1/4/2024 0 Comments Northwest film study centerUnderstandably, former employees of the Northwest Film Center, all of whom were laid off at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown and almost none of whom have been asked back, felt the sting the sharpest. None of the filmmakers I know were consulted.” My concern is that the community needs to be involved. “I understand that organizations need to evolve. “I knew that something was coming once Bill retired and they hired Amy, looking at her history.” (Dotson’s resume includes stints at Brooklyn’s Independent Film Project and with the Vienna Biennale.) “I felt really good about her, but I also felt like what she was exploring was going to ruffle some feathers.”ĭocumentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, who made a short film for a 1983 class with Professor Stuart Kaplan that was key to his acceptance at Columbia University’s graduate film program, has similar feelings. “Everyone I know was just shocked,” said one longtime member of the Portland film community who requested anonymity to preserve professional relationships in that community. Days and even weeks later, those emotions were still raw. Among the most scathing commenters were many who had longstanding relationships with the Northwest Film Center, and whose emotions seemed to range from confusion to disappointment to anger. The initial reactions, as they often are on social media, were quick and unsparing. One thing seems certain: the direction that PAM CUT takes will be closely followed by a community of passionate filmmakers, educators, students, and cinephiles, all of whom will make their reactions known. It’s hard to know what to expect with any specificity, since both the vision and the language used to describe it have been, perhaps inevitably at this point, very fuzzy. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle, reflecting longstanding tensions between the Portland Art Museum and its cinematic partner as well as the tectonic shifts of the last several years in the way Americans experience and interact with movies and moviemaking. Others, it seems to some, evince an intentional, or at least negligent, discarding of the Northwest Film Center’s institutional knowledge, employees, and core missions. ![]() Some were unavoidable, most notably the pandemic-induced shutdown that so rudely interrupted Dotson’s first (and last?) Portland International Film Festival. There are several reasons for the seeming abruptness of this change in direction under Director Amy Dotson, who was hired in 2019 following the retirement of longtime director Bill Foster. But…”, leading into a lamentation of the procedural and/or substantive aspects of the announcement. ![]() “Change is hard.” In the weeks since the Northwest Film Center announced its new name, PAM CUT, at the 2022 Cinema Unbound Awards, I heard that sentence, or some variation, from most of the more than a dozen folks I spoke with on the topic.įor some, the name change – it stands for “Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow” – served as an acknowledgment that the transmutation of the 50-year-old institution into something new was inherently difficult but undeniably necessary.įor others, it was followed by some form of: “I get it. Honorees of the inaugural Cinema Unbound Awards gather on the stage in March of 2020.
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