Port Townsend Film Festival
Jane Champion
This video portrait highlights the first ten years of the Port Townsend Film Festival. The festival celebrates great films, filmmakers and community spirit!
Perspective from founder, filmmaker and futurist, Jim Ewing
The Port Townsend Film Festival is an iconic weekend. Over ten years it has become an essential ritual in the life of our unique society here on the Olympic Penninsula.
By late September, the visitors have all gone. They have taken their experiences with them along with their slice of our hospitalities. The weather has turned to the fall, to the late harvest. The harvest of all that has been seeded and nurtured through the spring and summer.
On a remarkably sunny, fine weekend the festival offers a gathering place for all of us. Whether we have passes or are sponsors or just show up to make the collective experience whole, the time comes to meet each other again and remember ourselves. To re-member ourselves. To renew our connection to this place we call home. This place that we keep up, where we invest in making it unique, where we attract more people who get it, who can make the commitment to truly be here, where we educate our kids and ourselves, where we give birth and where many of us will breathe our last.
The Festival would be fine if it were just some dinners on the street and lots of conversation. It is so much more.
The festival adds the potent ingredient of storytellers from all over the world. People who have done the remarkably hard work of making films. Short or long. Narrative or documentary. Classic or just out of the editing room. Us natives get to meet these makers. We sit in smart crowds in the dreamtime that our theatres provoke. Whether in the cozy Rosebud or under the moon and stars on the straw bales of Taylor Street. Together we increase our awareness of the world and the human condition that the filmmakers bring us from afar. Some of that occurs in the watching. Much occurs in the conversations that ensue as we gather for the next film, or sit on the steps by the Fountain, share an outdoor dinner with the crowd, or in the restaurants, at the parties, in the car on the way home, at the breakfast table or with the barista across the counter. 
The festival begins its second decade. There is more to do. We can leverage our films and our filmmakers to make even more of our communities. There is plenty of youthful talent and aspiration to be encouraged and supported across our region, well beyond the borders of Port Townsend. There are kids to be sent to film school. Adults who need to realize their unavowed childhood dreams. These are writers, directors, cinematographers, editors and lots of actors just waiting for a bit of inspiration and a path for their talents to find voice. Many people can’t make it to Port Townsend for the festival, but the festival can travel to them. The community can be made wider in membership, richer in friendship and more capable of making compelling stories to inform us, entertain us and bring us closer.
