I followed my tradition this year at the 25th Annual Port Townsend Film Festival by attending as many movies in the theaters as I could. That’s from the single film that screened immediately after the opening night dinner gala through the festival’s final day of theatrical screenings.

That tradition includes reviewing about a dozen of those films, many of which remain available virtually through Sept. 29.

Plenty of smaller communities include a number of cinephiles, but not every small town or county has its own independent movie theater, and Port Townsend has at least two.

Moreover, not every community has its own annual film festival, much less one that draws cinephiles and filmmakers from not just the region and statewide, but from across the country and around the world. This year the Port Townsend Film Festival screened 15 feature-length narrative films, 23 feature-length documentaries, 24 short narrative films and 29 short documentaries.

People in this community care about films. You indulged me when I reviewed Frank Herbert’s book “The White Plague” after the onset of COVID in 2020, and why I still receive occasional requests to continue the “Moonlighting” TV retrospective I started last year.

Among the many artists in this community, we have a number of aspirating and experienced filmmakers.

In Lawrence Kasdan’s 1991 film “Grand Canyon,” Steve Martin declares, “All of life’s great questions are answered in the movies.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but what I bet all those local cinephiles and filmmakers could tell you is that all of life’s great questions are asked in the movies.

We watch movies about everything from the mundane to the fantastical, to question and make sense of ourselves and our existences.

Who we see on the screen is who we are, and their stories are our own.

Which is why, for yet another year, I spent a weekend sacrificing sleep to broaden my horizons, and hopefully bring you all along for the ride.

Four days, 12-plus films and one review to rule them all, with no rest until it’s all wrapped up.

Total coverage. Maximum effort. We’re doing this.

• Day 1: Thursday, Sept. 19

FISH WAR

“Fish War” manages to pack more than 50 years of history into less than 80 minutes.

Directors Charles Atkinson and Skylar Wagner had only a year to make this movie to release it in 2024, for the 50th anniversary of the court case that restored the original treaty fishing rights to Washington state’s tribes.

But neither the Native American activists nor the events that followed Judge Boldt’s historic ruling receive short shrift in this documentary account of how the tribes’ civil disobedience protests in the 1960s and 1970s led to U.S. District Court and U.S. Supreme Court rulings in their favor in 1974 and 1979.

“Fish War” shows how those verdicts not only elevated tribal sovereignty and culture, but also led to government efforts to protect and restore the state’s salmon and their habitat, as the film’s directors leave it to the Native Americans involved to tell their own stories, often with a stoically wry wit.

“Fish War” presents a cyclical pattern of societal progress that’s common to many civil rights struggles, as public demonstrations and legal victories on the federal level are countered by state government and previously privileged majority populations defying those attempted reforms.

Even as this film acknowledges the rise of climate change, it supports the assertion of Port Gamble S’Klallam tribal member Ron Charles, who told attendees of the Thursday evening screening at the Rose Theatre that “we saved the salmon, but the fight still goes on.”

• Day 2: Friday, Sept. 20

ROBERT SHIELDS: MY LIFE AS A ROBOT

The short documentary “Saving Superman,” about a 57-year-old autistic man whose idolization of the comic book superhero drove him to learn martial arts and not tolerate others being bullied as he once was, sets a suitable tone for the feature-length “Robert Shields: My Life as a Robot.”

Shields overcame his own childhood bullying by becoming such a prodigy in the field of mime that Marcel Marceau discovered him performing on the street, and gave the 18-year-old a full scholarship to Marceau’s school of mime in Paris.

Shields’ talent continued to impress star-makers including Sid and Marty Krofft, Tony Orlando and Mac Davis, to the point that Shields and his equally impressive mime-partner-turned-wife, Lorene Yarnell, scored their own two-season comedy-variety show on CBS.

Even after Shields and Yarnell’s marriage ended, and Shields’ career was derailed by failed business ventures, married documentarians Christine and Mark Bonn discovered that Shields’ robotic style of mime had inspired an entire movement of dance that holds his name in high regard to this day.

The Bonns’ documentary benefits from Shields’ impeccable comic instincts, including a charismatic gift for gab that seems misplaced on a mime, as well as a wealth of archival footage preserved by Shields’ since-departed manager, Steve Binder, dating back to Shields’ stints as a street performer, honing impersonations of passersby.

The Bonns admitted they struggled not to laugh when Shields, who’s still spry in his 70s, would cut up on camera

STAKES IS HIGH

Writer-director Jean-Pierre Caner leaned on the real-life acting experiences of his leading man, Rahad Coulter-Stevenson, and drew from news reports of drivers who’d been subjected to predatory employment practices while working for rideshare companies, to create the harrowing “Stakes Is High.”

Coulter-Stevenson’s protagonist is already facing the plight of too many Black actors, who hope to eventually get past auditioning for a succession of nameless criminal “thug” characters, when his roommate suggests leasing a car to drive for a ridesharing app unsubtly named “Pyramid.”

Because much like the multilevel marketing schemes of my youth, Pyramid deceptively traps its drivers in doom spirals, paying escalating service fees for shrinking pools of potential earnings.

This forces our hustling protagonist to turn to desperate and questionable means to make ends meet, including an encroaching reliance on off-the-books and likely illegal gigs, plus pill-popping to stave off the sleep he needs.

Two decades ago, this film’s premise would have qualified as a satirically dystopian speculative future scenario, but today, it’s literally ripped from real-world news headlines.

Caner and Coulter-Stevenson deserve commendations for making “Stakes Is High” feel at once compellingly watchable and uncomfortably authentic, as we see our aspiring protagonist’s dreams of artistic expression descend to ragged, twitchy, hand-to-mouth survival impulses.

The conclusion offers an appropriate and earned measure of optimistic possibility for our lapsed dreamer, even in the midst of its darkly comic omens of doom for another character, who’s also waited a while for their luck to turn better.

SECRET MALL APARTMENT

“A Home on Every Floor,” a short-film spoken-word performance by poet Hanna Asefaw, uses stop-motion miniature models to recount her occasionally turbulent upbringing, in a since-razed Oslo apartment with her Eritrean family during the late 1990s.

While visually and dramatically arresting, it’s a tonal mismatch to use that short film to preface the mischievous antics of the feature-length documentary “Secret Mall Apartment,” about eight Providence artists who created a domestic space for themselves within an unused void inside the largest shopping mall in Rhode Island.

Against solid competition, “Secret Mall Apartment” was easily my favorite film of Day 2 of the Port Townsend Film Festival, since it smartly and amusingly explored the class warfare at the heart of what’s occasionally been justified as a guerilla art installation by some of its instigators, although I suspect that keeping a secret clubhouse hidden in a bustling public area also appealed to their inner children.

The turn of the millennium saw the city of Providence gentrifying its working-class and artistic neighborhoods into upscale shopping centers that few of their former residents could afford to patronize, so it appealed to this circle of displaced artists to succeed at colonizing a corner of that same commercial development, for four years before the authorities finally caught on.

“Secret Mall Apartment” chronicles how this already audacious experiment became ever more absurdly ambitious, and offers the punchline that the currently struggling mall might ultimately convert some of its spaces into residential apartments to sustain itself.

WE STRANGERS

“We Strangers” and its preceding short film, “Stalled In Eight Etudes,” were perfectly paired to showcase the broad ranges of their starring Black actresses.

“Stalled In Eight Etudes” writer-director Kersti Bryan tapped the versatile Tracey Bonner to play all but one of its eight eclectic female characters, in a slice-of-life drama set in the women’s bathroom of a courthouse, that almost appears to run as a single continuous tracking shot.

And “We Strangers” gives Kirby Howell-Baptiste — who already won me over as Death of the Endless in Netflix’s “The Sandman” series — a chance to demonstrate the levels of deft nuance and ambiguity she’s capable of, as a cleaning woman for hire who cannily manipulates a pair of dysfunctionally intertwined affluent suburban families.

Kirby (who’s since dropped her surname from her professional credits) shows how Ray the cleaning lady promotes herself from housekeeping to fraudulent psychic readings, by preying on the vapid gullibility of the self-absorbed housewives to whom she caters, since their visibly unfulfilling relationships practically broadcast what sorts of supposedly spiritually derived advice they want to hear from Ray.

“We Strangers” doesn’t encourage us to sympathize with Ray’s privileged clients, especially since it’s implied that the first mark whom Ray cons is more inclined to believe Ray is a medium because of racist assumptions about Ray’s cultural connections to so-called “voodoo.”

Nonetheless, Kirby’s multifaceted performance makes clear the toll that scamming these white women for their cash is taking on not only Ray’s dignity, but her soul.

• Day 3: Saturday, Sept. 21

GOOD BAD THINGS

Not only is “Good Bad Things” one of the most well-rounded, fully realized cinematic portraits of a character with a physical disability that I can recall, but it’s also among the more intelligent relationship dramas set to screen in recent memory.

Having sat through too many treacly “inspirational” flicks which reduce individuals with disabilities to the limits and hardships of their respective medical conditions, I deeply appreciate how “Good Bad Things” allows its co-writer and leading man, Danny Kurtzman, to treat his character’s disability as but one of many everyday hassles and hurdles he routinely navigates.

Kurtzman’s character in “Good Bad Things” shares his first name (Danny) and his condition (muscular dystrophy), but he’s also struggling to keep a small marketing firm afloat with his roommate and best friend Jason (Brett Dier), while still smarting from a bad breakup.

When Danny registers on the dating app he’s hoping to get hired by, he shortly finds himself matched with Madi (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a soulful free spirit who takes artistic photographs.

Experimental Madi encourages cautious Danny to explore beyond his boundaries, but it turns out they’re both gun-shy about exposing their emotional vulnerabilities, due to past romances gone sour.

Madi and Danny’s brief split doesn’t stem from a frustratingly contrived miscommunication, but from understandable anxieties that they simply needed to share with each other more fully.

Danny’s grand gesture to win Madi back has the added benefit of affirming his own body positivity.

SHORTS — LOCAL

Of the nine short films produced on the Olympic Peninsula and San Juan Islands that screened as part of the Port Townsend Film Festival’s “Local” block, eight centered heavily on the region’s environment, seven in an entirely serious way, and five explicitly called for the conservation of natural resources, ecosystems, and native wildlife and their habitats.

Three of those films tapped tribal members as subject-matter experts, and two films — “Last Stand: Saving the Elwha River’s Legacy Forests” and “Call of the Orcas” — even shared an on-camera expert between them.

The two comedic short films on the “Local” roster — “Clean Bill of Health” and “Glampire” — shared a cast member in common, while the starring bloodsucker of “Glampire” was Tony Doupe, a recurring player for Western Washington filmmaker Brion Rockwell.

None of these repeated elements were to the detriment of the short films in question, since the documentary shorts effectively highlighted essential issues, the two artistic shorts — “The Path” and “Water Poetry” — successfully conveyed specific tones and moods, and the two comedic shorts were funny enough to warrant the time and resources devoted to their skit premises.

“Glampire” was the winner of the Port Townsend Film Festival’s inaugural short screenplay competition, and I was privileged to witness part of its production in July, at the Hastings building in downtown Port Townsend.

Without spoiling its morbidly amusing twist, I was amazed by how good “Glampire” looked, especially given its budget, and I was tickled by the satiric bent of its humor.

GONDOLA

Robert Zenk wrote “Parting Out,” the short film that preceded the feature-length “Gondola,” and after the two films’ shared Saturday afternoon screening, he noted that both narratives depict pairings of women “fighting for love” through antiquated transportation technology.

While “Parting Out” follows a study-in-contrasts lesbian couple as they raid a scrapyard for classic car replacement parts, “Gondola” wordlessly chronicles the mutual affection that develops between two young women working as cable car conductors, for a route that connects the mountains above a rural European village nestled in the valley that lies between them.

As their gondolas pass each other every half-hour, our irrepressible heroines find creative ways to entertain, then express their emerging feelings for each other, ranging from rounds of remote chess to music.

Without dialogue, German filmmaker Veit Helmer concocts some elaborately whimsical visual gags to represent the coworkers’ playful rivalry, as each one tries to top the other’s outfits, performances and cable car decorations, before the pair’s courtship wraps up to the strains of a diegetic love song with no lyrics, but plenty of unorthodox musical instruments.

“Gondola” is a complete piece, but Zenk teased “Parting Out” as a scene from a larger story, one which he’d still like to see made into its own onscreen work.

Since September is National Suicide Awareness Month, Zenk took pride in portraying the formerly suicidal half of his fictional couple in a manner that respected her personal strength, in addition to not grounding the lesbian couple in clichéd stereotypes.

PORCELAIN WAR

“Porcelain War” won this year’s Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize, and it’s the best of the well-executed slate of films I saw during Day 3 of the Port Townsend Film Festival.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February of 2022, Slava Leontyev sculpted porcelain figurines that were then painted by his wife, Anya Stasenko.

While they’ve continued creating porcelain art since, they’ve also enlisted in the Ukrainian defense, with Slava serving as a firearms instructor for his fellow civilians-turned-soldiers.

The rich imagery of “Porcelain War” is bittersweet, since we see the pastoral countryside, whose wildlife has inspired so much of Slava and Anya’s cheery art, interspersed with war-torn cityscapes.

Likewise, when animators bring Anya’s static illustrations to life, those colorful animations recount how the couple’s once-idyllic lifestyle was wiped away by violence.

The subjects of this documentary doubled as its cinematographers, capturing the tragic history being made all around them, as Slava’s friend, Andrey Stefanov, sent his wife and daughters away for their safety, forcing Andrey to watch his daughters grow up remotely through video.

On the front lines, Slava shot footage of the combat, rather than a weapon, after telling the troops he trains that weapons are ugly tools that serve an even uglier purpose, even as he laments their current necessity, for his countrymen to defend their freedom and their culture.

Even after filming those battles, Slava told Saturday evening’s screening audience that he hoped “Porcelain War” would attest to “beauty, and not evil.”

• Day 4: Sunday, Sept. 22

MAYA AND THE WAVE

Brazilian big-wave surfer Maya Gabeira started surfing at 13 and surfing competitively at 15, before becoming a professional surfer at 17, in 2004, and the world’s top female big-wave surfer shortly afterward, as she surfed what was then the biggest wave ever by a woman, in 2009.

The silver lining is that Gabeira’s career subsequently crashed and burned when she was young enough to bounce back, as chronicled in “Maya and the Wave,” which fast-forwards through Gabeira’s celebrity honeymoon of winning ESPY and Teen Choice awards, to focus on the slump that followed her life-threatening 2013 wipeout on a massive wave in Nazaré, Portugal.

While Gabeira returned to Nazaré in 2018, and resumed setting surfing records, “Maya and the Wave” delves into the false starts, punishing training, chronic pain and psychological toll of the intervening five years of recovery attempts, which cost her the Red Bull brand as a sponsor.

Even after Gabeira returns to surfing by notching greater accomplishments on her belt than ever before, the sport’s official gatekeepers passively neglect to acknowledge those achievements, until Gabeira asks her online fanbase to call for action.

This silent institutional sexism was preceded by critics in the media who were outspoken about Gabeira’s performance shortfalls, with more vitriol than they reserved for her male peers in the surfing field.

Gabeira is appealing because she possesses the strength to admit her fears, and this film’s aquatic cinematography treats viewers to immediately proximate thrill-rides.

STORY AND PICTURES BY

The short film “If You Give a Beach a Bottle” employs sketchbook illustrations to expand on the broad swath of plastic pollution’s impacts on our planet’s waters, while still affording audiences a note of optimism, if they take action.

This short’s presentation leavened the gravity of its subject, but it remained only tenuously connected to “Story and Pictures By,” the feature-length film that followed it on Sunday, which interviewed various authors and artists who create children’s picture books.

Inspired by a New York Times article declaring the storybook genre to be “dead,” “Story and Pictures By” correctly counter-asserts storybooks’ enduring relevance, in part because of the powerful representation such books provide to kids who might not otherwise encounter their own perspectives in print.

Asian and Native American storytellers now working in the field recall ethnic stereotypes that made them cringe in their own storybooks as kids, while the film recounts how children’s picture books began including more diverse cultural viewpoints during the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from divorced parents to urban and minority families.

We even see Mexican-American writer and illustrator Yuyi Morales attempt to assure modern immigrant children they shouldn’t feel ashamed of their heritage.

Even books such as “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” offer children who misbehave, or make mistakes, comfort in knowing they’re not alone.

As one children’s picture book creator quite rightly put it, their job is to offer kids hope.

FARMING WHILE BLACK

Married producers Mark Decena and Liz Lupino Decena adapted African-American farmer and educator Leah Penniman’s 2016 book, “Farming While Black,” into a feature-length documentary because, in Mark’s words, it touched upon “land justice, social justice and food justice.”

Mark Decena also directed this film, which alternates between urban and rural Black farmers over the course of three to four years of changing seasons, as they turn to agriculture to revitalize existing communities within city neighborhoods, and to foster interconnected agrarian collectives in the countryside.

Penniman herself — who co-founded Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York — stars among this film’s primary subjects, and challenges viewers to reevaluate their perspectives, when she asserts that “food deserts” of scarcity should be called “food apartheid” instead.

Penniman has noted that deserts are naturally occurring ecosystems, whereas she identified the systemic exclusion of BIPOC from certain neighborhoods as leading to ZIP codes with high poverty and no nearby grocery stores.

Pennington and her fellow Black farmers have found fellowship and opportunities by sharing their skills and resources among each other, and strive to ensure their collectives remain sustainable by seeking to include new students and members.

Near the end of “Farming While Black,” we’re shown how this spirit of partnership can lead to an occasionally festive atmosphere among such collectives, but as the Black farmers themselves remind us, systemic discrimination against their efforts have not diminished as much as they’ve become more multifaceted.

I’d welcome more onscreen explorations of “Afro-Indigenous” farming practices.