For the past four years, Portland has been without film festivals dedicated to international fare and to regional films — ever since the dissolution of two fests produced by the Portland Art Museum’s Northwest Film Center (now PAM CUT): the Portland International Film Festival and the Northwest Filmmakers Festival.
But this month brings a new fest, Portland Panorama, offering a dose of both foreign and local cinema. Two industry-veteran members of the leadership team, executive director Stephanie Hough and programming director Melina Kiyomi Coumas, vividly remember when the local cinema landscape changed, necessitating just this kind of eventual redemption.
In March of 2020, PIFF was cut short by the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. Hough’s film, a documentary called Century portraying her family’s farm near St. Paul, was the last work screened before the rest of PIFF was cancelled. “It was a weird night for sure,” she recalls, “and that was the last time many of us were in the [museum’s] Whitsell Auditorium.” Coumas’s short film Aquí was among those canceled before it screened.
This turned out to be not just a one-time cancellation of PIFF. The festival, founded in 1977, was discontinued and never returned. Same for its sister autumn event, the Northwest Filmmakers Festival, as the film center, in the wake of not only the pandemic but also longtime director Bill Foster’s retirement, rebranded itself PAM CUT and changed its focus.
Portland Panorama, which runs from April 10-20, is not simply a successor to these defunct fests. Its organizers seek to reimagine the film and arts festival experience, championing diversity and innovation. More so than its preceding fests produced by the museum, Panorama is proudly a festival built by artists, for artists. And it’s not just film: there are numerous additional events.
“We’re picking up that mantle that that PIFF left behind, but we’re also trying to build something again from the ground up, something new” says Coumas, “something that we can put our own stamp on.”
Both Coumas and Hough come to Panorama with lengthy resumes in film production and programming. Hough, who is also board president for the nonprofit Women In Film Portland, has worked in various roles at BendFilm, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Her resume also includes TV work for PBS, The History Channel, and 495 Productions (producer of several reality shows).
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Coumas balances her Panorama role with being the full-time programming manager for the Hawaii International Film Fest, with past experience at Portland’s Filmed By Bike.
“When I began programming in 2019, I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun, I can just put together and curate all these fun, uplifting poppy films’,” Coumas says. “As I started working at bigger festivals and the world really changed, I started to see a lot of heavier films. So now I think I have like a good balance of those two elements.”
Panorama opens Thursday, April 10 at Cinema 21 (616 NW 21st Ave.) with Ponyboi, directed by Esteban Arango, starring River Gallo as a young New Jersey intersex sex worker who finds himself on the run from the mob.
“I saw Ponyboi at Sundance last year, and really enjoyed it, but the film just didn’t get any sort of a distribution until recently,” Coumas says. “I think it will have a limited release this summer, so it’s perfect timing for us. But it’s just one of those films that it kind of surprised me, and it went against expectations. It’s a protagonist that we haven’t seen before, with characters that are very complex and nuanced. That’s something that I really enjoyed seeing in particular.
“I was kind of going back and forth on whether that should be our opening film or not, because I feel like usually opening films should be crowd-pleasers. But I wanted to come out the gate swinging, in a sense. This is something more gritty. It’s something different. It’s shot on 35-milimeter film, too. It’s beautiful.”
The evening concludes with an opening-night party at Lovely Rita in Portland’s Hoxton hotel, 15 N.W. Fourth Ave.
Panorama’s first full-evening slate of films, on Friday, April 11, features a triple feature of documentaries at Cinema 21. First comes Bye Bye Tiberias, in which actress Hiam Abbass returns after 30 years in Europe to her native Palestinian village. The film is directed by Abbass’s daughter, Lina Soualem.
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Friday’s second film, Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, is a valentine to the female punk band that rose to acclaim in New York’s underground music scene in the 1990s. Director Ilya Chaiken wil be in attendance for a post-screening conversation, one of several such cases.
The night concludes with a 2025 Academy Award nominee for best documentary feature. In Black Box Diaries (also Cinema 21), about Japanese journalist Shiori Ito’s investigation of her own sexual assault. Her attempts to prosecute her high-profile offender became a landmark and high-profile case in Japan.
Panorama’s organizers made a point of curating robust short-film programs, of which there are several: three devoted to international fare, three featuring Northwest filmmakers, an experimental program, as well as a late-night shorts program. “They’re just really beautiful, very diverse programs that I’m really hoping people come out for,” Coumas says.
On Saturday, April 19, a program called Environmental Shorts (Hollywood Theatre, 4122 N.E. Sandy Blvd.), which features the U.S. premiere of director Skye Fitzgerald’s Chasing Roo, shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Earlier that week, Fitzgerald will also be the subject of a retrospective on Sunday, April 13 (Cinema 21), featuring his trilogy of documentaries about the global refugee crisis. 2018’s Lifeboat and 2020’s Hunger Ward were both Academy Award-nominated for Best Documentary Short, while 2015’s 50 Feet From Syria was shortlisted for the same honor.
From shots to features, submissions to Panorama were also free for Pacific Northwest filmmakers, assuring a wide crop of entries, and perhaps giving a nod to the defunct Northwest Filmmaker’s Fest, which did the same.
In addition to the films, Portland Panorama also includes several special events. On Saturday, April 12, for example, a virtual-reality pavilion will be in operation for six hours at Industry One Gallery (415 S.W. 10th Ave., Suite 100), hosted by VR producer Hungry Mantis and featuring a group of short films that are controllable by viewers with their VR headsets.
Later that day, Industry One will also host Origins XR, a live performance with dance performers moving through artist Fernanda D’Agostino’s large-scale video installation, with audience members and dancers able to interactively dance together in both analog and virtual reality.
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There are also educational offerings The morning of Sunday, April 13, brings “Music and Film: How to Work with a Composer” (PNC Live Studio, 1210 S.W. Sixth Ave.), hosted by composer Mark Orton, who has contributed music to more than 80 dramatic and documentary films. On Tuesday, April 15, is the panel discussion “The Power of Perspective: Why Lens Choice Matters” (Judy Kafoury Center for Youth Arts, 1000 S.W. Broadway), featuring directors of photography Sarah Whelden, Darin Moran and Moira Morel in conversation with moderator Sally Spaderna.
Planning and preparing for the Portland Panorama festival has been ongoing for nearly two years, and as the premiere finally arrives this week, so too has the preparation. “It’s just total chaos every second of the day,” Hough says. “But good chaos.”
The combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of streaming has meant a precipitous decline in theatrical movie-going, particularly for first-run feature films. Even massive blockbusters today may only play in theaters for a few weeks or days before jumping to the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Yet there have also been pleasant surprises, such as the growing popularity of classic movies in theaters, the rise of nonprofit movie houses, and how audiences continue to show up at film festivals. Hough and Coumas hope that will prove true here as well.
“It just was clear,” Hough says, “that people were ready to be back in cinemas and Portland is ready to host like a bigger festival again.”
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