Portland Panorama’s schedule of movies, showcases, and virtual reality immersions feels like falling down a wiki rabbit hole. You came to see who’s playing live at the screening of music videos from the Pacific Northwest at Mississippi Studios, and now you’re getting excited about a bunch of shorts by Black animators at Cinema 21.
There’s exciting variety to the 11 days of events—loosely structured as international films for the first week and local focus for the last weekend—that seems rooted in authentic knowledge of new movies worth watching. Curation is a recognized art form, but it’s not always as obvious as we see in Panorama’s planning. The film categories spill over and weave into one another beautifully.
There’s a chance to see If I Go Will They Miss Me, which the fest’s executive director Stephanie Hough highlighted as “one of the few films that sold at Sundance this year—for a six figure deal.” The director, Walter Thompson-Hernández, is a University of Portland alumnus and will not only not only joins the fest for a post-film Q&A but also appears on a panel about adapting shorter works into features on April 12. “It’s a really beautiful film,” said Hough. “It was originally a short, and he went through the Sundance lab, so it’s a Sundance success story.”
Attending film festivals like Sundance, Tribeca, South by Southwest, and Palm Springs International Film Festival is one of several ways Hough and Melina Kiyomi Coumas, the fest’s director of programming, find works to include in Portland’s Panorama. The main route is through an open submission process. “We doubled the mass submissions from last year to this year,” Hough says with pride. “So that’s great. Word is getting out.”
Both Hough and Coumas have built careers in the film festival circuit, but they first worked together at the Northwest Film Center, where Hough was an educator and Coumas an intern. That formerly film-focused program of Portland Art Museum (PAM) has since rebranded into PAM’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) and widened its scope into polymath practice, which it explores now via recurring series and year-round programming at Tomorrow Theater and the recently reopened Whitsell.
The Panorama team points to the absence of the Portland International Film Festival, which was last held remotely in 2021, as a major inspiration for their fest. Hough also highlighted the defunct Northwest Filmmakers Festival. Panorama is trying to reinvigorate what both of those fests used to provide for the movie-making/moviegoing community in the city.
For instance, the fest’s Pavilion area will show VR and immersive works in an area of Zidell Yards called the Old Moody, hosting a 90-minute program of shorts that attendees can explore. As with any VR collection, an underwater submersion scene is on the bill, but so is a strange 35-minute work about Egon Schiele where the Viennese expressionist “paints your portrait,” and you can see the purported sketch—supplied by AI—at the end. The program’s description rings true: “These are works that cannot exist on a traditional screen.”
Thai supernatural comedy A Useful Ghost is a film you’d read about and want to see, but miss during its short run at a multiplex on the other side of town. That’s just the sort of year you and debut director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke are having. Afterall, A Useful Ghost gained plenty of buzz by winning the Cannes Film Festival 2025 Critics’ Week Grand Prize, but was then disqualified from Oscar competition due to a mistake in submitting materials. It’s wonderful to be able to see this film before it shows up on the Movie Madness international shelf in a year and a half (no shade to the Movie Madness international shelf).
Another quality sleeper Barbara Forever puts—according to our critic HR Smith—”the body-ody-ody in ‘body of work.'” Brydie O’Connor’s documentary provides a delightful survey of Barbara Hammer’s experimental films that even someone with a finite attention span for such things can enjoy. The cool gay doc is co-presented with Oregon Media Lab (OML), so filmgoers can learn about OML’s Doc Camp, too. It’s a good example of Panorama’s layered and locally linked programming. Perhaps the documentary-interested could learn about this supportive organization and end up working on documentaries themselves? That’s certainly the idea.
Collaborative screenings are one of Hough’s self-professed “big goals,” especially right now as funding is direly scarce. Rather than try to grow the festival in its second year, the team focused on maintaining what they built and linking up events, like the music videos showcase at Mississippi Studios and a showcase of series episodes by Northwest filmmakers at Open Signal.
Similarly, a screening of 2017’s James Beard: America’s First Foodie is supported by the nonprofit behind James Beard Public Market. And a collection of short films made by various hand-process methods, Hand/Eye: Manual Processes is co-presented with Portland-based group Spectrum Between, whose name will be familiar to those interested in experimental, avant-garde, and underground films—especially those meant to be presented in analog formats.
This is a precarious time to try to grow a film festival. Arts funding isn’t just on the struggle bus; it’s fixing a struggle bus flat. So it’s refreshing to see the Panorama team measure second-year successes in more new submissions, links with other local organizations, and in actually bringing movie makers to town.
Hough seemed particularly proud that hotel sponsorships meant it could host over 100 filmmakers in Portland. “We’re gonna have tons of visiting filmmakers buzzing all around,” she said. “So that’s really lovely.”
Portland Panorama posts up at various locations, April 9-19, $15 per screening, passes $150-$350, schedule and tickets at portlandpanorama.org.
