Property

March 25 · Regal Riviera · 3:15 P.M.

Penny Allen, 1979, 92 minutes

Well before Portlandia, there was Penny Allen’s Property. Allen’s debut feature follows a group of outcasts and eccentrics in a quest to buy their Portland block from real estate developers. The group’s shambolic quest is rendered with a humorous, unsentimental eye, which both honors and gently critiques its characters.

A prizewinner in 1978 at the inaugural US Film Festival (later rebranded as Sundance), the film is a rare example from the era of a female-directed effort produced outside New York or Los Angeles. (New York-set, female-directed independent films of this era include Joan Milkin Silver’s Hester Street, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, and Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, among others.)

Penny Allen went on to direct one more fiction feature in the US, Paydirt (1981), before relocating to France. Since then she has written books, authored photo strips, and produced documentary shorts and features. Her contribution to the Portland film scene produced lasting effects well beyond the films she herself directed. Property gave budding filmmaker Gus Van Sant his first film credit (as sound engineer), and it was on the set that Van Sant met author Walt Curtis, whose novel Mala Noche became the source for Van Sant’s first feature.