Famously, if apocryphally, Bend, Oregon experiences over 300 days of sun each year. It was a little disappointing, then, to roll into town on Wednesday, October 8th, with the iPhone weather app predicting several wet, chilly days ahead. Fortunately, conditions weren’t that unpleasant, and, frankly, it wouldn’t have mattered much if they were. I was there, as were thousands of others, not to hit the slopes or inner tube down the Deschutes River but to dive deep into the 22nd annual Bend Film Fest, which kicked off that Wednesday and continued through Sunday, October 12th.

BendFilm is, by my count, the second-oldest general film festival in Oregon (the Ashland Film Festival is preparing to celebrate its 25th anniversary next spring), and feels like the most prominent one. The programming smartly continues to mix early peeks at fall award contenders with less heralded discoveries-in-waiting, consistently engaging short programs and special Environmental/Outdoor and Indigenous categories that are anything but afterthoughts. And, like any film festival worth its laurels, it caters to insatiable filmgoers as well as the artists without whom they’d have nothing to watch, in equally welcoming fashion. For the second year, during the week prior to the festival, dozens of emerging filmmakers gathered at a remote facility outside Bend for Basecamp, an intensive, immersive workshop where they were able to interact with mentors, network, and participate in a “pitch contest.” This year’s winner was Gerry Maravilla, who received a $5,000 grant towards his feature Niño de Vidrio (Child of Glass).

During the fest proper, there were opportunities for insiders and civilians to learn about the increasingly challenging landscape for independent film and documentary production at panel discussions, daily social events and after-parties, and the frequent post-film Q&A sessions with visiting artists. The 2025 Indie Filmmaker of the Year, Dee Rees, was also in town for screenings of both her breakthrough debut, 2011’s Pariah, and the Oscar-nominated 2017 Mudbound. The celebration of cinema culminated with an award ceremony on Saturday night emceed by local plant shop owner and cabaret star Fertile Liza (say it out loud). But for those afflicted with FOMAM (Fear of Missing a Movie), the main attractions were the three dozen features and over sixty shorts served up over the five-day filmic feast. Twenty-four of those features were entered in competition, while others were presented as “Spotlight” titles. One attractive facet of BendFilm is that the screening locations are almost all within 20-minute walk (or, if your window between movies is short, a five-minute drive) of each other, including the Regal Cinemas multiplex in Bend’s Old Mill District as well as the venerable Tower Theater and the cozy Tin Pan Theater nearby. Pro tip and note to self: those Tin Pan screenings sell out quickly, so next year grab yours early.

With that fifth day of screenings added this year, there was more time than ever, if inevitably not enough, to catch everything worth seeing, but one fact became clear: the films in competition at the festival could go head-to-head with the Spotlight titles, which are generally the higher-profile ones that already have distribution. And that’s not because the Spotlight titles were anything to sneeze at.

Some of the Spotlight Narrative Features, including Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and Harris Dickinson’s Urchin either have been or soon will be in limited release, with director Hailey Gates’ first feature, Atropia sure to elicit some interesting responses when it joins them in December. In it, Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Search Party) plays an aspiring actress in the 1990s who plays a villager in one of the fake Iraqi villages built by the Pentagon prior to and during that country’s invasion by the United States. Quite funny in spots and very dark, it spoofs both American militarism and incompetence and the cynical vanity of a wannabe movie star. The documentaries under the Spotlight banner may not be coming immediately to a theater near you, but several are worth keeping tabs on. Seattle director Robinson Devor (The Woman Chaser, Zoo) interviewed the would-be assassin of President Gerald Ford, Sara Jane Moore, for his intriguing Suburban Fury, in which Moore relates her version of how she went from being an ordinary American mother and housewife to an FBI informant during the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst to a violent radical hoping to trigger a national revolution. And in André Is an Idiot, husband and father André Ricciardi (who, incidentally, attended the same small, Midwestern college I did at the same time) heroically and humorously allows director Tony Benna to capture his experience after being diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. The title, Ricciardi’s invention, refers to the fact that he neglected to get a colonoscopy when he had the opportunity, only to discover his cancer mere, but crucial, months later. The nature of that opportunity, like so much more in this inspiring portrait, reflects Ricciardi’s unconventional, gleefully irreverent approach to life (and death).

It’s notable that, at this dangerous moment in American history, only one of the Narrative Feature Competition titles was explicitly political. Chinese-born writer-director Yun Xie’s Under the Burning Sun is a scorchingly bleak parable about a pregnant young woman’s hellish trek through a fictional desert landscape to reach a land where she can receive an abortion. Going for intensity over subtlety, it’s a well-earned cry of rage and pain. Other entries, though, also push back against the rancor and xenophobia of our era with stories about the acceptance of difference and the importance of tolerance. In Mexican director Fernando Barreda Luna’s Café Chairel, an unlikely friendship forms between two very different people as they try to open a coffee shop and heal from their personal traumas, and Nicolas Colia’s endearing first feature, Griffin in Summer, features a perfectly pitched performance from young Everett Blunck in the title role. Griffin is a slight 14-year-old boy with the soul of Tennessee Williams who grates against the limitations on his artistic grandeur caused by his hard-working single mother (Melanie Lynskey) and his willing, but less stage-mad, peers. The category’s jury went for the sensitively acted, black-and-white drama The Color Book, David Fortune’s film about a newly widowed dad and his son, who has Down syndrome, trying to travel across Atlanta so the boy can attend his first baseball game, and although I preferred Griffin’s sly wit, it’s tough to fault their choice.

The Competition documentary roster, by its nature, features more direct engagement with social and political issues, including free speech, mental health, racist monuments, exploitive media, and the ongoing opioid crisis. (There’s also a lovely looking film called Shelf Life about cheese agers which I wasn’t able to catch.) As a sucker for a good true-life legal saga, I loved The Bitter Pill, about a small-town West Virginia lawyer who devised a novel strategy to go after the companies and bureaucracies whose neglect enabled Purdue Pharma to flood the country with addictive painkillers. The Anxiety Club, which features interviews with standup comedians (including Marc Maron and Sorry, Baby director Eva Victor) about their experiences with anxiety, proves unsurprisingly funny and surprisingly insightful. Professionals on the front line against the rise in book banning get some appreciation in The Librarians (not to be confused with the Noah Wyle classic), which has upcoming screenings at both Portland’s Tomorrow Theater and Eugene’s Art House. Predators, which already had a brief theatrical release, interrogates both the controversy around the NBC news segment To Catch a Predator and its unapologetic host. It took home the Best Documentary Feature prize and should be on some Oscar short lists.

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Other features taking home hardware included The White House Effect, which uses nothing but archival footage to trace the history of climate-change denialism, including a pivotal moment during the George H. W. Bush administration, and was recognized for its editing; Champions of the Golden Valley, the Best Environmental/Outdoor Feature about an Afghani skier who tries to bring the sport to his troubled homeland; and Best Indigenous Feature She Cried That Day, which draws attention to the vast number of uninvestigated cases involving Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).

If all this gives the hint that BendFilm is, as they say, a target-rich environment, it should. I haven’t even mentioned Free Leonard Peltier, which chronicles the process of making its title a reality; You Need This, an excoriating takedown of consumer capitalism; or Cover-Up, Oscar winner Laura Poitras’ engaging and important profile of iconic investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Or the multiple short film programs. From the sampling of those I made, standouts included the documentary Idle Warriors, about New Yorkers who dedicate their lives to turning in drivers who idle too long, and a pair of gleefully subversive narrative shorts: Jane Austen’s Period Drama (it’s a double-entendre!) and prizewinner Teen Mary, which offers up an anachronistic, blaspheming rendition of the Nativity in which Mary’s gay best friend Joseph poses as the father of her unborn child in order to save her from being stoned.

From the silly to the sublime, from local creators to international talents, and covering topics from terminal cancer to teenage theater dreams, this year’s BendFilm covers the gamut, or at least that portion of it that thankfully excludes brainless Hollywood product and self-indulgent celebrity culture. After all, you can get plenty of that the other 51 weeks of the year.