Friday Harbor Film Festival now on-demand

You are reading about last weekend's 10th annual Friday Harbor Film Festival in part to get nudged to click on and watch on demand over 30 films through Oct. 30. They are worth your time. For $75 you can gorge on them all or start with one for $12.

In Friday Harbor the Film Festival lit up four theaters Oct. 21-23, gloriously in person after two years of films online only, imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Starting Friday morning at 10 a.m., 27 feature and 13 shorts were shown over three days, ending with the showing of the people's choice award, the film getting the most votes from viewer rankings.

I chased eight films Friday and Saturday, choosing from both personal and a sense-of-community interests. I found patterns, common themes, repeating traits and values of heroism, determination, grit, vision and love.

The La Conner connection was "Alaskan Nets," following the Metlakatla High School basketball team through their 2018 season. Director Jeff Harasimowicz moved to an island in Southeast Alaska to live with and follow the Tsimshian people. This small community – 72 high school students – fishes and plays basketball. No restaurants. Can the team win the state championship? It is a singular obsession, even – especially – as the sea claims an alumnus.

Documentaries draw out interest as stories with heroic figures, people who have reached to explore and change the world and themselves in the process. This is true for the basketball team.

It is true for world renowned individuals, like Robert Davidson, a Haida sculptor ("Haida Modern: The Art and Activism, Robert Davidson"), writer Joyce Carol Oates. Surfer and swimmer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian and five-time Olympic medalist ("Waterman") and the French couple Kaita and Maurice Kraftt, known in France and among volcanologists ("Fire of Love").

Each film followed the reach toward great accomplishment. But trauma and tragedy were in the lives of most individuals highlighted.

It is impossible to review eight films in one newspaper story. The finest, most artistic film I saw was Swedish director Stig Björkman's "Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind." The film was almost 20 years in the creation, from concept to completion. It follows Joyce's career, highlighting a handful of the over 100 novels she has written, weaving archival footage personal to her life and tracking over 75 years of American history portrayed in her novels and memoirs. From a young Marilyn Monroe, through two Kennedy brothers – John F. and Teddy – to the 1967 Detroit race riots and the 1980s environmental tragedy of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, Oates' writing life and life purpose is portrayed.

Other films are important because of the topic and the story they tell. "The Pollinators" had incredible close up slow motion footage of honeybees as the directors followed commercial beekeepers trucking semi-loads of pallets of hives cross country across the year. They watched their bees die, poisoned by neighboring farmers' pesticides. Farmers out standing in their fields were interviewed, the few dissenters pursuing regenerative agriculture and creating living soil.

"The Boys Who Said No!" was based on interviews with Vietnam War draft resisters – not draft dodgers – but men who as teens understood and made the decision to burn or rip up their draft cards and counseled others to do so, knowing they would spend years in jail for their actions. They did.

"The Hunt for Planet B" was a hybrid, portraying the important story of pursuing the hypothesis of exoplanets that are in the Goldilocks zone around stars. allowing the conditions for life as we know it to arise. The protagonists were primarily women scientists finding opportunity in more esoteric areas of scientific research. The James Webb telescope, launched last December, was a character, too, and made for good filmmaking, its cables, foil layer and gold surfaces on display.

Heroic determination, joy and love in service to a larger cause was common to each film.

Don't take my word for it. See for yourself through Sunday. Plan to go next October. It is fhff.org

Before you go to the islands, sign the San Juan Islands Pledge that you will be a responsible steward over there: visitsanjuans.com/san-juan-islands-pledge .