I already gushed over the film lineup for this month’s Orcas Island Film Festival. The twelfth edition of the small but mighty festival officially closed yesterday with a slate of Audience awards. With a record-setting 8,174 attendees, the audience favorite at the festival was Elsinore, Simon Stone’s moving feature aboutIan Charleson’s tremendous performance as Hamlet at the National Theatre while valiantly fighting AIDS. After its world premiere at Telluride and claiming the International People’s Choice at TIFF, it seems like the heart-rushing film has legs and is poised to launch a Best Actor bid for the indelible performance from Andrew Scott. Runners-up included I Play Rocky, Josephine, La Bola Negra, The Debut, and Rose. 

On the documentary side, OIFF audiences embraced Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals for a Revolution as the festival favorite. Runners-up included Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff; Radioheart: the Drive and Times of DJ Kevin Cole; Union Town; The Endless Frontier; and Landscapes of Memory. Among the animated programs, Tangles took the top spot in fan voting. Finally, filmmaker Beth de Araújo was this year’s Jean-Marc Vallée Vanguard Award recipient for Josephine. 

As for my own festival, it was a delight as always. Some notes from the weekend below!

I had great ambitions for overstuffing my weekend with filmgoing, but life and weather had their say. On Thursday morning, despite stunning weather around the Salish Sea, an incredibly stubborn patch of morning fog at the Eastsound airport conspired to keep me away from Orcas Island. So long as it was trapped between the mountains on either side of the island, I was stuck at the Kenmore lounge at the very quaint Boeing Field airport. While the lounge was a cozy and cute space to work during an extended delay, I was thrilled when the skies finally parted and I was able to hop a ride with some other filmgoers (and their very cute dog) who were flying in for the weekend. The views can’t be beat! 

Once settled into Eastsound, I’d missed a couple of morning movies that I’d been itching to catch. Eric already sung the praises of La Gradiva. By the time I met up with them, my friends — who went to the festival by car and ferry — were glowing with reviews of returned with glowing reviews of Mouse. They drove up in the morning and were lucky enough to catch the afternoon ferry that made it directly to Orcas from Anacortes. Another, which had an emergency drop off of all passengers on Lopez later that day was the talk of the town. Starring Sophie Okonedo Katherine Mallen Kupferer, the coming-of-age story of girlhood is the latest from Ghostlight directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson and is now high on my must-see list for the rest of the year.

While they went to catch up with Josephine (whose director Beth de Araújo was presented with this year’s Jean-Marc Vallé Vanguard Award), I pulled up a seat Eastsound institution The Lower Tavern to watch the absolute cinema of the Milwaukee Brewers sweeping the Los Angeles Dodgers while our beloved Seattle Seahawks clawed their way into overtime only to seize defeat from the jaws of victory with a game-ending interception. At least the burger was good. After, I drowned my football sorrows and debriefed on the day’s movies at an always cozy table with ever-delicious cocktails at The Barnacle. Their movie-themed menu included one with mixological sorcery inspired by Practical Magic that put a little coconut alongside the lime in a mezcal margarita. An ingenious brew.

Luckily, the island goes dark fairly early on weeknights, so I got plenty of sleep to start the day with a tasty biscuit sandwich from Olga Rising, a short stroll from the waterfront to Orcas Center, and a screening of The Dreamed Adventure. Bulgaria’s official submission for the International Film Oscar is a rambling affair set in towns near the Turkish border still reeling from the whiplash between the fall of communism and the rise of crony capitalism. What begins as the story of an architect/contractor from the mountains (Syuleyman Alilov Letifo, as Said) descending into his past rough-and-tumble life amid small-time gangsters stridently follows its own rhythms. He’s made the trip to get a short-term loan to flip a minor moneymaking scheme, but finds himself reunited with an old flame (Yana Radeva, as Velska) who’s leading an archaeological dig outside the city, but not impervious to its gravitational forces. Soon, it becomes her movie as she becomes a curious observer and investigator of long-simmering wounds, contentious networks of criminals and their illicit activities, and interconnected personal relationships. Unfolding across motley groups of late-night dinners and drinks, I found myself waiting for the plot to cohere, but that’s not how real life works. Luckily, we have this very charismatic, mysterious, and strident archaeologist at the center to sort through all of the complicated layers to discover some meaning below the surface. 

While I mostly spent time catching movies, I took a break in the middle of the afternoon to sit in on a documentary filmmaker panel featuring Humboldt USAdirector G. Anthony Svatek; Landscapes of Memorydirector Leah Galant, Radioheart: the Drive and Times of Kevin Cole,including the subject himself and the film’s co-director Peter Hilgendorf, at a lively and informative panel discussion. Each panelist reflected on the very different experiences of making their film, be they personal observations, serendipitous connections through history and geography, or profiling a beloved figure on the precipice of a major career transition. They also spoke passionately of the place that documentary filmmaking holds in the culture, the critical role of collaboration, and aspirations for future work. It was a great conversation; that it took place in a room with a stunning view across Fishing Bay into the tranquil harbor at the center of the horseshoe-shaped island, all the better. 

With so many movie-related activities on the schedule, we had to squeeze in an early dinner as soon as Houlmeopened their doors for the evening. The restaurant’s been nominated for a James Beard award seven times (just give it to them already!) for good reason: perfectly thin and crisp sourdough pizza crusts, a fantastic selection of wines (including a skin-contact orange that seemed produced especially for a sunbream), and smoked carrots whose removal from the menu would cause riots. The meal put us in just the right frame of mind to see I Play Rocky at a packed Sea View theater. I am a known skeptic of Peter Farrelly’s dramatic turn (Green Book’s Oscar win remains an open wound), but was willing to give it a shot. Yes, this story of how struggling actor Sylvester Stallone came to write and star in Rocky was cheesier than what they put lather on Philly’s favorite sandwich. But goddam if this story of underdog triumph and determination in Hollywood isn’t expertly produced as a  Grade A, ultra-effective, incredibly satisfying American dairy food product of a high order. In telling the true story, it somehow achieves the difficult task of making what we already know to be a sure thing still feel like a longshot the whole way. Anthony Ippolito really is such a major charmer in the speech-impeded, strident title role (a line that he repeats stridently at multiple points in the picture) that I cannot bring myself to be mad about it, especially when Farrelly threads a connection between Sesame Street, steadicam, and the guerrilla day-one filmmaking of the famous staircase shot. It’s not deep stuff, but the stand-up and cheer finale is earned and it played like gangbusters in the room.

The next morning started with an Orcas Bakery bagel in hand and a second screening of Paper Tigerplaying nearby at the Sea View. The latest family drama from James Gray — like its spiritual predecessor Armageddon Time — again transports us back to Queens in the 1980s in New York City. There we meet a comfortable but striving family for whom an opportunity to enrich their finances just in time for their oldest son’s departure for college sets off a dark and dangerous chain of events. Most surprisingly, perhaps, is the degree to which Miles Teller has slid into “square dad” territory as the do-gooder patriarch of the family. A catered Peter Lugar’s steak dinner from his brother (Adam Driver, solid as the cool uncle), a former NYC cop whose fortunes have flourished post-retirement, woos the steady-as-he-goes civil engineer to work with his flashier sibling to reach for a brass ring in the form of tax-free consulting dollars. A seemingly simple scheme, it’ll draw him and his teen boys into the literal and metaphorical stink of the Gowanus Canal on the verge of profitable rejuvenation from superfund site to desirable neighborhood. All the while, Scarlett Johansson mostly triumphs over a capricious wig as the mother quietly bearing her own looming tragedy. I found the intersection of family and criminal drama extremely compelling, textured with mid-1980s vibes, and set on edge with unsettling mob menace. An ever-present malaise and uncertainty hangs over the loving family as they trip into dangerous waters. With supreme control, Gray takes the film out on a series of extraordinary sequences, one set in the tall grasses far from the city is among his finest.

I passed the afternoon with Iron Boy (Le Corset), a deceptively simple hand painted animated film about a tween boy in the French countryside whose finds himself tipping over due to a spinal misalignment. Louis Clichy’s fluid drawings evoke a very sweet coming-of-age story about finding yourself, your passions, and new friends amid limitations (in this case, an awkward iron brace). Along the way we learn about organ music and the insidious nature of agribusiness on family farms. Très French! Spirits lifted by an afternoon family film, we enjoyed the weather with another 15 minute stroll back to Orcas Center, where the festival has installed two theaters and a lounge filled with festival merchandise and sustenance in the form of family-style catering from Delmi’s Tacos.

We were there to immerse ourselves in the Black Box theater (surprisingly comfortable folding chairs!) for Everytime, Sandra Wollner’s exceptional investigation of family, grief, and healing. Germany’s official submission for the International Film at this year’s Academy Awards, it opens with a mother (Birgit Minichmayr) and her two daughters returning home after a day out. Younger Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling, extraordinary) hassles her teen sister Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) with schemes about how to more equitably divide their shared room. Jesse’s carefree night of dancing and drugs with her boyfriend Lux (Tristán López, a quiet standout) weaves its way from the club, to the moonlit forest, to observing gulls from a rooftop as the warm pink sunrise envelops Berlin and a tragic accident ensues. Though the camera captures the most consequential actions at a distance, the inventive depiction only heightens the shock. The majority of the film returns months later, in the dull confusing relative calm that marks the uneasy transition from sharp grief to a new normalcy. Life goes on, lives intertwine with persistent echoes and understanding. Shot by Aftersun‘s Gregory Oke, the film shares some of that film’s best moves, including an extended period spent at a holiday resort in Tenerife nestled among stark hillsides and a craggy coast with the potent metaphor of massive ocean waves crashing into tranquil pools. Yes, there’s a stroboscopic club scene, soft cinematography whose observations be they distant or close consistently take your breath away, and an intimate facility with the bittersweet melancholy that comes with the persistence of digital artifacts. The effect is deeply modern, but also instantly timeless. Wollner uses all of these tools to communicate the feeling of having your heart continue to beat while a toothpick is lodged firmly in it until the ache entirely shatters your reality. As it blooms to a mindbending finale, this incredible film took the breath out of my lungs and left my head spinning like little else this year.

I closed the festival with an encore showing of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, which stars Julianne Moore as a Mona Friedman, a housewife whose life transforms after she tries out for a community theater musical helmed by a persnickety director played with smarmy appeal by Paul Giamatti. Having seen its premiere at Telluride, I was impressed how well the comedy held up on second viewing. With a sense of where it was going, I appreciated the range of emotion that Moore carries below the surface as a woman suddenly realizing that she’s been long adrift in a life so centered on a family that she’s made herself so small that they’d barely notice if she disappeared. Eisenberg paces the movie with such a steady hand that each phase of Mona’s development never overstays its welcome. Even more miraculously the original songs from “Nosy Neighbors”, the goofy show-within-a-show about the comings and going of a fictional New York City apartment building, remain fresh no matter how often we’ve heard them. A soon-to-be immortal scene in which Giamatti puts on an acting clinic is the first of many episodes that demand spontaneous applause or uproarious laughter. This is a major crowd-pleaser that earns its stripes and I hope that people will make the time to see it in a theater with strangers when it comes out later this year. As for awards, the shit and mud that Julianne Moore drags herself through on her journey from House Mouse to Method Monster as a woman on the verge of a theatrical breakdown bring down the house, but she should win an Oscar for an ongoing bit with an unlit cigarette alone.

With a day of movies under our belts, we ventured to see how Eastsound arts crowds cut loose. Over at the Odd Fellows Hall, the festival was throwing a “Wonderful World of Oz” dance party. Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt warmed things up with some chill vibes while festival goers filtered in from their evening films. By the time the room had filled up, DJ CARE claimed to the top deck of an illuminated platform to get the surprising number of witches in the crowd, a lone flying monkey, and more than few pairs of ruby slippers onto the dance floor. For a minute things got so heated that a circuit broke! I didn’t stay to find out what transpired once the speakers were back up and pumping.

I had a very pressing appointment with a morning bun from Brown Bear, a brisk walk to the blessedly fog-free Eastwound airport, and a flight back to Seattle. My time on the island was over for the year, but I’m already dreaming of next year’s event. At the party I talked to co-directors Carl Spence and Donna Laslo about their vision for the future of the festival. A major part of year thirteen and beyond lies in a commitment to preserving the festival’s legacy while creating an exceptional, year-round home for cinema.

The keystone of that plan lies with a major investment in the Sea View, the beloved Eastsound cinema with the less than beloved seats (many patrons grab a seat cushion for the show). On the way into the festival, I was fascinated to chat with the theater’s new co-owner Mark Maunder (who recently took ownership along with Kerry Boyte). He spoke with boundless enthusiasm and fascination with the nuts-and-bolts details of the latest innovations in exhibition technologies and sound technologies. The theater will be out of commission over the winter and spring with Orcas Open Arts hosting pop-ups in the interim, but the planned overhaul includes not only new seats, refreshed bathrooms that bid farewell to the notorious stall doors, a new lobby and lounge, all alongside the most cutting edge projection and sound. I’ve heard that film projection is in the works along with adding a second screen in a boutique-style theater. It all has the makings of a cinematic destination for the region and I can’t wait to return to see just how great the films in the festival’s outstandingly curated programs look and sound when it’s all said and done.