10th CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival is this week. What’s in store
The CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week — and it’s certain to be a special weekend.
“CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival is a Bellingham, Washington-based festival dedicated to discovering, developing and showcasing emergent and expert women filmmakers and promoting the Pacific Northwest as a destination for film production and filmgoing audiences,” the festival’s mission statement says. “Our annual film festival and cultural and educational programs throughout the year champion the arts, community and diverse perspectives.”
This year’s festival has a total of 28 films, according to festival’s executive director Cheryl Crooks. There will be 21 short films and seven feature films shown from April 30 to May 3. The directors featured in the festival come from all over the world.
The films will be shown at both Pickford locations on Bay and Grand Streets in downtown Bellingham.
This year, the festival is featuring its first film from Saudi Arabia entitled Hijra directed by Shahad Ameen.
“It’s a narrative film, really terrifically powerful performance, a simple story, about a grandmother that takes her two granddaughters on a pilgrimage to Mecca,” Crooks told The Bellingham Herald. “One of the granddaughters bolts — she wants to leave the country — and the other granddaughter and the grandmother go on a search for her. You learn an awful lot in the making of the film about Saudi society, about the way women are regarded there. I learned things I didn’t know.”
In addition to film screenings, the New Prospect Theater will host a handful of panels, including a script workshop panel, a sound in film panel and a film in the current world panel, according to the festival program.
The 10th film festival will feature a first-ever filming location tour. With the hope of attracting future film directors to bring their productions to Washington, the tour will highlight scenic and ready-to-film spots, including Western Washington University and the Alaska Ferry Terminal.
“If we bring productions here, it creates jobs here. It keeps artists working close to home,” said the festival’s secretary Rochelle Robinson.
To celebrate the festival and the 10th anniversary, the red carpet will be rolled out at the Whatcom Museum’s Lightcatcher building. The party, scheduled for 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, will be a look back at the festival and a look forward to the future.
“We’ll have interview opportunities for our directors. We’ll have photo opportunities as well as media outlets there just to write, to write up the entire experience,” Robinson said. “The hope is to bring more eyes to this work, to these films.”
Robinson described the party as a chance to “let your hair down, eat, drink and dance the night away.”
At its core, the festival’s goal is to highlight women in film, she said.
“It’s still a very male-dominated industry. We need to give these women more of a chance,” Crooks said. “When a guy’s in control, you’re getting a certain perspective. You’re getting a male perspective, instead of a woman’s perspective. When there is a woman directing a film there tend to be more women working on the set, because they’re the ones that are intimately involved in hiring everybody else. So they can have a real impact on the number of women that are working in film as a result of them being the director. They’ve always been here, but people have not been aware.”