Nastacia Voisin |
It all began with a flyer I picked up in Random Order Coffeehouse while waiting for my hazelnut latte.
Slate blue, with an eye gazing from the cover, the movie program challenged me to “look the world in the eye” by attending the 37th Portland International Film Festival.
I was intrigued. I took a peek at the movie list, and I was hooked. That evening, I signed up for three movie screening volunteer shifts.
I’m no indie film guru, but even a Washington transplant like me has heard of the PIFF. Oregon's biggest film event showcases a cross-section of new world cinema from over 30 countries, shown in a handful of movie theaters Downtown.
Like most new PIFF volunteers I thought I could sprint through at least six films in the three weeks of screening – not including the features I was helping set up. The truth is, getting through a fraction of this year’s 128 films—104 features and 24 shorts— is an impossible challenge. I feel lucky now to have attended three showings.
Unlike my fellow volunteers (who could toss around the names of obscure directors and filmmaking techniques) I was expecting a cinematic circumnavigation of the world to encounter familiar tropes of international films: cycling Parisians, sinister Nazis, Dutch dairymen, conflicted dictators, broken hearts and hellish traffic jams.
I was not expecting to feel the resounding impact of the scope, diversity, tragedy and beauty of the films I screened.
They asked the fundamental questions we all ponder: Why am I living this life? What am I meant to do? What is worth striving – and failing – for?
But the beauty of these films is that they struggle to answer these questions in the languages of the whole world. The diversity of the human experience, and its sameness, means that there are countless ways of understand how to walk through life, and all or none of them might be right. These films drag us to experience what it means to live the life of “the other” – and to plunge ourselves in the grace and the wonder, the futility and rage, of that life.
To walk out of a film and hold on to the resonance of that experience, to remember how to see yourself in a stranger, is to have truly experienced PIFF by learning to “look the world in the eye.”
