It’s time for PDFF 2025!
Join us for three unique nights of PDFF Picks in partnership with PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater. This year’s festival shares 25 films from 14 different countries that dive into moments of grief, joy, love, and rage. We hope to see you there!
2025 SCHEDULE
September 19th – 21st, 2025
SCREENING
Sept 19th | 7:00
@ The Tomorrow Theater
PICKS 1
We begin our festival with a cohort of nine earnest, light-soaked offerings of dance and film. Picks 1 opens with a solo poem that glides across the skin, celebrating the body as earth (Brown Boys, Australia), and closes with an ensemble of women throwing wide their rage (Maldonne, France).
In between, we’re invited into stories of round repetition and soft fatigue (Corralling of Circles, China), and into layered digital elements laid over bodies seeking passage (SLUGS, USA/Oregon). We meet Carmen (Spain), a young street flamenco superstar, and are held in the precise and fierce tension of a daughter’s plea for freedom (Spoken Movement Family Honour, United Kingdom).
The second half of Picks 1 begins with I’m Here (United Kingdom), a collaborative exploration of grief danced by former and current members of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. From there, we move into the cultural crossroads of the Silk Road in the goddess-inspired Kucha (China), and finally to the sweet, colorful pas de deux Passing By (United States), which sails us into the coiled fury of Maldonne, where we end the night in defiance and sisterhood.
SCREENING
Sept 2oth | 7:00
@ The Tomorrow Theater
PICKS 2
The eight films of Picks 2 explore the slippery layers of time and how we surrender into its supposed reality. We begin with The Joy and Sorrow of Time (Denmark), a sunlit meditation on community vibrancy and the delicate dance of possibilities. In i am woman (USA/Oregon) we peer into the cyclical flow and screech of a woman’s daily meeting of the world as the wheels fall off and she cleanses the discord.
From there we are delivered into the hypersaturated, supernatural arms of HipHop Purée (Australia) in which two sisters confront one another on a perilous journey to Thursday night’s dinner in their suburban home. The color continues and then fades in SEASONS (Poland), a playful and editorial expression of nature’s themes in four distinct chapters.
The second half begins with The Meaning of February (USA/Oregon), a solo elegy of profound grief set in the particular weight of the Pacific Northwest winter. Kielo (Finland) reminds us: “We all have a poetic body that dances when encouraged.” Youth, neurodivergence, and the tension between sitting still and authentic movement are given compassionate time.
In One Human Show (USA), experimental film becomes a tool for questioning gender roles and societal hierarchies as the subject encounters themselves in varied roles, and we end the evening with the stunning film What Remains (Belgium), a haunting, multigenerational inquiry into memory, inheritance, and the shapes grief makes as it settles in the body.
SCREENING
Sept 21st | 7:00
@ The Tomorrow Theater
PICKS 3
We end our 2025 festival moving in elemental currents. We open with Breathless (United Kingdom), a study in balance and power performed within an enclosed circular space, the dancers caught in an infinity loop of relationship. Santa Barbara (Spain) follows with the stark beauty of snow, ash, a red hat, and one singular figure pressing into the landscape.
In A Mother’s Odyssey (Netherlands), the primal bond between mother and child plays out in gestures of routine and of two bodies reaching for something to hold, and in dust (USA/Oregon) the theme of caretaking continues on, refined by the coastal wilds of Oregon into a shifting landscape of legacy and the rhythm of ushering each other in and out of life.
The second half begins with Somber Tides (Canada), a duet of birdlike figures in an eco-dance of survival and bone deep chill. In Adam (United Kingdom), a dancer generously offers a solo very near the death of her father, a longtime collaborator of Pina Bausch in an intimate choreography of feathers and tears.
your love: “walking” beside me (USA) evokes tenderness through the grainy Super 8 film and is a gentle honoring of love past that somehow still walks beside us. We close the night and our 2025 festival with Directions to the Other Side of the World (Ireland), in which one woman traverses the far reaches of rural Ireland to make peace with the darker edges of her spirit.