“A lot of this is about having a good time,” says Portland filmmaker and writer David Walker, who, in collaboration with the Hollywood Theatre, co-founded the Portland Black Film Festival in 2013. In a cultural landscape that’s often embarrassingly normative when it comes to representation from filmmakers who aren’t aging white men, a festival like this one—spotlighting work from African American filmmakers—is especially important. And by the sound of it, it’s also really fucking fun.
“A lot of festivals will like try to show 30 or 40 movies, and we’re like, let’s try to get five or six movies that are fun to watch,” says Walker. One of the aims in curating the festival, he says, is selecting under-seen films that he wants to watch himself. “We’ve had the opportunity to show some films,” Walker says, “that don’t get shown on the big screen that often.”