Indie Festival Darlings.

#OregonMade keeps winning things and launching careers.

Not all the time. Not every year. Not on every project. But with a frequency that, when you lay it out in sequence, stops looking like luck and starts looking like something else.

There’s something about this place. Oregon.

Something about the combination of landscape and light and crews and community and a film office that has been building the conditions for exactly this kind of work for sixty years. Something that keeps pulling first-time directors here, keeps giving them what they need, and keeps sending them to Park City and Austin and Woodstock and Mill Valley with films that win things.

So let’s count the darlings.

It starts - for the purposes of this accounting, at least - in Portland in April 2016.

Macon Blair had been here before. He’d co-produced and co-starred in Green Room, which shot around Astoria and Clackamas County in the fall of 2014. During that production he discovered Mississippi Records on North Mississippi Avenue and spent every dollar of his weekly per diem on vinyl.

Then he came back to Portland to direct his first feature: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, about a nursing assistant who gets burgled and decides, with the help of her strange neighbor, to find the thieves herself. Melanie Lynskey. Elijah Wood. Oregon company filmscience producing. Janet Weiss, the drummer for Sleater-Kinney, as a location scout.

Eighteen days. Shot in Portland.

After the festival screenings, Blair attended the Sundance closing ceremony alone and underdressed, certain he would not be called to the stage.

Then he was. It won the Grand Jury Prize. US Dramatic Competition. 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

A year later, in the spring of 2017, Debra Granik - whose Winter’s Bone had also premiered at Sundance, received four Academy Award nominations and launched a then unknown Jennifer Lawrence into the stratosphere - came to Oregon because she wanted to photograph the forest. “The temperate rainforest is a glorious thing to photograph with its textures, its patterns, its shades, its moisture, its reflections,” she told OPB. She shot Leave No Trace in thirty days. Forest Park. Eagle Fern Park in Clackamas County. A Christmas tree farm in Beaverton. The forests around Estacada. Ben Foster plays a traumatized veteran living off the grid with his teenage daughter. That actor was a young New Zealand actress in her first US feature film named Thomasin McKenzie, also the role that launched her career. Jojo Rabbit and Last Night in Soho and a career that is now, unmistakably, one of the more interesting in contemporary cinema.

And a performance that was found in the Oregon forest.

Leave No Trace premiered at Sundance in January 2018. It holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It played Cannes. Bleecker Street distributed it domestically, Sony internationally.

In November 2022, a first-time director named Greg Jardin made a body-swap horror comedy in an on-the-market mansion in the hills above Portland in eighteen days. It’s What’s Inside premiered in the Midnight section at Sundance in January 2024. The first offer came in within twenty-four hours. The bidding war lasted thirty-six hours. Netflix paid $17 million, the largest acquisition deal of the entire 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

“I can’t believe they spent this,” Jardin said. “I still can’t.”

Three Sundance films. Three distinct directors. Three direct paths from Portland to the most important independent film festival in America, and from there to audiences around the world. Stories told. Careers launched.

But this is where the story gets more interesting than just a few (successful) Sundance movies.

In the summer of 2023, Kyle Hausmann-Stokes came to Oregon to make My Dead Friend Zoe.

Hausmann-Stokes is a US Army combat veteran who enlisted one month before September 11, 2001, served five years, and received a Bronze Star in Iraq. The film he came to make is autobiographical, a dark comedy about a female Afghanistan veteran navigating grief, a dead best friend who appears to her as a ghost, and a fraught relationship with an estranged Vietnam vet grandfather. Sonequa Martin-Green. Natalie Morales. Ed Harris. Morgan Freeman. Travis Kelce as an executive producer, in his film producing debut. A story that could only have been told by someone who had actually been there.

He shot in Portland, Forest Grove, and Molalla. At one point he needed access to a rodeo in Molalla for a key scene. The director of the rodeo was also an Army veteran. He agreed to let the production film: on one condition. Hausmann-Stokes had to agree to receive a prestigious award at the rodeo, which would involve being placed in the back of a pickup truck with fireworks and music playing.

He accepted the terms. The rodeo is in the film.

My Dead Friend Zoe won the Narrative Spotlight Audience Award at SXSW 2024. Then the Grand Jury Prize at the Woodstock Film Festival, alongside the Audience Award and Best Cinematography - three awards from a jury that included, with a neat synchronicity, Debra Granik, whose Leave No Trace had won at Sundance six years earlier in the same forests where this film was also made. Then the Audience Award at Mill Valley. The film holds 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and was released theatrically nationwide in February 2025.

Hausmann-Stokes said that his very first location scout - arriving at Portland International Airport, seeing the Oregon-made movie posters on the walls of the terminal - gave him “pre-confidence that we were going to be okay there.”

In 2025, a first-time director named Graham Parkes shot Wishful Thinking in Portland.

A science-fiction romantic comedy about a couple whose emotional states have supernatural effects on the world around them. Earthquakes, stock markets, entire nations at risk because two people in Portland can’t figure out their relationship. Parkes has said that he wrote the part with his friend in mind. That was Lewis Pullman. Maya Hawke then signed on almost immediately. The final cut was delivered to SXSW days before the festival began.

Wishful Thinking won the Narrative Feature Competition Jury Prize at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Sony Pictures Classics acquired it. Reviewers reached for Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy as the closest comparison. The cast includes, in a small role, Julia Morizawa - a Portland-based writer, producer, and actor with twenty years of experience in film and theatre who, in the month after Wishful Thinking screened at SXSW, was sitting in the Alder Ballroom of the Dossier Hotel in Portland as a member of the inaugural The Bridge: From Oregon to Industry cohort, learning how to navigate the industry.

That is the local Oregon Creative matrix working as it always does. Julia having a role in an award winning #OregonMade film and participating in a program to help get her own feature film made during the same Spring season.

And that is what an ecosystem looks like when it is working.

It looks like A Simple Machine.

No Park City. No Austin. A local filmmaker, a local cast, a local story, a local crowd of cyclists recruited from Bike Happy Hour to fill a nighttime scene in the Central Eastside. Based on a Portland novel by a Portland writer. Directed by Mark Alan Hoffman, who lives here, shot by cinematographer Kevin Fletcher, who balanced, as one reviewer noted, both the architectural beauty and the urban decay of the Rose City (and, again as an example of the Oregon Creative matrix at work, was the Director of Photography on It’s What’s Inside). It’s a film so Portland that it posits proper bicycle etiquette as the secret to happiness.

A Simple Machine premiered at the Lighthouse International Film Festival in June 2025. It traveled the festival circuit. It won the prestigious Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature Film at the 50th Cleveland International Film Festival.

Six films. Six unique filmmakers. Grand Jury Prizes at Sundance and Woodstock. Audience Awards at SXSW, Cleveland. A 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. A $17 million Netflix deal. A Sony Pictures Classics acquisition. A Narrative Feature Competition Jury Prize at SXSW.

Each of them sent to a festival with a film nobody outside a tight circle had seen yet.

Each of them coming back with something and nothing more to prove.

But.

We’re not surprised.

We’ve been building this for a while.