THE RED BUS THEATRE

Open daily 5-9p to guests & the public!

*Please no food or drink. Thank you!


Now Showing

Wide Blue Yawn – An experimental documentary film by Eva Knowles

The idea for Wide Blue Yawn occurred to Eva after observing a UFO while alone on the beach in October 2020. She always had a powerful relationship to the Long Beach Peninsula, having grown up coming here for family getaways since she was a child–and so, after her mysterious encounter she decided to embark on deeper research of this place and make a film about it. Wide Blue Yawn attempts to capture layers of history at the mouth of the Columbia River and to honor the specific feelings evoked by the rugged pacific northwest geology, the spiritual presence of the first human inhabitants (the Chinookan people), and all that has unfolded since Lewis and Clark hit the scene in 1805. Wide Blue yawn spans centuries and wonders at how we ended up here, in our strange present reality.

Eva Knowles was born in 1990 and grew up in Bonney Lake, Washington. Her films are shot with a handheld digital camcorder and have an intimate and personal feeling. As an artist Eva is concerned with the mysterious, the sublime, and the mundane. She has worked as a teacher, a farmer, and also practices reiki. She has many projects in the works about fascinating topics.

Contact: email: eeva.knowles@gmail.com / instagram

Curated by Nikki Cormaci



Theatre Archive


“1000 WATERS” BY JULIE PERINI

Screening July – Nov 2023

1000 WATERS is a video meditation on the element of water. When filmmaker Julie Perini feels
disconnected from herself, loved ones, or the Earth, she finds it helpful to remember that water is
relentless in its efforts to connect. Water is in constant motion, changing and transforming, linking
everything to everything else on this planet and beyond. All of the shots in 1000 WATERS are culled from
Perini’s archive of daily video shooting with a consumer camera, a Flip camera or iPhone. Since April 1,
2011, she has been shooting a single-take, 60-second video each day, called a Minute Movie. She recently organized the Minute Movies into a massive database of over 5000 shots. About 20% of the shots in the archive contain water in the form of streams, lakes, the ocean, fountains, waterfalls, bath tubs, sinks, rain, hot springs, and more.

Julie Perini is a documentary and experimental filmmaker, daily videomaker, diary keeper, video artist,
reader, writer, teacher, question asker, raw nerve, hot spring hopper, product of white suburbs of New
York and DIY culture of the 90s, and friend to many. Her involvement with the post-9/11 “War on Terror”
spurred her work with prison and police abolitionist movements. She exhibits work in theaters,
community spaces, galleries, campgrounds, storefronts, the sides of bridges, and many other venues. She sees movies in actual movie theaters. Julie likes old cameras and eats pancakes at a diner at least once a week. Originally from New York, she is a Professor of Art at Portland State University in Portland,
Oregon.

Curated by Nikki Cormaci


Portraits, Men in Ballgowns, Sound, We Will Be Heard” by Scott Braucht

Scott Brauchts films are screening in a special exhibition celebrating Pacific County Pride in our Red Bus Theatre May 29 – July 14.

Portraits is a collection of film interviews shot both on super 8mm and digital formats. It includes a selection from the series Men in Ballgowns, exploring ideas of masculinity and femininity in the LGBTQ2SIA+ community. This work-in-progress highlights men wearing gowns in different environments filmed on super 8mm with audio interviews detailing how growing up LGBTQ2SIA+ reflects in their art. Portraits concludes with the short film Mel & Kate about letting go and moving on. // Sound is a collection of music videos featuring the short documentary We Will Be Heard about rappers that identify as LGBTQIA+.

Scott Braucht makes narrative, documentary films and music videos focusing but not limited to LGBTQ2IA+ themes. His purpose is to make and share daring stories for those voices not visible in the media. The trailer for their first feature-length documentary Dear Doris premiered at Sydney WorldPride. As a gay, cisgender man, Scott grew up consuming cult films and 80s music videos. After moving
to Portland he fell in love with super 8mm film and still finds ways to incorporate it in his filmmaking.

Curated by Nikki Cormaci


Lindsay Costello

Lindsay Costello shares her diaristic 8mm nature films accompanied an exhibition from Costello and Erika Callihan in our Art Trailer Gallery titled, “What Else is Here?

Costello is an experimental writer and artist with an academic background in textiles and book arts at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She is currently studying herbalism at the Elderberry School. Her writing can be read in Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Art & About, Oregon Artswatch, and Textile: Cloth and Culture, among other places. She is interested in how storytelling and the natural world intersect in the processing of traumatic experiences. Her creative practices are interwoven, informed by birdwatching, walks, and the wetlands near her apartment.

Curated by Nikki Cormaci


As part of Arts Week 2023:

PENNY the Conduit” by Kelly Nesbitt

PENNY is a film about mourning the recent loss of my father, burnout from working in the ICU, and finding solace through the use of play – as exemplified by the character Penny’s awkward yet earnest commitment to meditation, nature worship, and conversations with a radically different kind of deity. Penny is a conduit who expresses our collective grief and despair, yet exemplifies the unquenchable hope that lies deeper in the human heart. Death, mourning, and healing are overt themes of this piece. Kelly Nesbitt (she/they) is a transdisciplinary artist, culture weaver, humor healer, and frontline healthcare worker. Nesbitt’s performances employ drag costuming, makeshift props, and lowbrow intermedia aesthetics. Films experiment with imagery and sound design through the use of audio mash-ups and sync-error humor (where the recorded score and movements are purposely out of sync). Nesbitt embodies endearing forms, utilizes self-referential humor, and plays with the concepts of mask/counter-mask – while playing the underdog. Watch “Penny the Conduit” now.

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Rachel Slater in collaboration with Janet Goulston

Tell me a story, Mama” Rachel Slater is a dance film artist and educator based in New Orleans, LA, and Portland, OR. She is currently an MFA Candidate at Tulane University. Slater is in Portland this spring caring for her mother. Together they are urgently working on a family storytelling recording project before cancer claims the memories. 
Tell me a story, Mama shows artist Rachel Slater facing her mother, Janet Goulston’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Together they gather Goulston’s stories and collect the history no one else knows, including her days protesting the Vietnam War and performing in street circuses in San Francisco. 
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Sanford & Gosti

Suspended Rocks at SeaviewSANDFORD&GOSTI have merged their work for single artistic events. Having worked side by side since 1976, they decided to present their work under a single signature in 2000. The works produced alternatively by both artists find in each other motivation and stimulus, inventiveness and dialogue from the first phases of ideation and realization. SANDFORD&GOSTI enact their project titled ACTIONS PER in/FINITE FORMS, carry forward the idea of RECURRENT FLUCTUATION OF EVENTS (WAVES OF re/ACTION) and the periodicity of actions hypothesis. Their artistic media include installation, performance, video and digital photography, and silkscreens. “Suspended Rocks” is an expression of the need for balance and contrast, structure and tension, harmony and inclusivity. It illustrates the simultaneous existence of manmade and natural objects. It reflects the concept of “sustainability” – a fragile transparent ecosystem that sustains the weight and solidity of human impact – and of contrasting identities that work together to create a single world. The installation may be seen as reflecting a cosmos, a world, a nation, a landscape, a city, or an individual person. It embodies a sense of delicacy and at the same time of respect, and as you say, “dignity” in difference.


Structures of Nature & Structures of Form by Ben Popp

Program Notes: 

Structures of Nature and Structures of Form are two programs investigating the ways in which cinematic stories can be constructed. While the substance of each work may be different, they all begin with editing and animation as the basic core building blocks with a mind towards how a work may be sculpted rather than simply put forward in a traditional linear fashion. Incorporating improvisation, repetition, looping, and spirals as metaphors for how a piece may unfold, the program is broken into two distinct themes. 

Structures of Nature deals with works that have been made in tandem with the natural world in large part from diary based expeditions in which images taken at a specific moment in time are later re-constructed to expand upon the notion of what existed in that particular moment in time. The films Yard Sitting, Oceanic Rounds, An Eastardly Journey, Coastal Observations, Windy Beach Morning, and An Afternoon Stroll at Thousand Acres Park, were all made with a still camera and combining multiple images together in repetitive loops with live and recorded audio to both mimic the natural world, while also diving deeper into what may exist in a plane just on the other side of our own perceptions. East Lake Sans Souci and HearNW were both shot on a Super 16mm camera in which the image extends into the area upon which a soundtrack might traditionally be laid, so that the image itself is creating sound. These two films expand upon this notion of what a photographed nature sounds like, both as improvised and composed layering of sound and image. Home is Heart is a hand drawn stop motion animation utilizing loops to examine how our breath, and pumping blood is directly tied to the continual rhythms of our home, Earth. Finally EARTH by the Cult of Ma and Quilt Patch Landscape incorporate digitally edited found footage and hand made direct animated loops to create “still moving images, or matte based films” in which the axis of linearity extended into the “z” or inwards, rather than the traditional “y”, or left to right. Similarly to the films listed in the first program, Structures of Form offers a glimpse into alternative methods for storytelling. Que Pasado, Episode 8 of the Lyric Project, The Oregon Fruit Tramp, and DEVOUR all embody live action narratives utilizing repetition, re-timing, and re-mixing, to help drive stories of loss, change, and trickery. Les Images Des Une Image, Blackhole Anteater Plays Home, A Growing Seeds Animation, and Juxtaposition are documentaries on an idea, persons, and places created as improvisational experimentations involving a single image, a musician, a group of 3 year olds, and the colors and shapes in an urban setting. Flip Flop, A Thauma-Tale, and Between the Lines, are animation based works using hand drawings, cut out, and digital effects to bring a story down to its most simplistic level, an action that sets off a path to other actions. Finally Words is a work playing with timing, re-structuring, repetition, and cyclical improvisation, as three words continually change to create different emotional statements.

Ben Popp is a filmmaker, animator, curator, and educator. Born in New Mexico where he was first introduced to animation and home movies using the family VHS camera. In 1999 Ben moved to Milwaukee Wisconsin where he got his hands dirty with 16mm in large part due to the Riverwest Film Co-Op and the kind hearted Micalea O’Herlihy. He returned to NM to finish a degree in Media Arts from the University of New Mexico before heading to Chicago where at the School of the Art Institute he began to work more with matting, and combining super 8, 16mm, and digital media, beginning to understand more the idea of structuralism and how this particular medium might be sculpted by time. In 2007 he received his MFA and moved across the country to Portland, Oregon. Here Ben co-found a microcinema, Grand Detour, with artists Dustin Zemel, Hannah Piper Burns, and Karl Lind. The cinema programmed works by both local, regional, and touring media artists. During this time Ben began teaching animation and video to youth throughout the greater Portland area while also teaching workshops at colleges such as Pacific University and Dartmouth College. In 2012 Grand Detour, now under Ben and Hannah Piper Burns created the Experimental Film Festival Portland, a five day festival highlighting single channel, multi-channel, and performative works from local, national, and International media artists. In 2014 Ben was awarded the prestigious Oregon Media Arts Fellowship and the following year took over the long-running Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival for the Northwest Film Center. He is currently the Head of Artist Services for the Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow and teaches animation through Portland State University’s School of Art + Design. 

Curated by Nikki Cormaci


ALWAYS PREGNANT PAUSE by SAM TAM HAM

SAM TAM HAM is an interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Portland, OR (stolen Chinook territory). Their practice functions more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but creatively and critically fertile nexus of intersecting inquiries. Whether as film, sound, installation, writing, painting, or performance, Sam has worked across the globe presenting work at Whitechapel Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Issue Project Room (NYC), ARTSPACE Aotearoa (NZ), Transmediale (Berlin), and much more.


In ALWAYS PREGNANT PAUSE, sam presents four artist film-works shot on celluloidal moving image film. Each film is a no-edit single-take shot employing the full end-to-end length of a roll of film (both 16mm & super 8) as parameters for determining the length of a
performance. Treating the material film like a stage or a canvas where defined physical limitations intrinsically dictate the shape of that which inhabits them. Although a variety of concepts are explored across the 4x works, they’re all pregnant pauses. Prefaces to
meaning. Rather than explaining themselves with easily consumable deliverables, they require you to invest yourself a little more than usual. Only getting something out of them if you’re willing to put something in.

Curated by Nikki Cormaci


Sou’wester Arts Week 2022 Extended Run – The Cabin Carport Projections

Sou’wester Arts Week 2022 artists Nicky Kriara & Cory Gray, Bobbie Robinson & Jordan Badger, Andie Sterling, and Rachel Blumberg created the four films featured in our spring Red Bus program. The filmmakers inhabited our four cabins during Arts Week 2022 and projected these films in the cabin carports during the closing weekend’s exhibitions, performances and installations. The four films screened alongside each other, layered over two beautiful sets of live music from drummers Bobbie Robinson and Rachel Blumberg (accompanied by Cory Gray), alongside the interactive environmental art installation of ceramist Nicky Kriara, and transforming the cabin into a tidal, “living projection” by the hand of animator Andie Sterling. What remains as traces of Arts Week, in all its light and sound leaking of one project to the next, are these films, featured here, concentrated and focused, on a loop starting May 10.


OneOK, and We’ll find you when the sun goes black by Anouk De Clerq

Belgian filmmaker Anouk De Clercq is our featured Artist-In-Residence in the lead up to Sou’wester Arts Week 2022. Anouk’s residency will culminate in daily screenings of One (2020)OK (2021) and We’ll find you when the sun goes black (2021); on rotation beginning Thursday, March 24th in the Sou’wester’s red bus micro cinema. Free and open to the public 5-9 p.m. daily.


Woman and non-binary directed films Curated by Nora Colie of POW Film Fest.

  1.     “Aguaviva” – By Alexa Lim Haas 6:48
  2.     “Turk Shop” – By Bahar Pars 6:40
  3.     “Applied Pressure” – By Kelly Sears 6:22
  4.     “Inocencia Enjaulada” – By 2:35
  5.     “Ziggy & the Starfish” – By Anne Duk Hee Jordan 16:28
  6.    “Noni & Elisabeth” – By Nana blondell 15:05
  7.    “All Men Must Die” – By Kate Beacom 9:02
  8.    “After Fall” – By Kelly Sears 3:19
  9.    “Liquor Store Babies” – By So Yun Um 5:04 

POW FILM FEST AND THE POWGIRLS MEDIA EDUCATION PROGRAM ARE IN SOLIDARITY WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER. WE CONDEMN ALL ACTS OF RACISM AND VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACK COMMUNITIES. WE SPEAK UP IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR FELLOW BLACK STAFF, VOLUNTEERS, FILMMAKERS, PANELISTS AND STUDENTS, AND THE ENTIRE BLACK COMMUNITY BECAUSE BLACK LIVES MATTER.

POW FILM FEST WAS ESTABLISHED AS AN ORGANIZATION THAT LIFTS UP AND AMPLIFIES THE VOICE OF UNDERREPRESENTED WOMEN AND NON-BINARY DIRECTORS, CREATING A PLATFORM TO SHARE THEIR WORK WITH THE GREATER PORTLAND COMMUNITY AND BEYOND. RECOGNIZING THAT MODERN-DAY FEMINISM IS BORN FROM A WHITE LENS AND THAT SUFFRAGETTES OF THE 1920S DISMISSED THE VOICES OF BLACK WOMEN, WE KNOW WE HAVE MUCH WORK TO DO. WE SHOWCASE FILMS THAT REFLECT ALL WOMEN DIRECTORS, AND WE HAVE WORKED ON BUILDING AN ORGANIZATION THAT UPLIFTS AND GIVES VOICES TO BLACK WOMEN AND NON-BLACK WOMEN OF COLOR, TRANSGENDER WOMEN AND NON-BINARY FOLKS, QUEER WOMEN, DISABLED WOMEN, AND THE MANY WOMEN THAT SIT AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF THESE IDENTITIES. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT INTERSECTIONALITY IN FEMINISM IS VITAL.


House curated films selected by Sora Blu

  1. Vignette – “Ness Hollow” By Sora Blu 2:25
  2. Vignette – “Dead Betty” By Sora Blu 1:50
  3. Vignette – “Jessica Owens”By Sora Blu 1:36
  4. Music Video -“Simple Pleasantries” By Rosetan 2:38
  5. Music Video – “When you go” By Darren Hanlon 4:12
  6. Vignette – “Honey” By Sora Blu 2:11
  7. Micro Doc – “Bog Town” By Sora Blu 2:08
  8. Micro Doc – “All Wild” By Sora Blu 2:37
  9. Vignette – “A Window In” By Sora Blu 2:03
  10. Music Video – “Today is My Day” – By Jet Black Pearl 4:31
  11. Music Video – “Ivory Coast” – By Pure Bathing Culture 3:28
  12. “Seekers” Short Film by Mikey Kampmann and Travis Woolsey 10:00

Sou’Wester Arts is a non-profit 501c3 organization that helps fund our art, music, and wellness programming. Our mission is to be of service to the artist community at large by providing a space for folks to create, connect, restore, and renew in order to experience transformation within themselves and their work. Subscribe to Sou’westerTV