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2006 Port Townsend Film Festival
September 15-17, 2006

Greetings from the Director

Peter Simpson It is only human to want to improve, so each year the Port Townsend Film Festival continues to tweak its programming. In what sometimes feels like a compulsive drive to create the perfect Festival, we add things one place, subtract in another, but mostly we just add. Since our first year in 2000, we have added to our programming, in roughly chronological order: films of topical interest, the extension of Taylor Street Outdoor Movies to Sunday night, Almost Midnight movies, street musicians, Formative Films, the San Francisco-based National Public Radio program West Coast Live!, the First Features sidebar, the continuous-run Drop-In Theatre, the Kids Film Camp, and A Moveable Fest, taking four Festival films to the Historic Lynwood Theatre on Bainbridge Island.

For 2006, we're adding two more innovations

advanced tickets sales, and
the Festival's own trailer.

The Festival has often been criticized for relying on passes and last minute "rush" tickets for box office sales, so this year the Festival is selling a limited number of advance tickets for screenings at our largest venue, the Broughton Theatre at the high school. If successful, advance ticket sales will likely be extended to all venues in future years.

Moviegoers who attend other Festivals will know that most larger Festivals introduce each movie with a trailer to celebrate both the event and its sponsors. Some are clever, some are boring, almost all become tiresome by the end of the Festival. But we have a treat for Port Townsend Festival-goers. Inspired by Richard Miller's poster photograph, Festival founder, board member and filmmaker Jim Ewing pioneered the effort and, along with board member and filmmaker Ian Hinkle, is directing and producing a set of 52 unique trailers for screening before each film at the indoor venues.

Like all filmmaking, the trailers are a true collaboration. We are especially grateful to Peter Lack, a gifted musician and a fine composer, for writing and recording four original soundtracks that bring an essential drive to the work, moving it from special to extraordinary. And the photographs incorporated into the trailer come from the body of work created by our team of photographers from 2005: Elizabeth Becker, Luke Bogues, David Conklin, and Harvindar Singh. This is entirely a volunteer effort for which the Festival is most grateful.

It's our way of saying thank you to our year-round sponsors, the venue sponsors, and film sponsors. Of course there are many more sponsors who we thank in other ways. We hope you will enjoy each trailer you see and that they will prompt you to say thanks to these essential benefactors with a round of applause somewhere along the way.

Peter Simpson
Executive Director

Poster Artist - RICHARD MILLER

Miller Each year, the Port Townsend Film Festival selects a local artist to provide the image for that year's poster. Richard Miller is the artist for the 7th annual event, joining Marii Lockwood (2001), John Craig (2002), Steven Z. Kennel (2003), two-timer Max Grover (2000, 2004), and Linda Okazaki (2005) in the pantheon of Festival artists.

Photography was a male right of passage in Richard Miller's family. Both his grandfather and his father were serious amateur photographers. He spent many hours as a child watching prints emerge from the developer in his grandfather's bathroom/darkroom or sorting through his father's glass slides of Yosemite and Death Valley, holding them up to the window to see. As a teenager, he inherited his brother's basement darkroom and enlarger when his brother went away to college. Richard's first cameras were his grandfather's World War II era Zeiss Ikon and his father's Rollei from the 50s.

"Growing up near Yosemite in the1960s and '70s, I idolized Ansel Adams, read his books, hiked in his mountains and imitated his style," Miller recalls.

He inherited his love of photography from his father.

"Ironically, I also inherited a genetic atrophy of the optic nerve that has left me legally blind for most of my life," he says. "Not wanting to challenge my obvious physical limitations, I pursued academics." He received a BA in History with an emphasis on American cultural history from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1979.

At age 30, throwing logic aside, he returned to school to study advertising photography at Rochester Institute of Technology.

About his inspiration for the Film Festival poster image, Miller says "that on the ordinary level I wanted to express that wonderful feeling of watching a classic movie under the stars on Taylor Street while sitting on a straw bale."

"At a deeper level I wanted to explore how the process of projection, whether in the human mind or in the cinema, allows our fantasies to emerge out of light and become real."

After watching 15 films in 48 hours, the line between reality and projected reality can blur, and "for me that can be a lot of fun."

"Just watch out for the gorillas," he added. Richard Miller's work can be viewed at Gallery 9 at 1012 Water St.

Program Schedule

Awards

Three-Day Program Schedule PDF Download (100 KB)

The complete 7th annual Port Townsend Film Festival program is announced August 30. Check back here for periodic updates or sign up for our newsletter to receive up-to the minute programming and guest announcements