The Portland Unknown is a globally minded, yet community centered film festival seeking films made with a genuine heart, a radical soul, and psychedelic nature. We aim to uplift mind bending, innovative film made with limited resources on a low budget. Calling all young and fresh groundbreaking filmmakers, old punks who never had their day in the sun, and explorers of things that don’t yet exist.

The Portland Unknown are:

Queer exalting, female empowering, trans adoring, lovers of BIPoC lives. Working class folk, sick of working for a patriarchal, white supremacist regime, in favor of decolonization. Immigrant embracing, spiritually inclined individuals who believe in people over property. Earth loving, plastic shamers, against the prison industrial complex. Sex worker esteeming, police abolitionist, kkkop haters. Learning everyday how to be better neighbors who are more anti racist than the day before. Neither Democrat nor Republican, education glorifying, discussion inducing, millennial shits on a mission to eat the rich.

We really want to stress - Black Lives More Than Matter and Fuck the Police

We acknowledge we are living, working, and playing on unceded Atfalati, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Clatskanie, Kalapuya, Molalla, and Multnomah land.

Where your entry fee goes:

We at The Unknown, really hate monetizing art which is why we have always kept entry fees substantially lower than other festivals.  We wish we had the ability to charge $0 for all entries but currently entry fees are the only way we can afford to pay for venue, equipment, festival hospitality, and to pay artists when we can.  This has not been and never will be a money making venture and the organizers do not get paid a dime.  Hopefully as the U.S. changes, we can begin to tear away from capitalistic norms and everyone will have enough to bring beauty into this world while those who strive to take beauty away will go into extinction.

In an effort to equalize the playing field, The Unknown chooses NOT to invite film and only selects films from the current season’s crop of entries.  If you are unable to pay to enter, please contact us.  At the end of each month we will be able to offer a small number of entry fee waivers.