Doors at 6:30 p.m.; Performance at 7 p.m.; Film at 7:20 p.m. Tickets $15.
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THE EXPERIENCE

Join us for a night of local multimedia storytelling! Featuring local filmmaker Cambria Matlow’s new film Why Dig When You Can Pluck, about balancing motherhood and creative practice. Lindsay Baltus will kick off the evening with her storytelling piece “Pregnant in the Archives,” inspired by her personal experience with childbirth, interspersed with archival recordings of a feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s. We’ll also screen Zach Weintraub’s short film, Rad Dad (13 min), about fatherhood and skateboarding.

ON SCREEN: Why Dig When You Can Pluck

2024. Directed by Cambria Matlow. Runtime: 51 minutes.
Spring, Clay, and Elio are a family of three on a summer camping trip to the Oregon coast, where jarring rock formations cut across the horizon. In search of inspiration for a new project, filmmaker Spring takes pictures of the landscape and uses her volatile husband and defiant young son as reluctant props. Otherwise she experiences her family as an unwelcome interruption to her creative process.

Clay and 9-year old Elio sit for hours on the sand reading and snacking, silently enduring their vacation. Lonely and stoned, Spring craves adventure. She jumps in the water and climbs the rocks alone. But when Elio wants to play with her, she’s busy working. Clay grows aggravated with the growing distance he feels from his wife, while Spring is repulsed by Clay’s drinking and rising temper. Elio refuses to wear shorts. They are three ships passing in the night, their messed-up dynamics echoing the solitary sea stacks.

On the final day of their trip, a harrowing moment between father and son shatters Spring’s illusions and brings her competing desires to be a good mother and creative artist to a hilt. Her heart breaks as she comes to terms with the choices she’s willing to make and realizes she’s not the mother or the artist she thought she was.

Moving between deadpan realism, unexpected humor and quiet devastation, Why Dig When You Can Pluck challenges norms around motherhood and artmaking while exploring themes of trust, violence, and love.

“With its proud duration of 51 minutes for a fiction, WDWYCP proposes a first anomaly. But this is unusual cinema not only because of its duration: Cambria Matlow’s film dares to whisper storms, to clamorous discretion. Disenchanted and uncomfortable, stealthy, precise in the progression of millimetric displeasures that affect its protagonists and with true empathy in the design of its characters, it is especially generous: nothing is saved or hidden to offer a last-minute coup d’effect. It may be a fierce comedy about family dynamics – on which it casts a merciless gaze – but it is also a horror film (with the same theme as its fiery core).”

– David Obarrio & Javier Porta Fouz, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema

CAMBRIA MATLOW,  Writer/Director

Cambria Matlow is a film director, writer and editor based in Portland, OR. In moody storyworlds that disrupt and discomfort, Matlow uses the mirror of nature to illuminate fractured identities, broken systems and complicated relationships.  An IFP Documentary Lab Fellow, Southern Circuit Tour Fellow and winner of Oregon Film + Playa’s Screenwriting Award, her Jury and Audience award-winning documentaries No More Dope Parties (2019), Woodsrider (2017) and Burning In the Sun (2010) have been selected for IFP’s Independent Film Week, broadcast on Al Jazeera and PBS, released through distributors Cinema Libre, Bullfrog Films and Uncorked Entertainment, and screened in festivals and cinemas worldwide including New York’s Lincoln Center and Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. Her films have been described as “hauntingly beautiful” by Willamette Week and ”relaxing and contemplative” by the Los Angeles Times. Why Dig When You Can Pluck (2024) marks her narrative debut as writer/director and premiered in competition at BAFICI.

ON STAGE: “Pregnant in the Archives” by Lindsay Baltus

Seven months pregnant with her first child and anxious to make as much progress as possible on her PhD before the birth, Lindsay Baltus visited an audio archive to conduct research on the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s. Her performance weaves together personal storytelling about her own experiences as a writer, scholar, and mother with the archival recordings she heard during her visit, in which women share their struggles to pursue academic and creative work in the face of gender inequality.

Lindsay Baltus is a Portland writer whose work explores memory, motherhood, and the many forms of love and connection. She has a PhD in English from UC Davis, where she researched the radio, video, and print activism of 1970s feminist movements. She has written for Bitch Magazine and is the former director of the Davis Feminist Film Festival.

ON SCREEN: Rad Dad

2023. Directed by Zach Weintraub. Runtime: 13 minutes.
A sesh with the boys would make dad glad. But if dad can’t get rad, then will he be sad?

Zach Weintraub
Zach Weintraub is a writer, director, and actor from Tacoma, WA. His films have shown at festivals around the world including Locarno, AFI Fest, Vancouver, and BAFICI. Additionally, featured in Variety, Indiewire, and The Playlist among others. He loves spending time with his family, skateboarding, and is always down to hit a burrito or frosty Rainier.