Eastern Oregon Film Festival
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“If You Want Something to Exist, Figure Out How to Do It”: Ian Clark on Eastern Oregon Film Festival and A Morning Light
As both a programmer and filmmaker, Ian Clark has had a long-standing relationship with Filmmaker. Named a 25 New Face in 2012, Clark is also a co-founder of the Eastern Oregon Film Festival (EOFF), which hosts its annual online program on this very website. I’ve attended EOFF for three years, and every time I am amazed by the sense of community Clark fosters and his prowess as a programmer, a curatorial mindset that feels like a direct extension of his person. Clark and I had a conversation about the festival’s origins, his relationship to his hometown of La Grande, and his […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 7, 2018 -
Escape into America: The Eastern Oregon and Indie Memphis Film Festivals
Keeping on top of the media conversation in 2017 has begun to feel more like an exercise in self-harm than consumption. The dirty laundry is exhaustive and exhausting; we are quick to expose and defile, but quicker to move onto the next victimizer, leaving little lasting resolution in the wake of the penultimate upheaval. At the movies, we look for meaning where we can get it. Plots are politicized to the point where the once ghettoized “issue film” is mutating into standard grade. Even if the latest Thor joint is raking it in at the box office, cotton candy escapism […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 21, 2017 -
Last Dance Before Trumpism: Eastern Oregon, Park City (Virtual) and Rotterdam
In retrospect, it seems like it was the last glimmer of something. We were all in Eastern Oregon again, the loose circuit of folks who gather annually for the tiny two-and-a-half day, two-venue film festival that takes cinephilia to the reddest corner of a blue state. The election was just a few weeks off. No one seemed particularly bothered about it, seeing as the weekend before all the talk had been about the #BillyBushTapes and how could an admitted sexual assailant become the President anyway, puhleeze? It wasn’t hard to encounter a Trump/Pence sign in La Grande, though. It’s a largely […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 4, 2017 -
Nowhere To Go But Up: The 6th Annual Eastern Oregon Film Festival
“A good movie is like a blast to the head,” growled Dusty Decker — musician, actor, purveyor of the Albino Bumblebee (goat’s milk, Jack Daniels, honey) and something of a local legend in the valley of La Grande, Oregon. His off the cuff commentary, though in jest, nonetheless proved a perfect transition from bb gun toting and hatchet throwing to a roundtable discussion on independent film beneath the towering trees of his backyard. We were all there for the sixth annual Eastern Oregon Film Festival, and the conversation began with the occasion. Just as any old chum can go out and shoot a film […]
by Sarah Salovaara on May 19, 2015 -
If You Build It, Will They Come? On the Treefort Film Fest
Idaho’s only city of 100,000+ residents sits in a valley north of the Snake river. Boise is a boomtown these days, with over 150,000 new residents since George W. Bush took office and new west corporate bravado written all over it. The flat city’s pert, immensely walkable and surprisingly bumpin’ downtown extends into residential areas north and east. Looming hills ringing much of the town can be glimpsed from almost anywhere in the city proper as long as the light is just so; it’s an oddly marvelous place to roam around. A gold rush town after the French and Native […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 28, 2014 -
Secret Cinema: The Eastern Oregon Film Festival’s Remarkable 5th Edition
Unlike nearly everywhere else in the culture, bigger is not necessarily better at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. It’s a slender event in a small town. Eleven features and 21 shorts across three days and two venues. Still, they don’t call this stretch of fully enclosed valley “La Grande” for nothing. Despite only containing about 12,000 souls, this mountainous hamlet, like Ian Clark and Benjamin Morgan’s program, leaves you plenty of room to explore. The festival opened on a Thursday night in late February, commencing with a dinner for its supporting members in the town’s recently renovated arts center. Over beer, […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 7, 2014
