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When Jessica Barr moved from Portland to Los Angeles in 2022, she departed as an actor with good reviews and high hopes.
She had won acclaim for her performance in the Portland-made indie drama Sophie Jones. That coming-of-age film, which Barr also wrote circa age 20, had its Portland International Film Festival premiere foiled by COVID. But it eventually found arthouse distribution in 2021, and Variety called Barr’s lead turn a “captivating, openhearted performance.”
Now, Barr returns to Portland as a director. On Aug. 19, she’ll screen The Plan as part of the fifth annual Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology. The fest had a two-decade run as a touring international film festival before rebranding and settling in Portland in 2022. This year’s lineup features 170 films from 31 countries.
Barr anticipates her debut feature could resonate with the OMSI crowd.
“Genuinely, all of these characters I am basing off people I know in Portland,” Barr says.
Whether that lands as a loving compliment, a searing diss, an inside joke, or just a knowing nod may vary once you’re acquainted with The Plan’s ensemble. The film centers on a collective of seven far leftists holed up in an apartment. It’s the night before they’ll undertake a radical act of direct violence against the government.
The 75-minute thriller is shot in one unbroken take and set almost entirely in Barr’s former Los Feliz apartment. With the formal and tonal tension building, a snapshot of desperate social dynamics unfolds (more Cassavetes’ Opening Night than How to Blow Up a Pipeline). Nerves reveal the group’s last-minute preoccupations with relationship drama, security violations, flask pulls and cohort hierarchy.
The Plan is as stressful and crushing as it is sneakily hilarious. Barr calls the film a “critique of liberalism,” and it does play out like a heightened, forceful allegory for why the Left struggles to get things done. The script was inspired, in part, by conflicting priorities she witnessed at Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests during summer 2020.
“I look back on a lot of stuff that my friends and I were engaged with [at the protests], and I find it very problematic,” Barr says.
Were they showing up for racial justice, Barr asks, or because it was “fucking badass” to smash a Starbucks window? (The director says she knew young people who did the latter.)
“It was like hundreds of white people thinking about race for the first time. But then also so many people were coming out to party because of COVID and almost, like, to show face on Instagram.”
No one in The Plan is doing it explicitly for the ’Gram. In fact, the characters are ostensibly trying to remain undetected before their climactic act—a spectacle of violence mostly driven by their shared anger and hopelessness.
There’s the steely ringleader, Mads, and her girlfriend, Emily, who’s worried they won’t get a proper goodbye before the next morning. Three of their conspirators are negotiating a very ill-timed love triangle. Taylor is flouting the group’s anti-surveillance protocols. Toby is getting sloppy drunk, seemingly out of anxiety. Oh, and no one remembered to tell the unaffiliated roommate to stay out of the apartment on this fateful night.
It’s an impressive cast for a low-budget indie. Cinephiles may well recognize An-Li Bogan from After Yang, Jordan Hull from Hustle, Percy Hynes White from My Old Ass, Ryan Simpkins from the Fear Street trilogy, Akira Chantaratananond from the Oregon-made Twinless, Logan Miller from the Escape Room movies, and Eve Lindley from Bros.
Still, Barr says the cast came together smoothly. A few of the actors were already her friends and neighbors in Los Feliz. A few more hopped on board via a simple Instagram invite. (Don’t go through agents, is Barr’s advice to micro-budget directors.) The experiential challenge of “the oner” was a good sell to actors, and the brief three-day shoot in June 2025 made it easy for them to sign on.
Not that it was easy to execute. “When I see the characters at the end of the film, they are a wreck,” says cinematographer and co-writer Sarah Whelden, emphasizing the forced focus that came with doing three, breakless 75-minute takes. (They ultimately used Take 3.)
That said, Whelden’s job may have been the hardest on set. The cinematographer—who spent a decade-plus in Portland before moving to L.A. in 2022—was charged with maneuvering around tight apartment corners and framing up seven actors, while knowing that any shake or stumble would have the same ruinous impact as a flubbed line.
“My brain is running a million miles an hour,” Whelden says of the no-cut approach. “Plus, I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this sucks. When is this going to be over?’”
The most memorable hurdle for the one-take style arrived during a scene at the 60-minute mark in which a few characters flee the apartment. As it happens, the residential streetlights automatically turned on at a different time each night.
To compensate, Logan Miller improvised a reason to stall his fellow actors from running outside, lest there be no light and the whole take be unusable. In the movie, it plays as another instance of his character’s motormouth waffling.
“I feel like you also need those moments to break up the tension and the pressure cooker,” says Kelly Wilcox, The Plan’s production designer, co-writer and yet another former Portlander.
While the visuals and music are played tense and straight, the characters’ unprocessed stress creates levity.
Barr’s previous body-horror short Tight and acting-class-nightmare short Private Moments similarly thrive on thematic exploitation and clenching comedy. “I love being uncomfortable,” she says.
That same impulse to leverage discomfort for all it’s worth has transferred into her work as a director and producer. For instance, she knew that a one-take film—while a stylistic flex—is actually cheaper and faster to shoot than something with multiple setups.
“It’s kind of my penance,” Barr laughs about the producing emphasis, though it’s probably not a sin to be a 20-year-old actor who thought big things were in store.
And maybe they still are. The Plan is an ambitious and tonally complex response to widespread political rage. It premiered at Slamdance Film Festival in February and will play film festivals for the rest of 2026 while on the hunt for distribution. Meanwhile, Barr is set to direct two more films this year. One is a short she’s making with Wilcox and Whelden through Cate Blanchett’s film accelerator program Proof of Concept. The other is a feature-length “grief comedy.”
It’s unwise to jinx best-laid plans, though—on or off the screen.
“To have any expectation of what you make and how it will be received,” Barr says, “is the worst thing you can do.”
SEE IT: The Plan screens at the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology at OMSI’s Empirical Theater, 1945 SE Water Ave., 503-797-4000, pdxfestofcinema.com. 6 pm Wednesday, Aug. 19. $10–$12. All ages.
