There’s a persistent myth that movie festivals are for insiders. This idea is for people who already know what a Dardenne brothers tracking shot looks like and can make that face when someone says “mumblecore.” You know the face. It communicates I know what that is and I have feelings about it. This myth is very convenient for people who don’t want to go to movie festivals, and honestly we get it. But I think it’s wrong. And right now is probably the worst possible time to let it go unchallenged.
Movie festivals are one of the few places left where a culture encounters itself. Not the version of itself that an algorithm has decided you want to see after studying your viewing habits for twelve years. The real version. The messier one. The one that’s occasionally subtitled and sometimes made by someone whose life looks nothing like yours and who had something they needed to say badly enough to figure out how to say it on a movie. The slight discomfort of watching something that wasn’t made for you? Not a bug. Entirely the point. The algorithm will never give you this. The algorithm wants you comfortable.
We do not.
Think about what Cannes was doing in 1968, or what Sundance meant in the early 90s. Those weren’t just movie events. They were moments when a culture looked at itself and decided to renegotiate what stories it was willing to tell. Easy Rider didn’t come out of nowhere. Neither did sex, lies, and videotape. Both showed up at festivals when something was shifting, and the festival was the room where people first felt it.
We are, by most accounts, in another one of those moments. Whether we’re paying attention to it or watching something the algorithm picked for us is genuinely an open question. (Algorithms select some excellent content. Probably not sex, lies, and videotape, but still.)
When a curator puts a festival program together, they’re making an argument about what the moment requires. Not what’s popular and not what’s going to sell, but what people actually need to watch right now. The best programming has always felt like a diagnosis. Here is what we’re afraid of. Here is something you didn’t know you needed and now will think about for the next decade. (We apologize in advance for this last category. It cannot be avoided.)
Regional festivals, including the ones in places like Seattle, Portland, and eventually Astoria, do something different from the big international showcases. They’re not hunting for the next awards contender. They’re doing something harder: building a shared vocabulary for a specific community in a specific place. Less red carpet, more actual carpet. The community-theater kind.
The Pacific Northwest has a creative temperament that doesn’t always register on the coasts. There’s a real comfort with strangeness here. A willingness to sit with ambiguity. A relationship with landscape that never quite reduces to a “nice backdrop.” Movies that come out of this region tend to be quieter than the industry expects and more durable for it.
Washington’s upgraded movie incentive has started producing real results. Train Dreams, the Denis Johnson adaptation with William H. Macy, was originally being developed for production in Europe… because of course it was. Then someone visited Washington and had the genuinely radical idea to movie a story set in Washington in Washington. It landed on Netflix in late 2025 to strong reviews. Next we’ll suggest filming movies about Oregon in Oregon.
Here’s what we actually believe: a well-programmed small festival is not a consolation prize. It’s a different kind of institution. It gets to ask a simpler and more interesting question than the big events can afford to ask. What does this community need to see right now?
That question is worth taking seriously. Movies that make people feel less alone. Movies that ask hard things without faking an easy answer. Those movies need a room. They need people willing to be in it. They need the kind of conversation that only happens when you’re all watching the same thing at the same time. (Watching it later alone on your phone is fine. We’ve all done it. But it is genuinely not the same.)
That’s what we’re building here… a big tent. Join us!
Astoria Picture Show is currently in development. Our inaugural festival is in planning. If you make films, love films, or have simply arrived at the point in life where you’d like to be around people who care about something — get in touch.
