ALERT: Free entries for BIPoC artists and filmmakers through August 14th! Please enter films under 30 minutes.
Due to Covid 19 and current events, The Portland Unknown Film Festival will be postponing the 2020 Unknown Film Festival until Autumn 2021. Our festival is held in an intimate space and many people visit from all over the country which will not be possible due to the virus. Additionally, we believe folks currently need space and time to focus on fighting for the Black Lives Matter Revolution. We still have some things up our sleeves and we will be organizing a couple outdoor, BIPoC centered, protest driven screenings in 2020. In 2021, we will hold a bigger, better, more all inclusive festival than ever before.
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The Portland Unknown is an international, yet community centered film festival seeking films made with a genuine heart, a radical soul, and psychedelic nature. We aim to uplift mind bending, innovative film made with limited resources on a low budget. Calling all young and fresh groundbreaking filmmakers, old punks who never had their day in the sun, and explorers of things that don’t yet exist.
The Portland Unknown are
Queer exalting, female empowering, trans adoring, lovers of BIPoC lives.
Working class folk, sick of working for a patriarchal, white supremacist regime, in favor of decolonization. Immigrant embracing, spiritually inclined individuals who believe in people over property. Earth loving, plastic shamers, against the prison industrial complex. Sex worker esteeming, police abolitionist, kkkop haters. Learning everyday how to be better neighbors who are more anti racist than the day before. Neither Democrat nor Republican,
education glorifying, discussion inducing, millennial shits on a mission to eat the rich.
We really want to stress - Black Lives More Than Matter and Fuck the Police
We acknowledge we are living, working, and playing on unceded Atfalati, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Clatskanie, Kalapuya, Molalla, and Multnomah land.
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Where your entry fee goes:
We here at The Unknown, really hate monetizing art which is why we have always kept submission fees substantially lower than other festivals. We wish we had the ability to charge $0 for all entries but currently entry fees are the only way we can afford to pay for venue, equipment, festival hospitality and to pay for artists and services when we can. This has not been and never will be a money making venture and the organizers do not get paid a dime. Hopefully as the U.S. changes, we can begin to tear away from capitalistic norms and everyone will have enough to bring beauty into this world while those who strive to take beauty away will go into extinction.
In an effort to equalize the playing field, The Unknown chooses NOT to invite film and only selects films from the current season’s crop of entries. If you are unable to pay to enter, please contact us. At the end of each month we will be able to offer a small number of entry fee waivers.