Run Wiggly Run (2002), Why It’s a Good Thing That Not All Asians Know Martial Arts (2002), and trailers for NWFF programs Obsolete Media Weekend (2003) and Ultra: The High Noon of Consumer Culture (2002).* Kim’s cheeky style, humor, and keen-but-kind sense of irony is written all over these WigglyWorld-era productions. The vault holds several VHS tapes of Kim’s promotional bumpers for NWFF that show off his creative versatility with media – digital effect compositing, Super-8 film, and DV.

* TRIVIA: The Ultra series included a man-versus-pig Whopper-eating contest, held at WigglyWorld’s Little Theatre on 19th.

Short animations and music videos from a 2005 youth media camp that are all but guaranteed to make you wish NWFF sold ice cream.

We’re fairly certain that these are the girls who left an unequivocally affirming tag on the wall of the vault: LOOP GIRLS RULE.

Then-teenaged filmmaker Zorah Oppenheimer’s Water Motion (2003) arranges a suite of distinct water sounds into a rhythmic composition. The resulting visual arrangement seems incidental to the sound composition, and the overall effect is a hypnotic, deliberate, and danceable celebration of nature. As of this writing, Oppenheimer is now a District Manager of Clark Conservation District in Battle Ground, WA, helping landowners protect their county’s natural resources.

Mon’ica Brown and Jeff Palmer’s collaborative film …Just a Little Over a Million (2001) is a fast-paced, quick-witted spoken word short that lampoons the cumulative commercial sensibilities that we allow to inform the construction of our individual self-image. We are sold the idea that our values can be communicated by commodity curation, and are constantly reminded to interrogate our worth in terms of appearances – and these teens aren’t having it.

It simply wouldn’t be a regional film retrospective without some Krogstad.

Proclaimed by one of his own flyers (though signed “Roger Ebert”) as “the father of Seattle Independent Filmming,” the late Karl Krogstad was a chaotically creative force of nature. His films positively explode with DIY technical experimentation, gleefully leaping between artistic disciplines and mashing concepts, sounds, images, and fragments of writing together like tightly clutched toy cars. May his video for The Visible Targets’ “Life in the Twilight Zone” (c. 1983) grant us all new perspective on the possibilities of plastic wrap in set decoration!

Rest in peace, KK
(7/25/1948–10/27/2019)

Excerpts from his Last Call short film series, a fantastic bumper for NWFF sibling cinema The Grand Illusion 👏, and his latest film, Solar Forests (2021), round out our micro-retrospective of Crowell’s work. Since 1997, Crowell has been involved in filmmaking, primarily through his ingenious stop-motion animations, though he has also taught animation workshops to NWFF’s younger filmmakers, built marvelous structures and contraptions, designed costumes, and more. Both his human-scale and miniature worlds are highly tactile, marked by his striking, personal spin on steampunk aesthetics.

University of Washington Special Collections Moving Image Curator Hannah Palin presents two found films; Comin’ Home Baby (1968/2011), an orphan silent film reel in the “city symphony” style, discovered in the Victor Steinbrueck collection, and Lost & Found Film, a collage of color 8mm footage from home movies created for Home Movie Day 2003.

Britta Johnson’s Waterway (2009) is a stop-motion depiction of glassy, enlarged-to-show-detail beads of water traveling through a rough world of organic matter and creatures that cleanse them of contaminants as they go. Two out of two reviewing MIPoPS staff cried when they watched it, so obviously it had to be included.

Set to a plucky, atmospheric score by Lori Goldston and Stuart Wolferman, and assisted by Clyde Petersen, Waterway was commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs using Seattle Public Utilities 1% for Arts Funds. An excerpt of the film was presented to Nick Licata as part of the Seattle City Council Film Forum series while NWFF’s Adam Sekuler was curating the series.

Three films that express the experimental spirit of the Pacific Northwest by setting their subjects on fire, impaling them, hurling them into a lake, covering them in reiterative drawings of themselves… we don’t want to give too much away, in case you start guessing!

I Don’t Feel Too Good is a shuddering, zoetrope-like vision of sticky exuberance, seemingly wrenched directly from a Seattle millennial’s own memories of having ridden “The Orbiter” at Fun Forest after eating a hot dog and a half on a blistering summer day. Blazing with bright, desaturated colors and echoing with squeals of what we can only hope is joy, Phillips’s film is a ride: simple, intuitive, and thrilling.

Our closing film is edited by the late Lynn Shelton and newly re-scored by Lori Goldston, whose music also accompanied it when it debuted at On the Boards’ 2001 Northwest New Works Festival. Our Round Earth is a found footage compilation with a focus on organic forms and intimate, tactile imagery, with a recurring theme of orb-ness/circularity. All footage seems to have been pulled from 16mm educational reels, with the exception of a nearly 2.5-minute sustained shot of someone napping in front of a convenience store marquee that advertises coffee, sandwiches, hot dogs, milk, “cig,” oil, bait, and soda.