A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
In their twelfth year of running a festival on the gem of the San Juan islands, it’s basically a given that the small but mighty Orcas Island Film Festival will quietly drops one of the season’s most complete and compelling film festival lineups of the year. The quality of the program is an embarrassment of riches and it’s basically in our backyard (provided that your backyard has a seaplane or a ferry boat).
At this point, in their eleventh year, it barely counts as surprising when the Orcas Island Film Festival quietly drops one of the most astonishingly complete and compelling film festival lineups of the year. Over more than a decade, they’ve been curating a selection of films from around the world that has locals and visitors alike flocking to the quaint town of Eastsound on Orcas Island to celebrate much of the year’s best cinema.
Every autumn, locals and visitors alike flock to the quaint town of Eastsound on Orcas Island to celebrate much of the year’s …
We were thrilled to see that the Orcas Island Film Festival was planning a big return for 2022 after a slightly-subdued 2021. Since then, they’ve released their full lineup — a jaw-dropping collection of some of the top prize-winners and most buzzworthy titles from many of the year’s most prestigious festivals. Along with potentially Oscar-bound international films and heart-stirring documentaries, the re-expanded program will pose scheduling conundrums for attendees trying to decide how to best plan a weekend of seeing some of the year’s best films well in advance of their neighbors. For lovers of first-look films, it’s among the best kinds of problem to have!
In the midst of putting the finishing touches on their event, the festival’s leadership trio — Donna Laslo, Jared Lovejoy, and Carl Spence — were kind enough to make some time in their busy schedules to chat with me over e-mail to share some insights about the the practicalities of re-launching the in-person festival in the midst of a pandemic, highlights from a stacked schedule of film, and some recommendations for a visit to Orcas Island.
In this year’s SIFF wrap-up, I sung the praises of the smaller, intensely-focused film festival as a counterpoint to the multi-week sprawling …
