After spending another year roaming the Northwest on a quest to unearth every single independent filmmaker with new work to show, it’s rather humbling to catch our breath and consider that this cavalcade we call the NW Fest has been reborn annually 30 times now.

Maybe you don’t remember when Richard Nixon was your President—maybe you’re like a good number of this year’s Festival filmmakers that weren’t even born in 1973. Looking over the films shown in the first Festival way back then (except for the haircuts) they don’t look entirely alien next to this year’s batch. The work that was interesting in 1973 is still interesting.

But for anyone suggesting that we haven’t come a long way, just recall when video editing was linear and consider how the formerly fantastical world of digital video has exploded the possibilities of personal, independent film. Production ease has expanded exhibition and distribution opportunities correspondingly. The Northwest is spilling over with opportunities for filmmakers to show and circulate their work. That’s great. We operate on the premise that audiences don’t have a saturation point where more art ceases to be a good thing. If all these screenings don’t inspire production, they at least inspire artful thought.

The Northwest Film & Video Festival hopes to offer regional filmmakers some cachet.
By making it into this august, respectfully competitive event, their work can make a unique claim of distinction. Narrowing down 400 plus entries to 40 is a subjective exercise. The Festival’s tradition has been to invite someone (usually from outside the region) of revered accomplishment and judgement and let their cultivated taste and educated vision help us shape this annual crosscut of the media arts community. This year we thank James Benning, who sat in the Guild Theatre for days watching entry after entry, compassionately looking for what each filmmaker was getting at. Looking over the selections and his comments, we hope the spirit of his sensibilities comes through.

These are by no means the only good films produced in the Northwest in the last two years. There will always be good films that don’t make it into our Festival. In 1974, Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton received their letter of rejection—“Closed Mondays” did not make it into the 2nd Northwest Film & Video Festival. Of course it went on to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject and introduced much of the world to a technique called Claymation.

We close this Festival where we began with a celebratory screening of work from the 1st Northwest Festival in 1973 films that may be virtually forgotten now, but are part of the heritage of every new film picked this year. There are degrees of separation, but it’s all connected by inspiration.
   
Thomas Phillipson, Regional Services Coordinator
Bill Foster, Director