UNORTHODOX DOCS
Non-fiction arts that play with the boundaries of form, function, style & story.
Give Me the Ball! x Portland Arts Week
- Sun, Jul 26
Run Time: 101 min.
Tickets $15. World champion tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King has had a game-changing impact on culture and sports. Rare archive and candid interviews with Billie Jean and those closest to her reveal how one woman put changing the world ahead of saving herself.
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World – Encore Screening
- Fri, Aug 14
Run Time: 91 min.
Tickets $15. If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Sasha Waters’ beguiling portrait features poems read by Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Jesse Welles, and Oprah Winfrey.
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World – Encore Screening
- Sat, Aug 22
Run Time: 91 min.
Tickets $15. If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Best-selling poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, queer and out but intensely private—Oliver’s poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites. She was America’s unlikely, contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly fifty years in order to open herself—and us, her readers—to the known and unknowable world. Sasha Waters’ beguiling portrait features poems read by Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Jesse Welles, and Oprah Winfrey.
Sherman’s March (4K Restoration)
- Sun, Sep 6
Run Time: 158 min.
Tickets $15. Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ross shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love.
Summer Tour w/ Garcia Birthday Band
- Fri, Sep 11
Run Time: 200 min.
Tickets $35. A poetic documentary about the Deadhead experience and a full set with a liquid light show by the Garcia Birthday Band!
Cookie Queens
- Sun, Sep 13
Run Time: 91 min.
Tickets $15. It’s Girl Scout Cookie season, and four tenacious girls strive to be a top-selling “Cookie Queen,” navigating an $800 million business in which childhood and ambition collide. A celebration of girlhood and the complexities that come with it, Cookie Queens is a coming-of-age story about the joys, pressures, and tensions woven into one of America’s most cherished rituals: Girl Scout Cookie season.
Chasing Chimeras: The Lure of Deceptive Climate Solutions
- Sun, Sep 13
Run Time: 105 min.
Tickets $15. Barbara Bernstein's new documentary tells the stories of people living in the crosshairs of the fossil fuel industry's self-serving climate solutions, including renewable diesel, hydrogen, renewable natural gas, biofuels, carbon capture and storage, and carbon offsets.
A Life Illuminated
- Sun, Sep 20
Run Time: 90 min.
Tickets $15. An uplifting documentary that takes audiences into one of Earth’s last great frontiers: the deep sea. Pioneering marine biologist Dr. Edith Widder’s perseverance is a wonder to behold as she pursues her lifelong quest to use the language of light to communicate with the ocean’s most mysterious creatures.
Black Zombie
Run Time: 90 min.
Tickets FREE. A documentary that digs beneath the blood-soaked spectacle of modern horror to uncover the zombie’s buried origins.