Kelly Reichardt Articles
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Notable Festivals: Sundance Inducted into the Criterion Collection: 2017 As an ideological or sociological construct, The West looms large over the American psyche. Far more than a physical, geographical region, it has come to represent a state of being that embodies our foundational values: freedom, fortitude, and persistence. Ever since the film industry dropped into…
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Notable Festivals: Venice, Deauville (Grand Prix) The state of Oregon boasts a long and proud history of eco-activism, be it as simple as routine composting and recycling at the individual level or as sweeping as governmental efforts aimed at preserving our natural resources. The beauty of nature knows no politics; our lush forests and bubbling…
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Notable Festivals: Venice The Oregon Trail holds a venerated place in the annals of American myth, buoyed by a pioneering spirit as well as its status as a cultural touchstone for every Millennial who played the iconic computer game. The actual journey, however, was far from some game or romantic adventure— it was a grueling,…
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Notable Festivals: Cannes When the Great Recession arrived in mid-2008, very few people outside of the financial sector saw it coming. Naturally, it was the middle and lower-class factions that bore the brunt of the damage, their jobs and life savings having evaporated away overnight while wealthy corporations received generous government bailouts. Jobs, homes, and…
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Like many other artists of the time, the highly-controversial outbreak of the Iraq War weighed heavily on director Kelly Reichardt’s mind. Easily the most divisive conflict since Vietnam, the Iraq War was waged by the George W. Bush administration as a drastic pre-emptive measure based on faulty, misleading, and downright false intelligence. As the…
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The Portland I knew growing up is gone now. Its soggy, homegrown eccentricity has long since been replaced by a cosmopolitan renaissance. A ruggedly provincial, semi-blue-collar character has given way to a creative class comprised of outsiders and economic refugees fleeing the runaway cost of living in larger cities like LA or San Francisco. This…
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Director Kelly Reichardt released her debut feature, RIVER OF GRASS, in 1994, but her sophomore effort, OLD JOY, wouldn’t arrive until 2006. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s a gap of twelve years — an unnaturally long period by any standard of measure. While such developments are rare among most commercially-successful filmmakers, they…
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Notable Festivals: Sundance, Berlin As a filmmaker born and raised in Portland, Oregon, I naturally feel a kinship to its homegrown film scene— one that’s been infused from the start by a freewheeling DIY spirit. The first ten years of my active filmmaking life were spent on reckless, ragged guerrilla shoots with close friends and…