peripheral produce and the northwest film center presents:
The Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival
April 15-18, 2004
www.peripheralproduce.com

The Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival (PDX Film Fest for short) will take place April 15-18, 2004 at the historic Guild Theatre. Founded and organized by local filmmakers, the festival will showcase provocative, artistic, challenging, and firmly uncompromising films from around the globe that are created outside of the parameters of mainstream entertainment.

The festival, now in its second year, is an offshoot of Peripheral Produce— an independent screening series that started in Portland in 1996 by filmmaker Matt McCormick. Peripheral Produce is an important link within the local film community, and has been credited as a driving force behind Portland’s recent emergence as an important center for experimental cinema.

highlights of the festival
special guests: This year, the PDX Film Festival is very excited to be bring famed experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen and media-activist extraordinaire Dee Dee Halleck to Portland. Each will present selections of their work, and engage the audience in a discussion after each screening.

Jem Cohen is a New York-based filmmaker whose films include the feature length Benjamin Smoke, which premiered at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival, and Instrument, a documentary made with the band Fugazi, which was chosen for the Whitney Biennial 2000. He has also made numerous short films including Lost Book Found, Little Flags, and Amber City. Cohen’s films defy easy categorization, thriving on the collision between documentary, narrative, and experimental film. But while his work is defiantly non-commercial, it still maintains a broad sense of accessibility. Primarily working with Super-8 film, his films portray a stunning and vivid account of the urban landscape. Throughout his career, Cohen has worked with several musicians including Fugazi, Vic Chesnutt, R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Cat Power, Blonde Redhead, and God Speed You Black Emperor. His films have been seen around the world, from squats in Italy to the Berlin Film Festival, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

At the Festival, Cohen will be presenting two programs of his recent shorts, including his 1997 portrait of Elliot Smith titled Lucky Three and a clip from his current work-in-progress feature length project Chain.

DeeDee Halleck is a media activist and co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first-ever grass roots community television network. She has also made several films, including “Mural on Our Street,” which was nominated for Academy Award in 1965, and “The Gringo in Mañanaland,” a feature film about stereotypes of Latin Americans in U.S. films that was featured at the Venice Film Festival, the London Film Festival, and won special jury prize at the Trieste Festival for Latin American Film. She has led media workshops with elementary school children, reform school youth and migrant farmers, and, as President of the Association of Independent Video and Film Makers (AIVF) in the seventies,led a media reform campaign in Washington, testifying twice before the House Sub-Committee on Telecommunication. She has also published a book titled Hand Held Visions: the Impossible Possibilities of Community Media, published by Fordham University Press. Halleck received a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship and has also received three awards for lifetime achievement: The George Stony Award from the Alliance for Community Media; The Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) and the Herbert Schiller Award from the 2003 Schmooze Awards.

At the festival, Halleck will be presenting a selection of brand new programs created for the Deep Dish Network including Shocking and Awful: A Grass Roots Response to War in Iraq which is a series of visual commentaries from around the U.S. that offer artistic reactions to the war on Iraq; Scenes from the World Summit on Information Society: Showdown in Geneva in December 2003 which documents the latest in a long series of world summits organized by the United Nations to deal with central questions of humanity and technology; and Scenes from the Indymedia Center at the Fourth World Social Forum in Mumbia India, January 2004, which covers a meeting of 100,000 human rights advocates, academics, and Nobel prize winners who protest the growing inequities between rich and poor nations.

The 2004 Peripheral Produce Invitational: Now in its third year, the Peripheral Produce Invitational (dubbed the “World Championship of Experimental Cinema”) once again pits some of the best filmmakers from Portland and beyond against each other in a rock-em-sock-em, trash talkin’, competitive film showdown. With the filmmakers in attendance and the audience deciding who wins, this Battle-Royal of experimental film will feature brand new work from Andrew Dickson, Melody Owen, Aaron Valdez, Zack Margolis and several others who aim to dethrone current PPI champion, Trevor Fife, and walk away with this year’s trophy.

nearly 100 films including: Jacob Ocada’s documentary Curtis (which just received an Honorable Mention award at Sundance); mind-bending videos from the New York video duo the Half-Lifers; new films from Deborah Stratman, Jim Trainor, and Bill Brown; Erik Gandini’s new doc Surplus; a program of new experimental works from Europe programmed by Six Pack Film’s Ralph McKay, AND MUCH MORE!!!

contact and information:

The 2004 PDX Film Festival is presented by Peripheral Produce and The Northwest Film Center, and is funded in part by a generous grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities. For more information, please visit our website or contact festival director Matt Mccormick at (503) 282-6082 or email to matt@peripheralproduce.com.

festival information
schedules, film descriptions, and updated festival information can be found at:
www.peripheralproduce.com

Location
All festival screenings take place at the Guild Theatre, at 829 SW 9th Avenue in downtown Portland (at the corner of SW 9th and Taylor)

Tickets
$7 General Admission (single program)
$40 Festival Pass
Tickets and passes will be available at the Guild Theatre Box Office. Box Office opens one hour before each screening, and only tickets for that day’s screenings will be available. There are no advance tickets.

Contact
Press Contact: McCormick
phone: (503) 282+6082
mailing address: PO Box 40835, Portland 97240
website: www.peripheralproduce.com
email: pdxff@peripheralproduce.com