BY JACK CAMERON for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 10/16/2026
This is the Tacoma Film Festival’s 20th year and the lineup this year looks to be innovative, interesting, and intriguing. No matter your tastes, odds are that there’s something here for you at the Tacoma Film Festival.
Beginning Oct. 22 and ending Oct. 25, the festival includes feature films, shorts, documentaries, animation, music videos, and many short films. The festival has films from over 20 countries as well as some local premieres.
The festival opens Thursday night with “Time Warp” a documentary about a group of performers attempting to stage Rock Springs, Wyoming’s first “Rocky Horror Picture Show” shadow cast. Directed by Allison Berg, the film follows the performers as they confront resistance from their conservative community while trying to create a space for queer expression.
“Time Warp” is also a good film for setting the tone of many of the films featured in the festival. A recurring theme is that of individuals finding ways to express themselves within their community.
MTV is gone, but music videos are forever
On Friday night, the festival moves to the Proctor District and the Blue Mouse Theatre for “Track 20.”
The two-and-a-half-hour program collects 20 music videos from artists ranging from Aphex Twin and Coldplay to Kendrick Lamar, Talking Heads, Little Simz, and The Last Dinner Party. The program is designed as an immersive celebration of the music-video form on the big screen.
Local Films Get A Spotlight
The Tacoma Film Festival has always been a home for local filmmakers to present their work.
The Tacoma premiere of “The Joyless Economy,” an experimental documentary that centers on a woman whose collection of movies become entangled with her infidelity. It’s screening with the world premiere of Isaac Olsen’s “In My Room (With My Stuff)” about an imprisoned woman who communicates with young women through the magazine Metal Edge. The two films couldn’t be more different, but are united in their Northwest origins.
“Assets & Liabilities,” from Zach Weintraub has him revisiting his younger self in this dark comedy. It’s paired with “Fresh Values,” in which a food co-op tries to implement an augmented reality in hopes of saving their business.
How about a documentary this weekend?
The weekend of the Tacoma Film Festival is full of documentaries.
“Joybubbles” tells a story of pre-internet days. When a blind boy discovers he can game the phone system by whistling certain tones he becomes connected to the underground world of “phone phreaking,” one of the earliest forms of hacking.
“Bucks Harbor” from filmmaker Pete Muller follows a working-class fishing community in Maine, near the Canadian border. It explores the complicated juxtaposition of tradition, masculinity, and the definition of success.
“Dwarf Neon Mayfield” uses the aftermath of destructive storms in rural Kentucky to explore the way people adapt to the changing environment.
“A City in the Forest” follows the fight between Atlanta authorities attempting to create a training center in the forest called Cop City and activists and environmentalists who want to stop construction of the facility.
Science fiction, romance, and a very drunk superhero
If you’re looking for an escape rather than reality, the TFF has you covered.
The Tacoma premiere of “Again Again” takes the time-loop trope and turns it on its head. Agatha, a trans woman who has spent years in a time loop reliving the same day trapped in an RV with her best friend, is suddenly unsure what to do when the time loop breaks.
“Ephemera” takes the idea of one last magical night and explodes it. Set in Shanghai, a Chinese American actress is leaving for Los Angeles in the morning, but before that, she’s got one last date. The film plays with parallel realities to show what might be and what might have been.
“A Safe Distance” is a crime thriller taking place in the British Columbia wilderness. When she is abandoned by her boyfriend, a couple living off the grid find her, but her rescuers are more than they seem.
And then there’s “Matapanki.” It’s a Pacific Northwest premiere from Chile. And it probably has my favorite premise of all the films in the festival. This punk kid living with his grandmother drinks a bottle of something at a concert and gains superpowers. The drunken hijinks escalate to ridiculous proportions.
Shorts
It’s in the short films that you’ll always find some of the most experimental, innovative, and just plain original movies you’ll ever see.
“Ways of Seeing” explores observation and perception through both documentary and experimental films. “Forever…Forever” observes the Ottenstein Reservoir over nearly two years using a specially developed 65mm camera. “A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth” follows a mother whose son disappeared during the Sri Lankan civil war.
“Sorry for Laughing” is for those of us with a darker sense of humor. This includes a workplace comedy of the undead, a revenge-filled baker, and an amorous and aggressive alien.
And for the kids and the kids in all of us, “Shorts6Shorties” on Sunday morning features talking animals, robots, monsters, and a singing butt. The event is recommended for children ages 7 and up and kicks off the morning with its annual Cereal Cinema event, complete with free cereal, coffee, and cocoa.
Sci-fi finale
The festival closes Sunday night with a science fiction road movie about a man, a woman, and a robot crossing an isolated desert planet in search of a mythical lake. Pete Ohs’ “Everything Beautiful Is Far Away” is a fitting finale to the festival. Pete Ohs himself will be in attendance and host a post-film Q&A session.
Ohs’ connections to the Tacoma Film Festival run deep. Back in 2013, the year he first came to the festival, Filmmaker Magazine named him one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
It’s connections like these that make the Tacoma Film Festival more than just a collection of movies and instead a cultural event where creatives can share their work and talk with each other and fans of the medium.
Tacoma’s Film Festival proves with its 20th year that it’s as strong as ever and likely to be even bigger next year.
