By JONAH BARRETT The Olympia Film Society is now accepting submissions for its 36th-annual Olympia Film Festival. Filmmakers are welcomed to submit their films online until the deadline of December 23, 2019. Named one of the “Top 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” by MovieMaker Magazine in 2018, the Olympia Film Society has hosted the …
By Ellis Boran Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is another amazing film by the Japanese writer/director Hayao Miyazaki. This movie is about Nausicaa, a young woman who risks her life to protect her home in the Valley of the Wind from a toxic jungle. The complicated part of the story is that, even …
By NOAH SHACHAR Summertime is coming around, and Olympia Film Society (OFS) welcomes warm weather with a new set of extraordinary films including Olivier Assayas’s philosophical romp Non-Fiction and Eric Becker’s documentary Return to Mount Kennedy. We spoke with programming director Rob Patrick about the screenings. As for Assayas, Patrick said, “The French director’s acclaimed …
By NOAH SHACHAR Some movies win Academy Awards, are nearly forgotten and hardly spoken about again. Some movies are simply boring, while others are entertaining or insightful. But a few movies ignite themselves in a blazing pyre to emerge as a phoenix from smoldering ashes ever livelier, more passionate and mesmerizingly intriguing — growing and …
By Ellis Boran Howl’s Moving Castle is about a girl named Sophie Pendragon who has her youth stolen from her by an evil witch. She then meets a magic scarecrow who is the result of a spell set by an evil entity’s henchman. The scarecrow leads Sophie to the mobile castle powered by a demon …
By Ellis Boran I’m Ellis Boran, and it is a pleasure to start my own film review column, “Cine-Files!” My first movie review will be on the new animated film Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse. Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse is about a young boy named Miles Morales who is intrigued and bewildered at becoming the new …
By Billy Thomas As the weather continues to warm up, and the sun — that’s that bright thing in the sky, for those of us who have forgotten, due to its infrequent presence — begins to shine brighter, the promise of a long weekend is a reprieve from the slog. For readers who are looking …
By NOAH SHACHAR Cinema and music have been intertwined since the debut of moving pictures. With the invention of sound cinema, however, we lost the combination of a live orchestra playing alongside the silver screen. Starting in May, Olympia Film Society (OFS) introduces an all-new film program series, Screen Scores. The program attaches live ensembles …
By TODD B. GRUEL Julia Shapiro, guitarist and singer for Chastity Belt, considers what feminism means in the 21st century for an all-female band. “To me,” she decides, “it just means being a person with multiple identities, one of them being female, and not having to really think about the fact that I’m a woman …
By CHRISTIAN CARVAJAL Janae Huber and other citizens launched the group Olympians for People-Oriented Places in 2015. Their goal was to support a compact, diverse Olympia designed around attractive public spaces. Abbreviated O-POP, the organization recognizes the challenges of housing an estimated thousand new residents each year without sacrificing environmental protections or civic beauty. Toward …