Last week, the 6th annual Cinema Pacific Film Festival entertained film enthusiasts and cinema fanatics here in Eugene. HCO sat down with Arianna Trames, Cinema Pacific’s Production Coordinator, to learn more about the festival and her interest in the film industry.
HCO: Tell our readers a little bit about the Cinema Pacific Film Festival.
AT: I could not be more proud of the outcome of our 6th annual Cinema Pacific Film Festival. Premiering every spring, CPFF features films from Pacific bordering countries and this year our focus was on the Philippines, Chinese Wuxia Martial Arts classics, among local filmmakers from the state of Oregon. But that’s not all that we offer. Every year, and this year especially, our most popular events – The Adrenaline Film Project and The Fringe Festival – highlight just how creative the film community is in the Pacific Northwest.
The coup de grâce of the week (in my opinion) was The Fringe Festival, the biggest event we’ve pulled off since our start six years ago. An art carnival of sorts, The Fringe Fest is a celebration of unique expressions in remixed, performance and installation art. Every year CPFF has invited media lovers and technologists to take a five minute clip from a film in our program, this year The Touch of Zen (1971) and remix into literally any visual installation they can think of. The only rule: there are no rules. Oh, and have fun.
HCO: What do you enjoy most about the festival?
AT: Whether it be meeting with filmmakers or scheduling a last minute screening or hand picking popcorn off a theater floor, my job is always keeping me on my toes and I absolutely love that. For the premier of our festival, I was either sprinting between neighboring venues as an after party and film screenings simultaneously in different locations or meeting for four hours on a Sunday to coordinate reserved seating for a 500 seat theater. Being a production coordinator means I am able to work with a lot of different people in new situations and I find that that aspect of connectivity is something that really attracts me to the Film Festival Circuit.
HCO: How did you initially get involved in film? How did your passion for film develop?
AT: I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I fell hard in love with film. Sometimes I like to believe it’s somewhere in my roots. My family moved north to Portland from Los Angeles when I was still a kid and I basically thought my life was over until I realized how perfect of a city Portland is. Like a lot of Millennials, I grew up with a television as a babysitter and I always had a “thing” for the movies. (My favorite game on long road trips when I was a kid was to force my family to dictate famous lines until I guessed what movie they were from. They loved that.) Things didn’t click for me though until I had my first existential crisis in college (if you haven’t had one yet, you’re doing it wrong). I decided to toss my plans for a journalism degree out the window, refocus, relax and just take a film history course. Best decision I have ever made. One day my professor screened Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and admittedly when she pressed play I was ready to snooze for the next 90 minutes. I mean it was a silent film from 1929 and I was hungover. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Here was a film from 84 years ago, that didn’t have words, that was making me feel more inspired to look at the society around me than any Ted talk could ever do. I wanted to make something that did that to people.
HCO: What inspires you most about the film industry?
AT: I think that film is a revolutionary and cathartic medium and what I adore about it is the possibility of synchronicity. For me, its a field where I can incorporate all my passions, like my love of random history trivia facts, cinematography, emotions and social change. Recently I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a political science class I took where we discussed the influence of film on the Russian Revolution in the early 20th century (Man, that sounds dry when I put it that way). But when a medium can mobilize a largely illiterate population living in a country the size of three continents, one has to wonder how movies could have the same power to spark new movements of thought surrounding issues like gender equality in the 21st century. Not to bore you with statistics, but as recently as 2012 only 18% of directors, writers, cinematographers, editors and executive producers in ‘Hollywood’ were women. That seems like an exceedingly low number for an industry that thrives on representing the female body. Frankly, it pisses me off. I do have inspirational role models in film like Pamela Romanowsky, Lena Dunham, Tiny Fey and Sofia Coppola but there needs to be more female representation behind the camera influencing the messages we consume all day, every day in our media. I feel a certain fire under my figurative arse to increase that number personally.
HCO: What advice do you have to Oregon students who are passionate about pursuing the film industry?
AT: I find that there is a notion in film programs outside of California that in order to be a successful one has to get a film degree from NYU or USC and to that I respectfully say; No. The Pacific Northwest is teeming with creative and talented designers and filmmakers who have the ability to create a reckoning force to their neighbors down south in Hollywood. Those of us from Oregon know how lucky we are to be living in such a naturally beautiful state and I believe that the geography here is fated to be cinematic; go out and capture it. If in five years just five filmmakers came out of the state of Oregon, the state will be placed on the map as a cinematic force. My advice? Stay [in Oregon]. Be different. Don’t follow the advice of everyone telling you “how to make it in Hollywood.” Appreciate the uniqueness of Oregon and use it as an edge.
Photographs submitted by Arianna Trames