March 7 – March 21, 2019
Drawing an audience of 38,000, the Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) is the biggest film event in Oregon, premiering more than 140 international shorts and feature films to Portland audiences annually. Audiences can experience a variety of parties, visiting artists, and plenty of festival adventure taking in this feast of cinematic fare.
You have one last chance to catch some of the audience favorites from PIFF 42. Check out our Encore Screenings, March 22-24 at the Whitsell Auditorium.
Get Your Pass Today! Tickets and passes!
The Audience Award Ballots are open! We need your votes to help decide this year’s winners! Every film you see make sure to vote on a scale of 1 to 5 stars through our ballot system. By the end of the festival, we will calculate the winners based your votes!
By casting your votes you will be automatically entered to win prizes through our weekly raffles throughout the festival. The earlier you begin voting the more chances you have to be selected.
Audience Award Ballots: Vote Here!
Please use the filters below to sort our film selections by country, language, section, and screening date.

3 Faces
Directed by Jafar Panahi
Long banned from making films by the ruling regime in Iran, master filmmaker Panahi has nonetheless defiantly continued to produce …

A Family Submerged
Directed by Maria Alché
Argentinian actress Maria Alché (Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl) steps behind the camera with the sensitively-pitched A Family Submerged, one …

A Family Tour
Directed by Ying Liang
Based on director Ying Liang’s own story of political exile, A Family Tour follows Chinese-born dissident filmmaker Yang Shu (Nai …

Acid Forest
Directed by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė
The Curonian Spit, situated on the Baltic Sea on the border between Lithuania and Russia, is one of the world’s …

Afghan Cycles
Directed by Sarah Menzies
Following several young Afghan women who have taken up competitive road cycling and joined the national team, Menzies’ eye-opening film …

Amateurs
Directed by Gabriela Pichler
In Pichler’s side-splitting and astute sophomore effort, the lightly fictional small town of Lafors, Sweden is potentially due for a …

An Elephant Sitting Still
Directed by Hu Bo
A student of Hungarian master Béla Tarr, Hu Bo completed this stunning debut feature at age 29 before taking his …

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky
Previously collaborating on 2006’s Manufactured Landscapes— itself a monumental film about human impact—Baichwal, Burtynsky, and de Pencier now turn their …

Asako I & II
Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Hamaguchi’s feature filmmaking career started with a bang with 2015’s incredible Happy Hour, but his latest is no sophomore slump; …

Ash is Purest White
Directed by Jia Zhangke
Jia’s 11th feature is a piercing tale of lost love, following Qiao (Zhao Tao, in one of the year’s fiercest …

Birds of Passage
Directed by Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra
Veteran director Guerra (The Wind Journeys, Embrace of the Serpent) teams up with longtime partner Gallego (herself a veteran producer) …

Black Mother
Directed by Khalik Allah
Photographer-turned-filmmaker Khalik Allah returns to Jamaica, his mother’s birthplace, to fashion a multifaceted and highly collaged audio-visual portrait of the …

Blind Spot
Directed by Tuva Novotny
Making her feature debut with this immersive single-take family drama, actress-turned-director Novotny delivers one of the year’s most emotionally gripping …

Casanova Gene
Directed by Luise Donschen
A shape-shifting exploration into human/animal sexuality and desire, Donschen’s feature debut is wide-ranging, intimate, and unafraid to ask uncomfortable questions. …

Central Airport THF
Directed by Karim Aïnouz
Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, built in 1923 but heavily renovated during the Nazi period, was one of Europe’s busiest until its …

Chained for Life
Directed by Aaron Schimberg
A conventionally beautiful actress Mabel (Jess Weixler) finds herself starring in a misguided, independent film production alongside a collection of …

Crystal Swan
Directed by Darya Zhuk
With a shock of dyed hair and a wildly colored wardrobe to match, 20-something Velya (a breakout role for relative …

Dead Pigs
Directed by Cathy Yan
Yan’s playful, compulsively entertaining debut brings several storylines together around an ecological crisis in a mid-sized Chinese city outside Shanghai. …

Diamantino
Directed by Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt
One of the year’s most out-there conceptual works, Diamantino is an eye-opening and thoroughly hilarious experience. The film tracks the …

Djon África
Directed by João Miller Guerra, Filipa Reis
Co-scripted by Pedro Pinho (The Nothing Factory, PIFF 41), this intensely colorful and alive fiction debut by documentarians Guerra and …

Dogman
Directed by Matteo Garrone
Winner of the Best Actor award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Matteo Garrone’s (Gomorrah) latest film tells the tale …

Donbass
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa
Loznitsa continues his vital explorations of the conflict raging in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region, a hotly contested area marked by …

First Night Nerves
Directed by Stanley Kwan
Hong Kong’s Stanley Kwan returns to the director’s chair after a six-year hiatus with this soapy theatre-world drama about two …

Fugue
Directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska
Director Smoczynska takes a sharp left turn in her follow up to 2015’s The Lure, abandoning the singing, murderous mermaids …

Funan
Directed by Denis Do
Denis Do’s deeply personal, exquisitely animated debut feature grapples with the forced exile—and often murder—of millions of Cambodians during the …

Hotel by the River
Directed by Hong Sang-soo
While Hong’s often mischievous films are largely an acquired taste, their charms often lie both directly on the surface and …

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians
Directed by Radu Jude
Director Jude has already delivered several well-regarded films, including Aferim! (2015) and Scarred Hearts (2016)—work remarkable for its clarity and …

In Fabric
Directed by Peter Strickland
Still stinging from her divorce, Shelia (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) seeks out a confidence boost in the form of a new dress, …

Infinite Football
Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu
One of the funniest documentaries of the year, Porumboiu’s (Police Adjective, The Treasure) deceptively simple work follows Laurențiu Ginghină, a …

Introduzione All’oscuro
Directed by Gastón Solnicki
When longtime Viennale director Hans Hurch died suddenly in the Summer of 2017, the film world lost an immense figure …

Jessica Forever
Directed by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel
Up-and-coming filmmakers Poggi and Vinel bring us a video-game-influenced, hyper-stylized blast. Led by the mysterious Jessica (Aomi Muyock), a pack …

Keep An Eye Out
Directed by Quentin Dupieux
After discovering a body outside his apartment complex one night, Louis (Grégoire Ludig) is brought into the local police station …

La Ciénaga
Directed by Lucrecia Martel
Lucrecia Martel’s feature debut heralded the arrival of a major talent on the world cinema circuit; La Ciénaga is a …

Lajka
Directed by Aurel Klimt
Aurel Klimt’s animated feature debut envisions an alternate history of the fate of Laika, the Russian dog used as a …

Long Day’s Journey into Night
Directed by Bi Gan
Bi Gan’s sophomore feature is a moody fragmented effort that shatters film noir tropes into a visually dark and spatially …

Los Reyes
Directed by Iván Osnovikoff,, Bettina Perut
In the heart of Santiago, Chile, a nondescript skateboarding park abuts a sleepy residential neighborhood—not an unusual situation in most …

Maya
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
In this gently-plucked-from-the-headlines, warmly intimate film, war reporter Gabriele (Roman Kolinka) returns to France, along with his colleague Frédéric (ever-reliable …

Meteors
Directed by Gürcan Keltek
Captured during a recent crucial juncture in the Kurdish-Turkish conflict that has raged in Southeast Turkey since 1978, Keltek’s poetic …

Miriam Lies
Directed by Natalia Cabral, Oriol Estrada
Fourteen-year-old biracial Miriam has been anonymously chatting online with Jean-Louis just ahead of her quinceañera while her mother obsesses over …

Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements
Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky
Twelve years after her award-winning documentary Hear and Now, director Irene Taylor Brodsky once more turns the camera on her …

Non-Fiction
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Assayas’ (Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria) latest is perhaps best explained by its original French title, which roughly translates …

Okko’s Inn
Directed by Kitarô Kôsaka
Former assistant to legendary Studio Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki, Kitarô Kôsaka’s latest film (and first in 12 years) is a …

One Cut of the Dead
Directed by Shin’ichirô Ueda
A small crew shooting a zombie film finds themselves under attack from actual undead creatures in Ueda’s innovative—and surprisingly affecting—zombie …

One Day
Directed by Zsófia Szilágyi
A day (and a half) in the life of a married middle-class mother of three adolescents with a husband and …

Our Bodies Our Doctors
Directed by Jan Haaken
Documentarian Jan Haaken’s sixth feature highlights a significant group of individuals in the highly politicized world of women’s reproductive health …

Our Time
Directed by Carlos Reygadas
One of contemporary world cinema’s greatest visual poets, with Our Time Carlos Reygadas turns the camera on himself in this …

Rafiki
Directed by Wanuri Kahiu
A star-crossed love story between two young women, Kena (Samantha Muatsia) and Zika (Sheila Munyiva), whose fathers are political adversaries …

Ray & Liz
Directed by Richard Billingham
Known for his unflinchingly intimate portraits of his family, fine art photographer Billingham turns in one of the year’s most …

Redemption
Directed by Yossi Madmoni, Boaz Yehonatan Yacov
Madmoni and Yacov’s deeply emotional spiritual journey highlights the necessity of family and friends, even if that means painfully coming …

Shadow
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Zhang’s return to the wuxia (martial arts epic) genre also marks an important return to form for the veteran director, …

Shorts 4: Oregon Shorts 1: Documenting the Times
Directed by Various
Sponsored by Oregon Film and Prosper Portland

Shorts 5: Oregon Shorts 2: Dreams of Escape
Directed by Various
Sponsored by Oregon Film and Prosper Portland

Sir
Directed by Rohena Gera
Shy domestic servant Ratna (Tillotama Shome), having moved to Mumbai from the countryside in search of opportunity, works for wealthy …

Still Recording
Directed by Saeed Al Batal, Ghiath Ayoub
The conflict in Syria, under the brutal Assad regime, has raged on for many years with no end in sight; …

Stupid Young Heart
Directed by Selma Vilhunen
Kiira (Rosa Honkonen) is pretty, popular, the lead on the high school dance team, and long-time crush of goofy, scrawny …

Styx
Directed by Wolfgang Fischer
A self-assured doctor (Susanne Wolff) goes on a solo yachting trip in the Atlantic and discovers the limits of her …

Suburban Birds
Directed by Qiu Sheng
Youthful land engineer Hao (Mason Lee) and his colleagues are on a job measuring mysterious ground disturbances in an eerily …

Supa Modo
Directed by Likarion Wainaina
Sometimes a little escapism is just what the doctor ordered. Equally a superhero flick, a comedy about grief, and a …

Ten Years Thailand
Directed by Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The political realities of modern day Thailand are challenged in the four chapters of this omnibus presentation, inspired by the …

The Chambermaid
Directed by Lila Avilés
Set entirely inside an opulent, one-percenter Mexico City high-rise hotel, Avilés’ stunning debut follows Eve (Gabriela Cartol), a maid working …

The Dead and the Others
Directed by João Salaviza, Renée Nader Messora
Directors Salaviza and Messora spent several years living and working with the indigenous Krahô people in Tocantins, a northern Brazil …

The Grand Bizarre
Directed by Jodie Mack
Mack’s hypnotic travelogue takes her around the world through the prism of textiles. Always extremely colorful, the film animates production …

The Head Hunter
Directed by Jordan Downey
On the edge of a dark wood, a medieval Viking bounty hunter heeds a daily signal to enter the woods …

The Headless Woman
Directed by Lucrecia Martel
Lucrecia Martel’s third feature, premiering in competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, divided critics from the start, owing to …

The Heiresses
Directed by Marcelo Martinessi
In a relationship for over 30 years, Chela (Ana Brun) and Chiquita (Margarita Irun) are settled into a comfortable domestic …

The Hidden City
Directed by Victor Moreno
A sensory journey with few parallels this year, Moreno’s (Edificio España) latest investigation into infrastructure plunges us deep underground in …

The Hole in the Ground
Directed by Lee Cronin
Hot off its premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, The Hole in the Ground announces the arrival Lee Cronin, …

The Holy Girl
Directed by Lucrecia Martel
Set in the confines of a small, modest Salta (northern Argentina) hotel, Martel’s sophomore feature—following her unforgettable debut La Ciénaga—bristles …

The Image Book
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
A new film by the legendary Jean-Luc Godard is always cause for celebration, and with The Image Book, the 88-year-old …

The Image You Missed
Directed by Donal Foreman
Billed as a “film between Donal Foreman and Arthur McCaig,” The Image You Missed is a powerful excavation of historical …

The Load
Directed by Ognjen Glavonic
Opening on a gray landscape in Bosnia are distant explosions from NATO airstrikes, setting the scene for this quietly piercing …

The Proposal
Directed by Jill Magid
Renowned New York-based artist Jill Magid rose in the art world with both contempt and praise in 2016 for her …

The River
Directed by Emir Baigazin
Five Kazakh brothers, ages five to 16, live with their parents on an extremely spare, dusty steppe in a house …

The Silence of Others
Directed by Robert Bahar, Almudena Carracedo
Under General Francisco Franco’s fascist military dictatorship in Spain, lasting from 1939 until his death in 1975, the Spanish people …

The Trial
Directed by Maria Ramos
The Brazilian right’s 2016 impeachment (or “soft coup”) of President Dilma Rousseff of the democratic-socialist Workers’ Party (PT) remains one …

The Waldheim Waltz
Directed by Ruth Beckermann
Kurt Waldheim, one of Austria’s most notorious and well-known diplomats, was UN Secretary General from 1972 to 1981, eventually running …

The Wild Pear Tree
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Continuing in the long-take, deeply intimate and conversational vein of much of his previous work, Ceylan’s latest is one of …

The Wolf House
Directed by Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León
Strongly resembling a contemporary version of the early works of Jan Švankmajer, Cociña and León’s feature debut is a harrowing …

Theatre of War
Directed by Lola Arias
Today, the Falklands War of 1982 lives on in the collective memories of the Argentinian and British soldiers who fought …

Too Late to Die Young
Directed by Dominga Sotomayor
In this angular, sun-faded coming-of-age drama, Sotomayor excavates a certain feeling of youth in a teenage girl on the verge …

Transit
Directed by Christian Petzold
Adapted from Anna Seghers’ 1944 masterpiece novel, with Transit Petzold transports the story of those fleeing the Nazis during WWII …

Tumbbad
Directed by Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi, Adesh Prasad
A curse visited upon a family member leads a young boy to discover a bottomless treasure tied to Hastar, a …

Valley of Shadows
Directed by Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen
Six-year-old Aslak (Adam Ekeli) lives in a remote Norwegian village where someone or something has been slaughtering sheep. Much to …

Virus Tropical
Directed by Santiago Caicedo, Paola Gaviria
Based on beloved Colombian-Ecuadorian artist Power Paola’s graphic novel of the same name, Virus Tropical is a brilliantly line-drawn, gorgeous …

What Is Democracy?
Directed by Astra Taylor
The question posed by the title of Astra Taylor’s (Examined Life, Zizek!) latest documentary is undoubtedly a huge one with …

Winter Flies
Directed by Olmo Omerzu
The Slovenian-born Omerzu’s third feature is a charming and deceptively simple comic road movie following two teenage boys as they …

Woman at War
Directed by Benedikt Erlingsson
In Erlingsson’s confident follow up to his 2013 debut Of Horses and Men (PIFF 37), Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir (Metalhead) stars as …

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin
Directed by Arwen Curry
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) is one of America’s finest writers. Early in her career, she sought to break the …

Young Solitude
Directed by Claire Simon
Documentary filmmaker Claire Simon returns for a third time to the subject of French school life in her latest feature …

Your Face
Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang
Master director Tsai’s latest experiment with heavily stripped down cinema is no less thrilling and enveloping than his earlier quasi-neorealist …

Zama
Directed by Lucrecia Martel
Appearing on myriad best-of-2018 lists and nearly ten years in the making, Martel’s fourth feature is an adaptation of Antonio …