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Pacific Film Fest

Cyrus

The UO’s new film festival, Cinema Pacific, is getting off on the right foot. The five-day event, which highlights films made in countries around the Pacific, seeks in its first year to highlight West Coast and Korean filmmakers. On the U.S. side, Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton will be in town to present her 2009 film Humpday, about two friends who decide to make a porno together, and her upcoming MTVU series $5 Cover Seattle. L.A. directors Mark and Jay Duplass will screen Cyrus, a comedy starring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill. Highlights from the Northwest Film and Video Festival, work by experimental filmmaker and UO alum Jay Rosenblatt, and Chambers Productions’ boxing film Chamaco are also featured.

The focus on Korean cinema includes a retrospective of the work of director Bong Joon-ho, whose smart monster movie The Host (2007) was exceptionally well-received. Bong’s most recent film, Mother, premieres as part of the festival, then begins a Bijou run. Cinema Pacific also includes the Adrenaline Film Project, in which teams of filmmakers are assigned a genre, a line of dialogue and a prop, then given 72 hours to make a film. DIVA hosts the Cinema Pacific Fringe Festival, “an exercise in video creativity” in which UO students will create short collage films incorporating images and sounds from Kim Ki-young’s film The Housemaid.

Cinema Pacific begins Wednesday, May 5, as festival director Richard Herskowitz presents a screening of two video works by and about Nam June Paik at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. We’ll have previews of some of the films screening at the festival in our May 6 issue; reviews of many more of the films will appear at blogs.eugeneweekly.com as the weekend progresses.

Cinema Pacific takes place May 5-9 at various locations on campus and around town. Times and ticket prices vary; see cinemapacific.uoregon.edu for details.
— Molly Templeton