Written by Jonah Azurin
Hosting more than 100 films available to stream from your home and 12 drive-in screenings, BendFilm has a robust schedule for their 17th annual festival program.
BendFilm Festival is an annual independent festival that runs every October in Bend, Oregon, supporting filmmakers and the Central Oregon community. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s festival will continue virtually with screenings, filmmaker discussions, mentor sessions, and happy hours. In addition to their streaming events, BendFilm will also highlight 12 different films for their drive-in experience, adding to their unique festival programming. “Drive-in screenings are a perfect addition to this year’s Festival and we are thrilled to present a wide variety of crowd-pleasers, documentaries, comedies and late-night favorites to watch with your friends out under the stars. The line up as a whole showcases a diverse set of stories that will spark conversation and provide audiences a much needed opportunity to connect, explore and escape,” says Erik Jambor, BendFilm Head of Festival Programming.
Included in their screenings are 26 feature films that were selected to view in competition. In an effort to continue their filmmaker-focused support, BendFilm provides opportunities for filmmakers in the arts community with programs like the BIPOC Womxn Production Grant, Future Filmmakers, Artists-In-Residence, and more! From novices to pioneers, BendFilm provides a platform for independent films and filmmakers to grow and cultivate new and thought-provoking ideas.
Each film presented at BendFilm sparks crucial and necessary conversations for their audience members. Whether it’s a documentary, narrative, or short film, each provides an opportunity for viewers to question and explore untold stories. This year’s festival brings diverse voices to the Bend community from any mobile or streaming device. Be sure to check out the screening details for each film to see if there are any geo-blocking restrictions.
Below is a glimpse of a few films that will screen from Oct. 8-25, 2020. Visit bendfilm.org or connect with BendFilm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more information about tickets/passes and the Festival schedule.
Warrior Women (2020)
Directors: Christina D. King, Elizabeth A. Castle
64 minutes, Documentary
Synopsis: In the 1970s, with the swagger of unapologetic Indianness, organizers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought for Native liberation and survival as a community of extended families. Warrior Women is the story of Madonna Thunder Hawk, one such AIM leader who shaped a kindred group of activists’ children – including her daughter Marcy – into the “We Will Remember” Survival School as a Native alternative to government-run education. Together, Madonna and Marcy fought for Native rights in an environment that made them more comrades than mother-daughter. Today, with Marcy now a mother herself, both are still at the forefront of Native issues, fighting against the environmental devastation of the Dakota Access Pipeline and for Indigenous cultural values. Through a circular Indigenous style of storytelling, this film explores what it means to navigate a movement and motherhood and how activist legacies are passed down and transformed from generation to generation in the context of colonizing government that meets Native resistance with violence.
Still from the film The Falconer.
The Falconer (2020)
Director: Annie Kaempfer
75 minutes, Documentary
Synopsis: Rodney Stotts started his young life running the mean streets of Washington, D.C. Today, he’s a Master Falconer building a sanctuary for predatory birds in an old dairy barn in rural Maryland. Introduced to raptors through a conservation program that worked to clean up the Chesapeake Bay’s polluted estuaries in the 1990s, Stotts went all in, learning how to rescue and train these majestic birds, rescuing himself in the process. Now he uses the practice of falconry to show others a new path. Through cinema vérité style, director and cinematographer Annie Kaempfer gives Stotts the space to share his journey—at turns harrowing and uplifting—from friends who didn’t make it, to the joy that comes from forming lasting bonds with nature. What The Falconer quietly reveals is that it took much more than these birds, of course. It took family, faith, and Stotts’ own disciplined focus, sometimes a source of loneliness but no less the source of his strength.
The Younger and the Last of the Vengeants (2020)
Director: Eliab Rice
102 minutes, Narrative
Synopsis: A group of boys find a teleportation cube and accidentally release an inter-dimensional vampire from his prison. Using what they can, the wizard-aspiring friends must keep the cube from the vampire and save their little farmer’s town from impending doom. This film was written and directed by Eliab Rice, who is a Central Oregon Community College student and Prineville resident. He began filming at the age of 18 with his friends in Prineville and surrounding Central Oregon locations.
*This film is also screening at the BendFilm Festival Drive-In on Saturday 10/17 at 6:30 pm.
Coming Clean (2020)
Director: Ondi Timoner
101 minutes, Documentary
Synopsis: From award-winning director Ondi Timoner comes Coming Clean, a feature documentary examining addiction through the eyes of recovering addicts and political leaders, as they come together to bring the profiteers to justice and rebuild in the wake of the deadliest drug epidemic in our history. Two-Time Sundance Award Winning Director Ondi Timoner’s Coming Clean is selected as the Closing Night Film.
* LIVE Q&A w/ director Ondi Timoner at 2 pm PST on Saturday 10/24.
Warrior Women poster