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Everything grows back bigger and better in the spring, and the Portland EcoFilm Festival is no exception.
PEFF screens movies emphasizing how film intersects with global ecology and Indigenous perspectives from around the world. It began in 2013 as a signature program of the Hollywood Theatre, but also shows on select nights at Cinema 21 across the Willamette River for the first time in its history. Festival organizer Rozzell Medina, who succeeded founder Dawn Smallman in 2022, tells WW via Zoom that PEFF’s continued efforts to expand Indigenous stories in its lineup are crucial to the festival’s mission.
“At its root, ecology means the knowledge or story of home,” he says. “A lot of that knowledge of home and how to belong in the world and to realize that the earth and people belong to each other is coming from those perspectives.”
With this holistic lens, PEFF’s selection of ecological films departs from typically drab academic cinema. Connecting nature to humanity from all corners of the globe, PEFF reflects multicultural values found in its home, the Portland community. While fictional movies are mostly wrapped up through the festival’s June runtime, PEFF’s remaining short films and documentaries—broken up into themed days with several short movies for the price of one—find many creative ways to tell the stories of animal conservationists, environmental activists, and everyday Indigenous communities.
Environmental Justice May Day
PEFF celebrates May Day with an environmental justice double feature. The main feature and winner of this year’s EcoHero Award, Our Movement Starts Here (dirs. John Rash, Melanie Dang Ho; 2024), rehashes a Southern community’s plight against a toxic landfill in North Carolina. Following this documentary is a brief program on prankster activism, showing the short film Adidas Owns the Reality (dirs. Kiel Orion Troisi, Igor Vamos; 2024) with a community panel featuring Rash, Troisi and OMSH subjects Dollie Burwell and Cameron Ogelsby. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Thursday, May 1. $12.
Oikos/Homecoming
Staying true to the broader ecological theme of belonging and home, Oikos/Homecoming premieres five new documentaries exploring how to honor and pass down generational understandings of the earth’s ecosystems. Welcome Home (dir. Alan Lacy, 2025) focuses on Colorado’s voter-backed initiative from 2020 that successfully reintroduced imperiled gray wolves to the state’s wilderness areas. Director-producer Lacy created Welcome Home supporting the Endangered Species Coalition and its mission to stop human-caused extinctions of threatened and endangered species. It’s also this year’s recipient of the festival’s Best Conservation Film Award. Lacy will join directors of the night’s other four films for a community panel discussion. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Friday, May 2. $12.
Queer Ecology
PEFF’s debut screening at Cinema 21 hosts an encore presentation of three documentaries, all made by queer filmmakers examining ecological issues intersecting queerness, Indigeneity, disability, and other aspects of personal identity. Animal Pride (dir. Rio Mitchell, 2024) sees queer naturalist Connel Bradwell guide a 49-minute journey that challenges heteronormative assumptions about the broader animal kingdom. Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave., 503-223-4515, cinema21.com. 7 pm Tuesday, May 6. $11.
2025 Festival Award Winners
The award-winning films Ways to Traverse a Territory (dir. Gabriela Dominguez Ruvalcaba, 2024) and Percebes (dirs. Alexandra Ramires, Laura Gonçalves; 2024) earned encore screenings on May 27. As both the winner of PEFF’s Best Feature Film Award and an official selection of this year’s Indigenous Voices series, Ways to Traverse a Territory engages audiences with the director’s signature poetic narrative style, following the everyday lives of Indigenous Tsotsil women tending to sheep while contemplating their relationships to each other, the animals and their ancestral highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The film leads directly into the international short Percebes, which won PEFF’s Best Short Film Award this year for its creative rendering of the symbiotic relationship between a unique species of goose barnacle and the Native peoples of Portugal’s Algarve region. Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave., 503-223-4515, cinema21.com. 7 pm Tuesday, May 27. $11.
We & The Water
Humanity’s relationship with water is a perennial theme because, paraphrasing Medina, water is pretty important and we need it to live. This year, moviegoers will get a rare glimpse into the ongoing work protecting the Willamette River and Ross Island Lagoon from the harmful effects of climate change and the industrial activities that have long plagued these nearby waterways with How We Are Saving a River (dir. David Alexander Baker, 2024). The short premieres alongside six other brief documentaries, one of which spotlights another Pacific Northwest water conservation project. Líť‘sit yiká· xá·bil-ts: Quillayute River Restoration (dir. Jennifer Moslemi, 2024) explores conservation efforts in Washington state by the Quileute tribe to preserve their food and culture. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Thursday, June 19. $12.
Bring Them Home and The Calvary
PEFF closes with two thought-provoking films involving animals’ significance and emblematic existence amid human conflict and displacement in colonized lands. Academy Award nominee Lily Gladstone produced and narrated the documentary Bring Them Home/Aiskótáhkapiyaaya (dirs. Ivan MacDonald, Ivy MacDonald, Daniel Glick; 2024), which follows a determined effort from a group of Blackfoot people to reinstate wild buffalo in their ancestral lands. The Calvary (dir. Alina Orlov, 2024) depicts the lives of horses and their conditioning by Israeli police to suppress political dissent. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 3:30 pm Saturday, June 21. $9.