The McMinnville Short Film Festival wrapped its 14th annual outing last Sunday with a mid-afternoon awards luncheon scheduled to avoid conflicting with the Oscars. Reflecting afterward on all the films and conversations, I’m struck by a paradox.

The festival’s mission is to showcase and celebrate the small, but this event, easily the largest cultural celebration in McMinnville and possibly in Yamhill County, increasingly has an epic vibe. Let us count the ways.

More than 100 films from more than 15 countries were screened over four days, including 18 world premieres and nearly 30 Oregon premieres. It was the longest festival yet. Screenings and talkbacks have long been a staple, but now an expanding menu of mixers and industry panels allows viewers to put questions to professional filmmakers such as Ellie Foumbi and Kevin Jerome Everson.

Organizers say about 65 percent of the films were personally represented — usually by the director, but a few actors and producers also were present. Throughout the event, at mixers or in the McMinnville Cinema 10 lobby between screenings, it was easy to get into conversations with filmmakers from around the country and the world. Portland is no longer the big city on the festival’s block. New York City and Los Angeles are regularly in the mix, yet another sense in which the festival feels big.

“It just makes a big melting pot of an experience,” said Executive Director Heather Older. “We had people flying in from Europe. You could feel the energy.”

The final numbers aren’t yet in, but Older estimates ticketed attendance at around 1,600 people this year. Seats in the festival’s auditorium were nearly full — which hasn’t been true, in my experience there over the past couple of years, seeing “big” movies costing $150 million or more and backed by expensive and polished marketing campaigns. But ultimately, the feeling of immersion in something vast comes from watching the films.

Instead of superheroes and explosions, McMinnville festival audiences get an expansive view of what it’s like to be a human in this world. That’s what many of these filmmakers, most of them young, are paying attention to and thinking about.

Sponsor

This obviously is true of documentaries, which numbered more than two dozen this year, but I’m also talking about  nonfiction narratives. The variety of representations of lived experience and real-world social and political problems reflected a spectrum of class, age, ethnicity, gender, and nationality. It’s almost as if the event itself is a creative act: It forms a cinematic collage of who we are.

The festival has its own film categories, of course — drama/comedy, environmental, Indigenous, horror, experimental, etc. — but I’m always struck by the way these films in different genres speak to and echo each other across this artificial divide. Viewing them like this gives one a sense of how these films, ranging in length from three to nearly 30 minutes, open a wide aperture on the world. To wit:

Horseman Todd, barely four minutes long, tells the true story of an Idaho transplant who has recovered from a bout of homelessness and drug addiction and now has a clearly satisfying job tending horses in Clackamas County. The British film Twenty, meanwhile, tells the story of Emily, a homeless ballet dancer, as she navigates a series of nerve-wracking auditions.

Attend enough screenings, and you invariably get a variety of takes on the lives of children. The festival’s first Oscar-nominated short, Anuja, tackles the issue of child labor in India. Amplified, brought here by Jordanian/Palestinian director and producer Dina Naser, zooms in on a young girl who is deaf, and how her violating experience at a karate center disrupts her sonic world. Naser immerses the viewer in that world with the sound design. The Promise, by first-time director Chris Liles of Oregon, is told from the perspective of Fee, a boy whose visit to a nursing home with his grandmother in the 1970s inspires him to be part of a more humane solution as an adult.

Sally, Get the Potatoes, from New York director Danicah Waldo (one of many filmmakers in attendance to charm the audience with delightful behind-the-scenes stories) looks at how a girl’s innocence is shattered when she hides in her wealthy family’s mobile laundry cart. Pushed around the house, hidden by sheets, she … sees things. Waldo calls it “exploration of the grey area in between adolescence and adulthood.”

Creatives themselves were the subject of many films. Along with Twenty, there’s Portland filmmaker Jason Rosenblatt’s rollicking and brilliantly edited documentary Gonna Need a Bigger Boat: The Jason Wells Story, about the adventures of his fellow Portlander, a musician and sound designer. Nino Mancuso’s Children’s Books is a single-joke but very funny story about an author who realizes that her illustrator’s contribution to her entire body of work is stuffed with phallic symbols. Finally, we go to Vietnam in They Call Me the Tattoo Witch, by director Lindsay Nyman, which looks at the tattoo artist Tran Ngoc, an expert in tattooing over scars.

Finally, the human cost of life in reactionary times: The Heart of Texas, discussed in our festival preview, takes on immigration and working-class struggle, and director Gregory J.M. Kasunich took home the coveted Grand Jury award, which will help with his goal of expanding the short into a feature. Right to Privacy, a 14-minute drama directed by Julie Herlocker with a script by Rachel Mann that’s based on a true story, features festival regular Nancy Nagrant of New York as an abortion provider whose daily run-in with the protesters outside her clinic takes an unexpected turn when one protester shows up with her pregnant teenage daughter. And An Orange from Jaffa, directed by Mohammed Almughanni, illustrates the perils of being a Palestinian trying to get through an Israeli checkpoint.

Sponsor

I’m just scratching the surface. Even taking in only a couple of screenings (a dozen were offered, starting as early as 10 a.m. and going to nearly 11 p.m.), one gets a feast of storytelling, characters, and perspectives.

Festival screenings were held in the largest auditorium in the 10-screen multiplex, and it’s instructive to consider the context of the other nine screens: the usual Hollywood fare (mostly movies for children and youth) led by Disney’s $200 million animated Mustafa: The Lion King and Marvel’s $180 million Captain America: Brave New World (which, I suppose, also counts as Disney). All told, these and the other seven features collectively cost well over $600 million and probably closer to a billion to make.

The differences between these and the shorts notwithstanding, the blockbusters share a crucial common denominator.  Virtually all their directors started their careers by making shorts — or, in a few cases, short-form narratives, such as television episodes and music videos.

“Directing is a muscle that you need to keep working,” said director Ellie Foumbi, one of several industry panelists who flew into Oregon for this year’s festival. Born in Cameroon, she started making movies in 2015, mostly dealing with social and political issues within the African diaspora. In six years, she knocked out eight shorts, including a music video and an episode for Tales, an anthology TV series.

For her, working the muscle paid off. Her first feature, Our Father, the Devil, is streaming on the Criterion Channel, which happens to be a terrific place to find shorts by industry giants, including David Lynch — films they made before a break-out feature put them on the map.

Foumbi appeared on a panel with R.J. Daniel Hanna, whose features include Hard Miles and Succubus, and throughout the panel moderated by Older, they echoed each other about the problems and challenges in the film world. As they fielded questions, I jotted down the ways they and audience members described the post-COVID, post-Hollywood strike film industry: It’s in “turmoil” with “shifting terrain” that is “weird and hard right now.” Someone in the audience, talking about the difficulty of nailing down financing, termed it “Wild West time.”

Afterward, I asked Foumbi to drill down into the problem, and she described how her conversations with financiers completely changed after the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike shut Hollywood down for nearly six months. 

Sponsor

“Now, the people that get stuff green-lit, it’s such a small group of people who can get you above $10 million or even above $6 million, honestly,” she said. “It’s kind of shocking how everything narrowed. Companies are spending way less money than they were before the strike and even before the pandemic. It’s made it harder for indie filmmakers to find opportunities.”

Older, who came to the McMinnville festival as a filmmaker herself, back when it was run by founders Dan and Nancy Morrow, said the cost of making a short today ranges from as little as $1,500 “up to north of $50,000 for larger productions. A lot of people work at slashed rates to make a film doable.” The average cost, she added, is around $20,000.

The festival is a chance for audiences to see how creatives can pull off a lot — frequently with great success — with very little. The short Becoming Mermaids illustrates the point nicely. At four-and-a-half minutes, it surely was one of the least expensive films this year — and one of the most endearing.

Portlanders Adam Patrick Sweeney and Kjirsten Tornfelt made it during the pandemic lockdown. It’s a live-action film of a hand-crafted (and operated) “animated” film. Using an old iPhone box, a couple of popsicle sticks and a spool of receipt paper, the hand-drawn story is scrolled through a “screen” cut into the box, and Tornfelt provided the music vocals as she rotates the sticks, taking care to make sure the film ends just as her song does.

“She didn’t know how she could get a lot of people to be able to see something that small,” Sweeney told me. “So she said, ‘Hey, we’ll turn it into a video and we can project it on a big screen.’”

That’s the kind of analog creativity the TikTok generation of filmmakers needs, said Gresham filmmaker Shawn Welles Linzey, who brought his Pickle Vision to the festival. It follows a very old and frail man, “K,” who finds himself at the end of it all, utterly spent and numb, having coasted through his 85 years on a series of empty addictions; the story begins with him slumped in front of a television. One of his goals, Linzey told me, was to keep Pickle Vision old-school with practical effects, and no A.I., which he regards as a threat to artists everywhere and art itself.

“We need to inspire young people and show them that we can still make old-fashioned films that feel fresh and inspire them to go out and get their hands dirty,” he said, which made me think of Steven Spielberg’s admonition to young filmmakers to simply “learn the craft.” “They have to get their hands dirty.”

Sponsor

This year’s awards included a new one. The festival teamed with Oregon Film to award a $10,000 Pacific Northwest Indigenous Filmmaker Grant to Olivia Camfield, a multimedia movement artist of Muscogee Nation, and Woodrow Hunt, a Cherokee, Klamath, and Modoc Tribes descendent. The two will use the funding over the next year to make a film that will premiere at the 2026 McMinnville Short Film Festival.

The festival creates an environment for collaborations like that to emerge, sometimes a year or two later, with filmmakers meeting each other for the first time in McMinnville, then going on to work together. Which gives Older that “mission accomplished” feeling.

“People are nervous when they first show up,” she said. “A lot of them are traveling alone, and I love to see people just light up by the end of the festival, and they’re exchanging phone numbers. I just love that. It’s all about building that community. It’s so important to this craft to build out that community.”