Gray skies got you down? Try the silver screen.
The second annual Bainbridge Island Film Festival is set to begin Nov. 7. Programming will include 18 films and 27 shorts from directors all over the nation, including some from BI, with both acclaimed and untested films for every cinephile.
The schedule has a little of everything, with films featuring heavy Hollywood hitters like Lily Gladstone (“Jazzy”), locally famous films about local subject matters (“Fantasy A Gets a Mattress” and “Ultimate Citizens”), internationally acclaimed cinema (“Eephus”), and true classics (“The Balloonatic”).
Screenings will occur at the Lynwood Theater, the Bainbridge Cinema and the BI Museum of Art. Following showings, there will be panels, family programs and Q&A sessions. This year, attendees can vote for their favorite films to earn an Audience Choice award, and next year, a jury of teens may decide some of the festival’s standouts.
“I like to think that if somebody saw every single film in the festival, my hope is that there’d be some that they didn’t like,” said Charles Poekel, BIFF director and filmmaker. “I want to try and cover so many areas that I want more people to be happy than not.”
The festival is an evolution of BI’s first film festival, the Celluloid Bainbridge Film Festival, which was a hyper-local event hosted by Arts and Humanities Bainbridge. The title of CBFF referenced the physical media that film reels have been made of since the 1920’s, cellulose, and focused on the noir genre of the 1940’s and 1950’s. It was a free, one-day screening of a few films, out of over 300 available, that were either made on BI or featured an island resident— which limited programming, Poekel said.
Besides, film screenings are only part of what film festivals can do, he added.
“I think what makes BIFF kind of unique is that it’s only as big as it needs to be to accomplish its primary objectives, which are creating a platform for local filmmakers to show their films to an audience, and combining those people and filmmakers with the other films and filmmakers from around the country,” Poekel said.
The event’s new iteration joins other nearby independent film festival circuits, like those in Port Townsend and Seattle, in showing burgeoning filmmakers and cutting-edge cinema that were developed recently. But the importance of highlighting the local film scene is still integral to the festival, Poekel said. 11 of the 45 films have a local angle, including feature film “Inheritance” from BI-based filmmaker Rachel Noll James.
“It’s programmed with the island community in mind […] It could be as specific as, the executive producer grew up here but now lives elsewhere, or it could be the entire film was shot here on the island,” Poekel said. “It’s important that we don’t shun an artist or a filmmaker because they decide to move somewhere else. If they’re from Bainbridge, their work will always be supported here.”
