PORT TOWNSEND — A teenage girl, with guidance from a mentor, transforms into a magician.
Eleven women from different parts of the world set out for the North Pole on skis.
An Icelandic girls’ basketball team intends to prove its mettle.
An ensemble of Turkish women presents Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in the mountain villages of their country.
A daughter suddenly inherits her mother’s Christian bookstore back in her hometown of the Bronx.
A couple of creative types go on a date that doesn’t turn out as planned.
That’s a sampling of the stories in Women & Film, the Port Townsend Film Festival’s springtime celebration to start online this Friday. From “Queen of Glory” to “Queen Lear” to “Spoken Word Coffee Date,” the 10-day festival encompasses 12 full-length movies plus two short-film programs.
A festival pass, at $45, provides unlimited streaming of everything, any time of the day or night between 8 a.m. Friday and 11 p.m. May 1. Viewers also have the option of buying $12 single tickets to films of their choice. Either way, nearly all of the movies come with recorded interviews with the filmmakers.
Details are found at PTfilmfest.com, while information also is available by phoning the film festival office at 360-379-1333.
Teenager Jeff Wall teaches karate to seniors living in a nursing home in “Golden Age Karate,” one of the documentary shorts in the Women & Film festival starting this Friday. (Sindha Agha)
“It’s so hard to choose even just a few,” Danielle McClelland, Port Townsend Film Festival executive director, said when she was asked for her favorites.
“I personally loved ‘Sirens,’ ‘Marvelous and the Black Hole’ and ‘Mama Has a Moustache,’” she began.
“Sirens,” about an all-female heavy metal band in the Middle East, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, McClelland noted.
The film “touched me so deeply, as it explores young people struggling to find themselves, their art and their community in the midst of international conflict,” she said.
As for “Marvelous,” which stars Rhea Perlman as a mentor to a budding magician, it is “simply a very well-crafted story, full of dark humor and charming connection across generations and differences.”
McClelland, a self-described “huge fan of animation,” also touted “Ninjababy,” a comedy about a baby who climbs out of a girl’s diary to accompany her as she grows up.
“‘Queen of Glory’ is also so funny and irreverent,” McClellan added of the aforementioned story of a young woman with big plans of her own — interrupted by her mother bequeathing her the King of Glory Christian bookshop.
Prospective festival-goers can watch trailers for these films, read synopses and pre-order their home screenings at PTfilmfest.com.
“I really think there are multiple themes running among the films this year. Perhaps we are all — men, women, non-binary individuals — asking ourselves what it will take to survive our changing world,” McClelland mused.
“Filmmakers are definitely exploring all the varieties of strength. Do we need to toughen up? Open up? Be brave enough to connect with each other? Be hopeful enough to laugh?”
This year’s Women & Film festival, she believes, shows examples, stories and questions from all over the planet.
McClelland, the successor to Janette Force, who was the longtime Port Townsend Film Festival executive director, has been in her new job for 3½ months now.
This first festival on her watch, she said, is rich in connections between films and their subject matter — and there’s also plenty of comedy.
“I love laughing in so many different ways,” McClelland said.
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Jefferson County Senior Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
