20th Tacoma Film Festival Celebrates Best of Indie PNW
The Grand Cinema / The Evergreen Echo
The Grand Cinema is gearing up to host the 20th annual Tacoma Film Festival, which will run October 22-25. This year’s iteration, which celebrates independent filmmaking from the Pacific Northwest and beyond, includes a selection of feature films, a festival centerpiece on the art of music video, and a variety of short film programs.
The festival will open on Thursday, October 22 with a screening of Time Warp, a documentary from Allison Berg which follows a theater company putting on a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the small town of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The film promises a heartfelt story of the resilience of queer art even when it is threatened at every turn. The 2026 Centerpiece Presentation, Track 20, will screen on Friday night at nearby Blue Mouse Theatre. This program features 20 music videos from around the globe, highlighting the close connection between film and music. It will be followed by an encore of live local bands. On closing night, TFF will re-screen Pete Ohs’ Everything Beautiful is Far Away, a 2017 science fiction film starring Julia Garner which made its Washington debut at TFF nearly a decade ago. Ohs has had a longstanding relationship with TFF, and the film is being brought back from the archives for the festival’s 20th anniversary.
The curated short film presentations offer something for everyone’s interests, from horror to comedy and even a Shorts4Shorties family-friendly screening. Live, Laugh, Land Back will highlight the breadth and diversity of Indigenous experiences and stories through seven short films, while Ways of Seeing pushes formal constraints of film with experimental shorts that “explore the nature of observation and the limits of perception.” Pacific Northwest filmmakers have ample representation in the Local Color documentary shorts and Northwest Tales narrative shorts programs.
TFF promo poster / The Evergreen Echo
Among the feature-length highlights to look out for are a number of queer love stories, including A Safe Distance, a sapphic crime thriller from Gloria Mercer set deep in the British Columbia wilderness, and Ephemera, directed by Shan Jiang, which follows a Chinese American woman living in Shanghai who falls for her dance teacher.
The Echo’s local film critic, Zach Youngs, has two recommendations. First is Bucks Harbor, a documentary made by Pete Muller. Muller spent five years living in a coastal town in the far north of Maine to bring the town’s characters to life. Second is Again Again from Washington-raised director/actor Mia Moore, a time loop narrative about a trans woman reliving the same day in an RV with her best friend.
Another theme which emerges in looking at the lineup are films with an environmental justice angle. Dwarf Neon Mayfield, a documentary feature, is a portrait of the Kentucky countryside and the intertwining ecological effects of two historic storms on human lives and the natural world alike. Meanwhile, another documentary, A City in the Forest, follows a grassroots movement in Atlanta to stop an urban forest from being turned into a police training center.
The opening night screening will be followed by a party at The Poet, while Friday and Saturday night programming will be followed by late night drinks and socializing at McMenamins. On Sunday, there will be an awards ceremony where juried awards for categories such as Best Pacific Northwest Feature, Best Late Night Short, and Best Music Video will be announced.
In their 20th year of bringing independent cinema to Tacoma, TFF and the Grand are preparing for a busy and exciting weekend ahead building community around the arts. I am looking forward to bringing coverage of the festival to the Echo’s readers with highlights from the screenings. I am particularly excited for the Beautiful, Bloodthirsty, Broken late-night shorts, the features Ephemera and Bucks Harbor, and the Northwest Tales shorts celebrating the best of PNW short films.
