Film fest fetes ladies behind lens

POW! Fest enlivens local film scene

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, May 23, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

How’s this for a sucker punch? POW! Fest Ñ the Portland Women’s Film Festival Ñ is run by a man.

Tony Fuentes says he was inspired by the birth of his daughter, Mila, age 1.

He says, “I want to be able to provide an opportunity to show her and other girls and women that there are some wonderful films being made by women and girls that are not going to be seen at the local cineplex.”

Mila may be barely done with her Teletubbies tapes, but her dad’s going to find a grown-up audience. He’s also the person behind the archly acronymed Portland International Short Short Film Festival, which first played last fall at Itisness Gallery and will again later this year.

“I wanted to do a spring film festival anyway, and this seemed like a good theme,” he says.

Fuentes, 34, is a member of Zonker Films, a loose collective of local indie filmmakers and performers. By day he’s a transportation consultant, doing studies for light rail projects in places such as Bellevue, Wash., and Aspen, Colo.

So how does one become a movie festival curator?

“We put out a call for films in October 2002 on the Net and at a lot of the film schools in the U.S. and beyond,” he says. He also contacted Women in Film, a national organization. Nonreturnable tapes trickled in until just before the March deadline,when they became a torrent, totaling more than 100 films in the end. Movies will be shown over four consecutive nights at Itisness Gallery.

Sorting them was not that difficult; there were some obvious standouts to pass on to the jury, and some obvious doozies. Twenty-two made the cut, including “Hot and Bothered: Feminist Pornography” by Becky Goldberg of Brooklyn, N.Y., and “Bollywood Bound,” a comedy about four Indo-Canadian women.

So do women make films a certain way?

“I’m not sure you’d sense a big difference,” he says, then adds: “There wasn’t much feminist work. Subjectwise, there are a lot more female protagonists than at a coed festival and a lot more documentaries than features. On some level that reflects an adherence to storytelling, and perhaps to showing things a little more real, not seeing things as violent.”

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