The festival, while roughly half the size it was at its pre-pandemic peak, now looks ahead toward a promising future.

By Marc Mohan for Oregon ArtsWatch

The art of rejuvenation is nothing new to the city of Ashland, Oregon. The lithium-infused water that has drawn visitors to the area for over a century is reputed (though never scientifically proven) to possess restorative properties. And the city itself has long been a haven for harried urbanites looking to recharge their batteries for a week or a lifetime. So it should be no surprise that the Ashland Independent Film Festival, which had seemed at times over the last couple of years to be on life support, has rebounded to hold, from October 3rd to 6th, its first in-person celebration of cinema since 2019.

While the mere existence of the festival would be cause for gratitude, the curated selection of narrative and documentary features, as well as diverse shorts, shows that AIFF, as it always has, continues to punch above its weight. That’s at least partially due to the influence of Richard Herskowitz, who returned last year to the position of Director of Programming after serving as Artistic and Executive Director from 2015 through 2021.

There’s never a good time for a pandemic-induced shutdown, of course, but there are especially poor times. In February of 2020, AIFF opened a newly remodeled Film Center on downtown Main Street, a place intended to serve year-round as a 45-seat screening room, gathering space, and all-around artistic hub. It was meant to debut at that year’s festival in April, but of course that never came to be. “We had to shut it in March, a month later. But the idea was that it was the future. It was going to help us become a more sustainable, year-round arts organization, which is what a festival needs to get to the next level,” recalls Herskowitz.

Like every other film festival in the state, AIFF made every effort to persevere in some fashion. The April 2020 edition was quickly transformed into a virtual event in May, with the assistance of the suddenly ubiquitous Eventive service. “They were lifeblood for us during COVID,” says Herskowitz. “It was the quickest pivoting, and we had never done a virtual festival before.” The next year, AIFF, again like many other festivals, instituted a hybrid format, with a virtual component in March and an outdoor, in-person component in June. “We had received a state grant for a huge outdoor screen and great projection equipment. We used it and had a pretty successful outdoor event, even though the temperature reached over 110 degrees,” says Herskowitz.

The fits and starts of progress in taming the pandemic continued. While most cultural organizations returned to some level of normalcy in 2002, AIFF seemed to continue to be swimming against the tide. Herskowitz retired at the end of 2021, and the festival brought in a new Executive and Artistic Director, Roberta Munroe. Speaking with ArtsWatch then, she explained that the decision to remain a virtual event was prompted both by a compressed schedule (she had only been hired in January) and the continued uncertainty of the COVID situation. Another in-person component was held that summer, but Munroe departed under unclear circumstances and by late 2022, there was widespread concern that the following spring’s festival may not come to pass.

“I got a call from Lorraine Vail at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute [at Southern Oregon University] who ran a class each year that always had 75 attendees, each of whom was assigned to see six movies during the festival,” recalls Herskowitz. “So, they were supplying a good chunk of our audience. She had announced the course because she’d been promised there would be an Ashland Independent Film Festival in April of 2023, and she was beginning to get worried because nothing was really happening.” After he helped the instructor track down a dozen films for use in the class, she approached AIFF and they screened as a festival Documentary Showcase.

After that, the organization’s board and Executive Director Jim Fredericks turned their sights toward 2024. The Film Center space was being used regularly, and special programs involving Portland filmmakers Joanna Priestley and Skye Fitzgerald were announced. But, again, the process became daunting. “I got the call in mid-July,” says Herskowitz. “They realized they just did not have the experience. They needed more help in the actual mounting of the event. They had put together a team of people to process the submissions, but they lacked an Artistic Director to give it shape.” Herskowitz came out of retirement, in part because Maylee Oddo, now serving as Festival Director, was the president of the board during his earlier term as Artistic Director, and, as he puts it, “I was kind of indebted to her.”

So, working alongside former Senior Programmer Aura Johnson, who took charge of the submission process, Herskowitz began the process of deciding which films to invite to screen. “I’ve never stopped going to film festivals and scoping out what’s going on. So, I invited films from that circuit,” he says. “And we have our staples here, the perennial themes that go over really big: the arts, activism, and the environment. There were some really good choices in all of those categories.”

Those choices included, in the first instance, Musica!, about an elite music conservatory in Cuba, and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a distillation of the titular 24-hour theatrical event, both from Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who were in attendance as the festival’s Rogue Award Winners. Activist appetites were whetted by the highly anticipated Union, which chronicles the arduous labor organizing efforts, led by the charismatic and unconventional Chris Smalls, at Amazon’s Staten Island distribution center, and by Borderland: The Line Within, the latest effort by veteran documentarian Pamela Yates to chronicle the lives and struggles of Latin American people against poverty and oppression at home and government-sanctioned cruelty in the U.S. Both films were met with audibly passionate audience responses, and the post-film Q&A for Borderlands was an emotional experience. Surrounded by natural beauty, Ashlanders also appreciate documentaries such as Every Little Thing, which profiles a hummingbird veterinarian, and the Norwegian cinematic hymn Songs of Earth, in which the director’s father introduces us to the majestic valley where he was raised.

Of course, there’s room on the four screens of the Varsity Theater for fictional flicks as well. Cross-cultural narratives were a bit of a theme here, including the delightful, crowd-pleasing Queen of My Dreams. Amrit Kaur (The Sex Lives of College Girls) stars as Azra, a queer Pakistani-Canadian who’s living with her girlfriend while pursuing her MFA in Toronto. Azra’s relationship with her mother Miriam is, to say the least, strained, and when Azra’s father dies suddenly on a trip back to Pakistan, Azra must travel there and, ultimately, confront the mother-daughter tension. Director Fawzia Mirza uses flashbacks to 1968, when Miriam (here played by Kaur) was a young woman chafing against societal expectations, and to 1989, when the family lived in Nova Scotia and struggled to adapt to Canadian life. The multiple timelines are deftly juggled, and Kaur is an appealing lead, including in the Bollywood-inspired flights of fancy that the story occasionally takes.

In a similar but more surreal vein, director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language takes places in an alternate version of Winnipeg where Persian culture and language are inexplicably the norm. Reminiscent of the dry, deadpan oddness of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson, and drinking from the same weird well as fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin, it hops between vignettes involving the attempt to retrieve a wad of cash from beneath a frozen pond, an office worker who arrives in town on an odd quest, and a tour guide who spotlights only the most quotidian spaces. Both films end up celebrating the interconnectedness of the global village.

Oregon-based creators were, of course, ably represented. The festival saw the world premiere of a fascinating collaboration between indie-film stalwart Mark Duplass and Ashland icon Barret O’Brien. The Long Long Night is composed of six half-hour episodes which alternate between black-and-white scenes in a hotel room where Duplass and O’Brien’s characters have met to commit double suicide and iPhone video messages the pair send to each other several years afterward: clearly both survived that night, but their friendship did not. Duplass and O’Brien, who knew each other as children in New Orleans, vibe off each other wonderfully, and as the real story of what happened gradually unspools [presumably: I was only able to catch the first three episodes], the twists are both surprising and revelatory. The cinematographer for The Long Long Night was Gary Lundgren, whose feature Above the Trees (co-starring O’Brien) also screened in Ashland. Director Daniel Rester’s Emma Was Here isn’t as polished as those efforts, but it’s affecting nonetheless. A 24-year-old woman (Austin Goldsmith) diagnosed with brain cancer decides to use Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act to end her life and takes a final weekend trip to the coast with her best friends.

And the tribute to Priestley was well-timed, considering the recent release of the documentary History, Mystery, Odyssey, which profiles the work of several Portland independent animators. “A year before I left, I wanted to devote a whole year to Oregon animators,” says Herskowitz. “It blew my mind that so many of the greatest animators I had been showing for decades lived mostly in Portland, but all around the state, from commercial animators like Brad Bird, Matt Groening, Will Vinton and Laika, but also the independents: Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestley, Rose Bond, Jim Blashfield. I had wanted to feature them in a festival, and in the film center we were going to do monthly exhibitions of their work.” Priestly, Gratz, and Deanna Morse, a Klamath Falls resident whose experimental work has appeared on Sesame Street, participated in a Sunday panel to discuss animation in Oregon.

The festivities concluded with an awards banquet on Sunday evening hosted by Rogue Valley denizen Bruce Campbell, the cult film icon who previously hosted 2020’s virtual event (which is available on YouTube). Campbell also popped unexpectedly into a panel discussion on Friday to show a few scenes from his upcoming, Oregon-made directorial effort Ernie and Emma, due next year. This year, the festival jury selected the aforementioned Queen of My Dreams as Best Narrative Feature, with the Lynchian, Finnish black-and-white fable Giant’s Kettle a worthy Special Mention runner-up. On the documentary side, the Sundance Grand Prize winner Porcelain War, about and shot by a trio of Ukrainian artists from the midst of the carnage of war, took home top honors.

While AIFF isn’t back to full pre-pandemic strength (who among us is?), it’s about half the size it was at its peak, with, at last, a promising future. Herskowitz says he’s open to returning for next year’s festival, and he says the board is actively exploring the possibility of moving back to the traditional late-spring spot on the calendar next year, which would avoid the October pileup of Ashland, Bend, and La Grande each hosting film fests on consecutive weekends. Second only to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it’s a crucial cultural cog in the region’s economy, and one that emphasizes the importance of the in-person experience.

At a time when even the discriminating cinephile has access to thousands of great films via one streaming service or another, “we had a sense that you need to give people something, a live element, to draw them away from their devices,” says Herskowitz. “In a sense, every film festival that has a live filmmaker present is giving them that.” There’s also the social component: post-film discussions with likeminded audience members (or even wrongheaded ones) can be as memorable as the movies themselves. And, finally, there’s the distraction-free viewing itself: phones off, usually with only the slightest sense of what to expect, we settle in to see what’s been selected by festival organizers, not marketing committees or studio IP shepherds, for our eyes and ears.

Marc Mohan moved to Portland from Wisconsin in 1991, and has been exploring and contributing to the city’s film culture almost ever since. He graduated Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College cum laude in 2020 with a specialization in Intellectual Property. This article originally appeared in Oregon ArtsWatch.