hollywood Theatre, the festival is celebrating its 10th birthday. And it's not running out of breath.

This year's guest of honor is Cheryl Dunye, the groundbreaking filmmaker whose 1996 feature, The Watermelon Woman, was the first film about black lesbians made by an out black lesbian.

"This year, we're in celebration mode," explains Tara Johnson-Medinger, executive director of POWFest. "We have a performance by Milck, who was made famous by the D.C. Women's March, a whole education day with panelists entrenched in Hollywood, the NW Film Center and our first guest of honor, Cheryl Dunye."

We've selected three films that you shouldn't miss at this year's POWFest. If you're a no-show, you won't meet Alysia Reiner, whom you may know as Figueroa from Orange Is the New Black

Barbarian Press

Sarah Race's new mini-doc follows Crispin and Jan Elsted, a fittingly fictitious couple, who have dedicated their lives and marriage to producing "beautiful" things. Specifically, fresh, flamboyant covers for classic books. "The useful and the beautiful are necessary together, and that's the function of what we do," exclaims Crispin. However, the Elsteds are getting old, and their millennial—that's right, millennial—daughter Apollonia isn't interested in the family business. "My generation doesn't put passion first and foremost," laments the millennial Apollonia. 12:30 pm Sunday, March 5.

Swipe Right

With the running time of an extended music video, Kendall Goldberg's Swipe Right falls somewhere between thriller and horror. In the film, which follows a young girl on a Tinder date, everything that could go wrong does, and not in a "doesn't get a second date" way. In an "innocent people get fragments of wine glasses lodged in their necks" way. In step-by-step Tarantino fashion, this tart daydream exposes the same feeling most of us are certain to experience come the Love Actually sequel. You're going to have trouble understanding why it's so damn short. 9 pm Thursday, March 2.

Black Cat

Black Cat is a paradoxical, deformed love triangle between a teen witch, her left-brain single dad and the family cat. Directed by Leonie Savvides, this 15-minute Australian selection has some sincerely sinister moments as it explores the life of a young girl hell-bent on either killing her father with some ratchet black magic, or turning her cat into a demon so it'll do the dirty deed for her. 9 pm Friday, March 3.

SEE IT: The Portland Oregon Women's Festival screens at the Hollywood Theatre on March 2-5. See powfest.com for the full schedule.

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