The tagline for this year’s Portland International Film Festival is “Empathy has no ethnicity.” While clearly intended as a response to the xenophobia and intolerance currently plaguing our nation, it’s also a timeless reminder of the value of global cinema. It harks back to Roger Ebert’s famous description of cinema as a “machine for empathy.”
Movies, after all, arguably do a better job than any other art form at creating an intimate, visceral sense of identification with people totally unlike ourselves. They help us to recognize universal human tendencies as familiar emotions play across the faces of those separated from us by space and, increasingly, by time. Suffice it to say that if more Americans watched more non-American movies, the world would be a better place.
This year’s PIFF (March 8-21) is the 42nd overall, but the first to occur following the retirement of longtime Northwest Film Center director Bill Foster last year. While this year’s fest (and any in the foreseeable future) will surely evidence Foster’s ongoing influence, it will be interesting to see in what ways the event evolves in an increasingly competitive media landscape. As the theatrical distribution of foreign-language films continues to wither and their availability on home video or streaming platforms remains unreliable, PIFF offers, perhaps more than ever, the best and sometimes only way to experience a dizzyingly diverse array of experiences hailing from every continent save Antarctica. What follows is a necessarily scattershot look at this year’s program.