Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival returns to Bellingham this week

This year’s iteration of the Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival will include 20 short films and seven feature films, but don’t ask its organizers if they have any favorites.

“I was talking to a guy here at the Earth Day rally, and he said, ‘Among the films, the diamonds, there’s probably some dogs.’ And I said, ‘Not in our festival,’” festival Executive Director Cheryl Crooks told the Herald in a phone call.

The annual festival returns to Bellingham this week, running April 24-27, before the online version is held from May 1-11.

“We have a world premiere for one of our shorts. We have an international premiere on another one, a Pacific Northwest premiere. So we’ve got all new films that you haven’t seen anywhere,” Crooks said.

Aside from the new lineup, this year’s event will feature a couple of changes, including a poetry contest and an expanded art exhibit, now in its second year. The changes aren’t all for the better, though – Crooks expects a significant drop in attendees from British Columbia as a result of the ongoing trade war and heightened tensions between the U.S. and Canada.

“We know that some of our audience [which] does come from Vancouver, are just across the border, and White Rock and whatnot, won’t be here this year. We know that for sure. Our filmmakers are still coming.”

Cascadia Film Festival schedule

The festival, which primarily takes place at the Pickford Film Center, kicks off on Thursday night, with a screening of Jackie Christy’s debut feature film, “Magic Hour.”

“It is very loosely inspired by true events, and I mean loosely,” Christy, who’s traveling by train from New York to speak at the festival, told the Herald by phone from a Chicago Amtrak station. “But the part that I will confess is inspired by my actual life, is that I decided to go to film school a little bit later in life, when I had wanted to do this for years.”

Like Christy, who spent the first part of her career operating a theater space in downtown Manhattan, the film’s protagonist goes back to school for a second career as a filmmaker.

“There was a moment in time where I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t have endless time left. I’m not in my 20s, and if I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it now, and I’ve got to live fully and not let my fears and doubts control my life.’”

Christy didn’t set out to make an autobiographical film, as much as to inspire anyone in the audience who might be thinking about taking a similar leap.

“I wanted to make this movie, not just to sort of share my own adventure with the world, but also as a way of talking to other people,” Christy said. “Because I think everybody has a little part of him, like a little neurotic, scared, shy, tentative part of themselves that has a dream that they have not yet been able to realize, that they’re holding back for some reason. It’s kind of my way of saying, ‘You know what? Go for it anyway.’”

“Magic Hour” is the only film being shown Thursday night. Friday, however, will have a full slate, starting with a program consisting of seven short films at 1 p.m. It will be followed by a feature film at 3:30 p.m., Mila Tervo’s “Ohjus (The Missile),” which Crooks said is one of many standouts this weekend.

“The crazy thing about this movie is it’s so weirdly relevant,” Crooks said. “The director was shooting at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine. And the film is based on a true story from 1984, I think, when a Soviet cruise missile fell into the countryside outside this little remote village in Finland.”

The night will wrap up with a 7 p.m. screening of “VIVA VERDI!,” a documentary about the lives of former opera stars in a retirement home in Milan, at the Mount Baker Theatre’s Walton Theatre. After the screening, there will be a meet-and-greet with Yvonne Russo, the film’s director and the festival’s “honored guest.”

Saturday morning will have a series of directors’ panels at the New Prospect Theater, which are free to the public.

“One of them this year is on what’s called social impact filmmaking,” Crooks said. “We have several movies in the festival in which these directors, they’ve maybe taken a social issue — it’s maybe a fictional film, not necessarily always a documentary — but they’re trying to make some kind of awareness and create a social change as a result of their film.”

In the afternoon the festival will show another short film program and a pair of feature films, including Ondi Timoner’s “All God’s Children,” which Crooks expects will be a standout.

“It’s about a Jewish temple in Brooklyn, and a Black Christian church that decides that they’re going to work together, the congregations, to get to know and understand each other and to talk about the issues of racism and discrimination.”

The festival wraps up Sunday with the third and final short film program and two more feature films.

“The thing that’s running through most of these films, even though these topics tend to be fairly heavy topics, this year, we’ve looked hard to see the underlying uplifting message that these films are presenting … You know, we felt that that was especially important given everything that’s kind of happening around us,” Crooks said.

How to buy tickets

You can find the complete schedule on the festival’s website. Tickets are available for each individual screening or for the entire festival. Festival passes cost $275.