The 25th Annual Port Townsend Film Festival lineup includes two films that each premiered a number of years ago. I’m reviewing them both beforehand to give readers a small taste of what they might expect from this year’s lineup. The directors of those films — Catherine Hardwicke and Louie Schwartzberg — are featured guests at the festival, which runs from Thursday, Sept. 19, through Sunday, Sept. 22.

Hardwicke co-wrote the screenplay for what would become 2003’s “Thirteen” with Nikki Reed, who was only 14 years old, but would make her acting debut as one of the 100-minute R-rated film’s female leads, alongside Evan Rachel Wood and Holly Hunter. After the release of “Thirteen” at the Sundance Film Festival, Hardwicke won its dramatic directing award — one of many awards she, the film and its actors were either nominated for or received.

That success undoubtedly contributed to getting the nod to direct Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling vampire novel, “Twilight.” Hardwicke’s film adaptation, released in 2008, was commercially successful.

Hollywood has long drawn from the well of how much more troubled contemporary teens have become since at least as early as 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause.” But “Thirteen” overcomes its own occasionally overdone histrionics, thanks to performances by Wood, Hunter and Reed that feel painfully real, as well as the lived-in authenticity of Reed and Hardwicke’s screenplay, all facilitated by Hardwicke’s naturalistic direction.

As it turns out, “what’s wrong with the kids today” in “Thirteen” is down to the struggles and shortcomings of the adults saddled with raising those children within a modern media and consumer culture that seems almost cruelly calculated to exacerbate the most savage and self-destructive impulses of an already turbulent adolescence.

The film empathizes with Hunter’s plight as an overworked divorced mother, a high school dropout who works as a hairdresser in her home to support her two teens, plus her on-and-off boyfriend and a fellow single mom, who occasionally overnights with a little girl of her own.

And yet, even though the film doesn’t judge Hunter’s fitness as a mother — even as she stresses out over staying sober —  it acknowledges that her lack of education and questionable relationships have not left her daughter with a surfeit of stability in her homelife.

Schwartzberg’s 2019 documentary “Fantastic Fungi” packs into 81 minutes a whirlwind history of the biological evolution, environmental contributions and human uses of fungi, from the medicinal to the culinary, while addressing its sociopolitical and spiritual impacts.

He employs not only a touchy-feely Gaia theory-themed celebrity narration by Brie Larson, but also a visually dazzling abundance of time-lapse cinematography and CGI. It effectively tells the epoch-spanning tale of the planet’s fungi, largely by biographizing mycologist Paul Stamets.

Stamets traded the evangelical religious traditions he was raised with for evangelizing the benefits of mushrooms, which he and Schwartzberg carried on through the onset of COVID with the virtual “Fungi Day” event, one day before Earth Day in 2020, via various social media.

Schwartzberg uses Stamets and other experts in the field of fungi to attest to the organisms’ stubbornly resilient scientific ambiguity. After all, fungi not only exist in a strangely nebulous state, somewhere between plants and animals, but we also have yet to discover all the ways in which they function as life forms, and how they might help both us and the broader ecosystem.

Stamets recounts how a psychedelic episode allowed him to banish a severe lifelong stutter, as well as how his elderly mother went into remission from stage 4 breast cancer after taking medication derived from “turkey tail” mushrooms.

“Fantastic Fungi” not only touts the organisms’ ability to break down environmental pollutants such as petroleum oil, and alleviate mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, but it also questions what constitutes sentient communication, by exploring how underground networks of fungi enable forests of trees to interconnect, and respond to each other’s needs.

Although fungi have acquired a stigma in Western culture since they act as agents of decay, “Fantastic Fungi” joyfully points out that decay is not merely the messy aftermath of death, but a vital restoration of nutrients and other materials needed for life’s renewal.

“Thirteen” will be playing in the Marvin G. Shields Memorial Post 26 hall of the American Legion, on 209 Monroe St. in downtown Port Townsend, while “Fantastic Fungi” will be playing outdoors on Taylor Street, four blocks southwest on Water Street, with both shows starting at 7:30 p.m. and followed by opportunities to meet their respective filmmakers on Saturday, Sept. 21.