PORT TOWNSEND — The letters beside the name on her business card are VOR, as in Voice of Reason.
And for Janette Force, in her first year at the helm of the Port Townsend Film Festival, that title is no joke.
She adopted it several jobs ago, and it’s served her well through this latest season of challenges.
The 11th annual festival, which wraps up tonight, tosses together a wild blend: more than 60 film screenings, five venues, a Saturday night gala, a new Spirit of the Port Townsend Film Festival award, a slate of other prizes, a large flock of volunteers and several dozen filmmakers and industry types trying to find their way here.
As a longtime Port Townsender and festival volunteer, Force knows her way around the three-day weekend of moviegoing.
Being the boss, though, is another tale altogether.
“There’s no learning curve involved. This is a rocket trajectory,” Force said of her job.
Yet she is a willowy bundle of enthusiasm and calm, a Voice of Reason with plenty of experience in both management and the arts — and a love for both.
Janette Gould grew up in Richmond Beach, just outside Edmonds, and went off to study theater at Washington State University. She landed a job playing Wendy in a Seattle production of “Peter Pan” in 1974.
“We got to fly,” she remembered.
Her stage career took off, and she continued working in Seattle — but eventually, she said, the actor’s life became too “fraught with peril” with its crazed pursuit of parts.
Also in the early 1970s, she met and fell in love with Robert Force, and the pair founded a mountain dulcimer music festival called the Kindred Gathering. Ever since, the festival has rotated among sites in Oregon, California and Washington, and this summer came to a farm outside Eugene, Ore.
That rotation aligns with Force’s ethic of inclusivity.
She wants as many people as possible to have the chance to go — to the Kindred Gathering and to the Port Townsend Film Festival.
To that end, she and her team of staff and volunteers this year created the Peter Simpson Free Cinema, a place where movie lovers can partake in the festival’s films at no cost.
The cinema, located just for this weekend at the American Legion at Monroe and Water streets, is named for the late artistic director of the festival.
Also free this weekend — and feeding Force’s love of spectacle — are the movies shown outdoors on Taylor Street.
Force and crew slated “American Graffiti” for Friday, “The Princess Bride” for Saturday and “Big Night” for tonight, each with surrounding trivia contests and other activities.
To make the cinematic trains run on time, however, Force and staff must marshal a multitude.
There are the movie directors from Southern California who think they can merely catch a cab from Seattle over to the Olympic Peninsula.
There’s housing to find for those guest artists — and Force can’t just book hotel and motel rooms, since they need to be available for paying film festival-goers.
It’s like herding cats in overdrive.
But then Force saw that coming.
“Let’s face it,” she said. Artists are “a difficult bunch.”
Anyone who watches Force, however, can see she’s having the time of her life. She’s made this year’s festival into another cultural celebration, bringing to Port Townsend people such as Bunky Echo-Hawk, a young Pawnee-Yakima artist and the subject of a film screening this weekend; and Fumiko Hayashida, the 98-year-old internment camp survivor in the documentary titled “The Woman Behind the Symbol.”
Running the festival — “this quirky miracle,” as she calls it — is the latest installment in Force’s own saga.
If there were a list of credits for her, it would include cofounding the Children’s Theatre Workshop of Port Townsend; abundant volunteer work in the city’s schools; working at Aldrich’s, Discovery Bay Construction and the Uptown Dental Clinic and, just before taking her current job, managing an architectural practice on Bainbridge Island.
The Uptown clinic’s Dr. Steve Scharf, though it’s been 10 years since he worked with Force, remembers how she lived up to her Voice of Reason title.
A compassionate and proactive manager, “she taught me how to deal with my coworkers. . . . She always said to say, ‘Good morning,’ to people.
“Things like that are so important,” he said. “But they don’t teach you that in dentistry school.”
At one point, a clinic staffer was suffering a personal crisis, and Force told Scharf: “I’m sending her home, and I’m making an appointment for her with a counselor.”
Force changed the culture at the clinic, Scharf said, helping it progress from “dysfunctional to actually functional.”
As director of the film festival, “she will bring the biggest possible community together,” Scharf added. “Peter Simpson did a great thing” in establishing the event, “and she’s going to build on that.”
Through the years, Force has learned how to balance the many elements of her life.
At 59, she is a mother and grandmother, with extended family on both coasts. She and Robert have three grown children: Dakotah and Sam, both born in Port Townsend, and Katie, the daughter they adopted when she was 11.
Katie was the Force family’s baby sitter — while in the midst of raising her own four siblings. At the time, the Forces were living in Boston, where Robert worked for the Rockport shoe company.
Katie stayed with her biological family when the Forces moved back to Port Townsend. But they flew her out West every summer for years, giving her time to play and to relearn how to be a carefree kid.
Force remembers not having a lot of disposable income during those years. But with some prioritization, she and Robert could always afford Katie’s plane ticket.
And when they were all together, “I felt wealthy,” Force said.
Then, nine years ago, Katie got married.
“She gave us an incredible gift,” Force said: Katie asked her and Robert to “present the gifts” — offer the bread and wine — during her wedding Mass in Boston.
Katie is part of “the family of my heart,” Force said. “She has a biological family, and we’re the rest of it.”
One more thing Force does: She marries people. Since 1970, she has been a certified Universal Life Church minister, joining 200 couples in matrimony.
“It’s an incandescent experience,” she said.
Still beaming, Force took a breath, and summarized.
“I have a big life,” she said.