February 9 – February 27, 2017
Welcome to the Northwest Film Center’s 40th Portland International Film Festival. This program is arranged by section with the films in each section ordered chronologically by screening date with soonest on top. Showtimes and theater locations are listed on each film’s page. We hope the sections outlined below help you navigate your PIFF experience.
Please use the filtering tools below to sort by country, language or section.

A Dark Song
Directed by Liam Gavin
A grieving mother (Catherine Walker) hires a man (Steve Oram) well-versed in the occult to help bring her son back …

A Quiet Passion
Directed by Terence Davies
A Quiet Passion is the life story of the celebrated American poet Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon), from her youth as …

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Directed by Steve James
The incredible saga of the Chinese immigrant Sung family, owners of Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, New York, elicits both …

After Love
Directed by Joachim Lafosse
Marie and Boris, married for 15 years, are going through the emotional turmoil of divorce in front of their twin …

After the Storm
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda
In Kore-eda’s latest domestic drama, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a novelist who struck it big with his first tome, struggles to …

Afterimage
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
The final film of illustrious Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (Kanal, Man of Iron), who died last year, charts the passionate …

Alive & Kicking
Directed by Susan Glatzer
Some dance styles and crazes endure. For many who love music and dance, the lindy hop, jitterbug, shag, and other …

All the Cities of the North
Directed by Dane Komljen
Built around origin myths and mysteries from a not-so-distant past, Komljen’s debut is set in an abandoned, hotel complex near …

All These Sleepless Nights
Directed by Michał Marczak
“Many of us know the freedom of our twenties—unfettered by responsibilities or mortality, inventing ourselves in the rush of the …

Aloys
Directed by Tobias Nölle
Aloys, a reclusive private investigator, experiences life from a safe distance. After a night of heavy drinking, he wakes up …

Apprentice
Directed by Junfeng Boo
Aiman, an ambitious 28-year-old correctional officer, is transferred to the Singapore territory’s top prison. He strikes up a friendship with …

Austerlitz
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa
Filmed on the sites of former Nazi concentration camps, Loznitsa’s (Maidan, In the Fog) Austerlitz is a stark observation of …

Barakah Meets Barakah
Directed by Mahmoud Sabbagh
In Saudi Arabia, physical contact and meeting the opposite sex in public without a chaperone are prohibited, which makes this …

Behemoth
Directed by Zhao Liang
You can’t un-see political documentarian Liang’s cinematic allegory, which draws inspiration from The Divine Comedy in fashioning a simultaneously intoxicating …

Burden
Directed by Timothy Marrinan, Richard Dewey
One the most intriguing, boundary-pushing artists of his generation, Chris Burden guaranteed his place in art history in 1971 with …

Buzz One Four
Directed by Matt McCormick
At the height of the Cold War, the US Air Force was flying B-52 bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons on …

Daguerrotype
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Japanese horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s continues his winning stream with this patient and elegantly rendered ghost story set in modern-day …

Dead Slow Ahead
Directed by Mauro Herce
Despite new technology, the transport of physical goods continues to rely on age-old means. Herce’s film is a hypnotic and …

Death in Sarajevo
Directed by Danis Tanović
Tanović’s deft and dizzying thriller satirically illuminates the conflicts that have torn the Balkans apart for a century. On the …

El Acompañante
Directed by Pavel Giroud
Cuba 1988. The Castro regime has established “Los Cocos,” a sanatorium in Havana’s suburbs where HIV patients are confined under …

Eldorado XXI
Directed by Salomé Lamas
Set at 18,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes and focused on a community of exploited miners in the small village …

Fire at Sea
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi
The island of Lampedusa, between Sicily and Tunisia, is a major destination point for refugees fleeing Africa and the Middle …

Forever Pure
Directed by Maya Zinshstein
Beitar Jerusalem, an intensely nationalist soccer team in the Israeli Premier League, inspires as much extreme fandom as it does …

Frantz
Directed by François Ozon
A year after his death in 1918, Anna is mourning her fiancé Frantz, a German soldier killed in the war. …

Glory
Directed by Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
When a reclusive railway worker finds bags of cash on the tracks, he does the right thing and calls the …

Graduation
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this keenly observed depiction …

Half Ticket
Directed by Samit Kakkad
Half Ticket is a story of the “Have Nots” struggling to survive in a world of “Haves.” Fascinated by the …

Hedi
Directed by Mohamed Ben Attia
Resigned to his fate, Hedi is stuck selling cars, a job he hates, and engaged to a woman he barely …

Heidi
Directed by Alain Gsponer
Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s novels return to the screen for a new generation. Our heroine Heidi is sent to live …

I Am Not Madame Bovary
Directed by Feng Xiaogang
Superstar actress Fan Bingbing stars in this searing and fearless satirical comic drama about a cafe owner’s epic battle with …

I Am Not Your Negro
Directed by Raoul Peck
Based on the text of Remember This House, James Baldwin’s final, unfinished novel, Peck’s urgent essay film is a reflection …

Indivisible
Directed by Edoardo De Angelis
Indivisible is a beguiling poetic fairy tale that plays with the idea that we carry our loved ones with us …

It’s Only the End of the World
Directed by Xavier Dolan
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and this year’s Canadian Oscar submission, Dolan’s visually and emotionally …

Kati Kati
Directed by Mbithi Masya
Kaleche, a young woman with no memory of her life or death, wanders into the otherworldly village of Kati Kati, …

Kedi
Directed by Ceyda Torun
Cats (“kedi”) have an exalted status in Turkish culture, and caring for them is both a social and religious obligation, …

Kékszakállú
Directed by Gastón Solnicki
Loosely based on Béla Bartók’s 1918 opera “Bluebeard’s Castle” and largely constructed out of improvised scenes featuring non-actors, Solnicki’s film …

Kills on Wheels
Directed by Attila Till
In this exuberant coming-of-age crime comedy, two aspiring comic book artists with disabilities become embroiled in the schemes of an …

Land of Mine
Directed by Martin Zandvliet
Land of Mine surfaces a little-known story that took place in 1945 as the five-year Nazi occupation of the country …

Life After Life
Directed by Zhang Hanyi
A young boy becomes possessed by his late mother, whose spirit has wandered Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. …

Life+1Day
Directed by Saeed Roustayi
Somayeh is at a loss. Her only desire is to leave her family and take her life into her own …

Like Crazy
Directed by Paolo Virzì
Paolo Virzì’s (Human Capital) bittersweet comedy recounts a Thelma & Louise-like adventure between two women on the run in Tuscany. …

Lost in Paris
Directed by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon
Fiona, a hapless Canadian librarian, visits Paris for the first time after receiving a letter of distress from her 88-year-old …

Louise by the Shore
Directed by Jean-François Laguionie
Louise, an old woman, sits on the beach at a French resort town enjoying the last days of summer and …

Ma’Rosa
Directed by Brillante Mendoza
In the slums of Manila, you pay the police, or you go to jail, if not your grave. Based on …

Maliglutit
Directed by Zacharias Kunuk
Kunuk’s (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) poignant film, shot in the spectacular Arctic, is set in 1913 and inspired by John …

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
Directed by Dash Shaw
“The title tells the tale in this inventive, beautiful, and more than a little bizarre animated feature debut from acclaimed …

My Life as a Zucchini
Directed by Claude Barras
Barras’s funny and brightly colored stop-motion film tells the story of nine-year-old Icare, known to his friends as Courgette (Zucchini). …

Nagasaki: Memories of My Son
Directed by Yôji Yamada
Nagasaki: Memories of My Son is a heartbreakingly beautiful study of war, love, and family. On August 9, 1948, Nobuko, …

Nakom
Directed by T.W. Pittman, Kelly Daniela Norris
When his father suddenly dies, Iddrisu, a promising medical student, leaves the university in the Ghanaian capital of Accra to …

Nocturama
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Bonnello’s (Saint Laurent) latest provocation is a film in two distinct and gripping parts: first, a procedural in which we …

Obit
Directed by Vanessa Gould
Who makes it on the obituary page of the paper of record? Both a peek into the inner workings of …

Old Stone
Directed by Johnny Ma
Chinese taxi driver Lao Shi is thrown into a Kafkaesque nightmare where no charitable act goes unpunished. When a drunken …

One Week and a Day
Directed by Asaph Polonsky
Eyal and Vicky spend a week sitting shiva after the death of their 25-year-old son. While Vicky returns to teaching, …

Panamerican Machinery
Directed by Joaquín Del Paso
Panamerican Machinery may be the happiest place in the world to work. Workers and management get along like one tight-knit …

Paradise
Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky
In 1942, while working as a fashion editor for Paris Vogue, Russian émigré Olga becomes involved with the French Resistance …

Parting
Directed by Navid Mahmoudi
Navid Mahmoudi’s debut feature is a migration story that has not only war, but love at its core. Fereshteh and …

Personal Shopper
Directed by Olivier Assayas
“Kristen Stewart is the medium, in more ways than one, for this sophisticated genre exploration from director Assayas (Clouds of …

Raising Bertie
Directed by Margaret Byrne
What happens in the lives of young people caught in the complex interplay of generational poverty, educational inequity, and race? …

Rara
Directed by Pepa San Martín
Twelve-year-old Sara has a warm and supportive home with her sister, mother, and her mother’s partner, and is taking her …

Revengeance
Directed by Bill Plympton, Jim Lujan
Former Portlander Bill Plympton comes home for this special pre-release screening of his eighth feature, which tells the story of …

SHORT CUTS 5: Made in Oregon
Directed by Various
Sponsored by Oregon Film, World Foods Portland, and OMPA

SHORT CUTS 6: Animated Worlds
Directed by Various
LAIKA’s Mark Shapiro attends animation festivals from Annecy to Zagreb and has hand-picked this collection of diverse works that showcase …

Sieranevada
Directed by Cristi Puiu
In a labyrinthine Bucharest apartment, a cantankerous extended family has gathered 40 days after its patriarch’s death for a memorial …

Soul on a String
Directed by Zhang Yang
After discovering a sacred stone in the mouth of a deer, Taibei, a Tibetan cowboy, embarks on a mission: to …

Starless Dreams
Directed by Mehrdad Oskouei
Starless Dreams plunges us into the lives of teenage girls at a juvenile detention center on the of Tehran. The …

Staying Vertical
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
Léo, a filmmaker in search of a project, is scouting in the south of France when he is seduced by …

Suntan
Directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos
Forty-something doctor Kostis arrives for his new posting on the island of Antiparos during the quiet winter months, which suits …

Ten Years
Directed by Ng Ka-Leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai, Fei-Pang Wong, Kwok Zune
Despite being branded a “virus of the mind” by China’s state organ Global Times, Ten Years won Best Film at …

The Age of Shadows
Directed by Jee-Woon Kim
A cat-and-mouse game unfolds between a group of resistance fighters trying to bring in explosives from Shanghai to destroy key …

The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Directed by André Øvredal
A father (Brian Cox) and son (Emile Hirsch) coroner team delve into the mystery of a body discovered at a …

The Commune
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
When Eric’s father dies and the grand family house in Copenhagen must be sold, he and his wife Ann, who …

The Death of Louis XIV
Directed by Albert Serra
Versailles, August 1715. The Sun King (Jean-Pierre Léaud) feels pain in his leg. Fever erupts, marking the beginning of the …

The Distinguished Citizen
Directed by Gastón Duprat, Mariano Cohn
Daniel (Oscar Martinez), a Nobel Prize-winning author, accepts an invitation to visit his hometown in Argentina for the first time …

The Dreamed Ones
Directed by Ruth Beckermann
In 1948, Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor and esteemed post-war poet, met Ingeborg Bachmann, a writer whose father was …

The Dreamed Path
Directed by Angela Schanelec
Influenced by the ethos of legendary French director Robert Bresson, The Dreamed Path is a riddle of a film and …

The Eyes of My Mother
Directed by Nicolas Pesce
A young girl named Francisca witnesses a terrible act of violence perpetrated by a stranger upon her mother. Years later, …

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
Directed by Juho Kuosmanen
Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and this year’s Finnish Oscar submission, Kuosmanen’s debut …

The Human Surge
Directed by Eduardo Williams
Work and leisure—particularly in the “developing” world—has inexorably shifted to a quasi-industrial, quasi-service hellscape where everything is commodified and interpersonal …

The Invisible Guest
Directed by Oriol Paulo
As a suspect is prepped for court testimony, the story of the crime, a murder in a hotel room where …

The King’s Choice
Directed by Erik Poppe
The King’s Choice looks at a seminal moment in modern Norwegian history: the days in 1940 when King Haakon faced …

The Land of the Enlightened
Directed by Pieter-Jan De Pue
Shot over seven years, De Pue’s debut, a hybrid of documentary and fiction, paints a whimsical yet haunting look at …

The Long Excuse
Directed by Miwa Nishikawa
Celebrated novelist Tsumura is married to Natsuko, but their passion for each other has long disappeared. When she dies in …

The Olive Tree
Directed by Icíar Bollaín
This engaging, warmhearted fable encapsulates the wider story of modern Spain within a very personal narrative. Alma’s family has deep …

The Ornithologist
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues
Winner of the Best Director award at the Locarno Film Festival, Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist follows a man’s journey on a …

The Sense of an Ending
Directed by Ritesh Batra
Based on British author Julian Barnes’s Booker-prize winning novel about memory, jealousy, aging, and self-delusion, this film follows Tony (Jim …

The Son of Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green
Wry visual humor, playful religious subtext, and a note of farce inform a coming of age story that takes aim …

The Stopover
Directed by Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Aurore and Marine are given three days of “decompression leave” with their unit, among tourists, at a five-star resort in …

The Student
Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov
This scathing, pitch-black satire, set in the coastal city of Kaliningrad, follows Veniamin, a high school student who, as a …

The Teacher
Directed by Jan Hrebejk
In this intelligent and funny meditation on totalitarianism, the arrival of a new teacher at a Bratislava school in 1983 …

The Women’s Balcony
Directed by Emil Ben Shimon
Emil Ben Shimon’s feature debut is a comical feminist narrative about finding the right path to happiness and the subjectivity …

The World of Us
Directed by Ga-Eun Yoon
At an age when perhaps friends mean more than moms, 10-year-old Sun is an outcast at school. During summer vacation, …

Tonio
Directed by Paula van der Oest
Based on the best-selling autobiographical “requiem novel” by one of the country’s most renowned writers, A.F.Th. van der Heijden, this …

Train Driver’s Diary
Directed by Milos Radovic
Statistics show that during their professional career, most train drivers will inadvertently kill 20 to 30 people. Their victims are …

Truman
Directed by Cesc Gay
Goya Winner for Best Film, Director, Actor, and Screenplay, Truman is a warm tale of friendship in the face of …

We Are the Flesh
Directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter
The most transgressive film in this year’s program, Minter’s trance-inducing debut feature concerns a brother and sister drawn into an …

Window Horses
Directed by Ann Marie Fleming
Vancouver animator Ann Marie Fleming’s first animated feature is an extraordinary tale of art, history, and family. Rosie (Sandra Oh), …

Without Name
Directed by Lorcan Finnegan
Eric, a surveyor by trade, is hired by a corporate developer to assess a large plot of ancient forest. Superstitious …

Yourself and Yours
Directed by Hong Sang-soo
“Hong Sangsoo boldly and wittily explores the painful caprices of modern romance. Painter Youngsoo hears that his girlfriend, Minjung, has …