This year’s festival will include the Best of the Northwest Filmmakers Festival, featuring that festival’s 2012 audience prizewinner for best feature, Buoy, plus three short films. Steve Doughton’s film plumbs its drama, miraculously, from a single 80-minute telephone call, and has been lauded by Todd Haynes as “exquisitely controlled and grounded in its pitch-perfect performances, writing and direction.” Doughton will accompany his film in person.

Also coming from Portland will be director Brian Lindstrom with Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, the sensation of the recent Portland International Film Festival. Called “infuriating, tragic, heartbreaking, and incendiary in equal measures” by Willamette Week, the film, whose presentation is cosponsored with the Good Works Film Festival, delves into the tragic beating and killing of Chasse by Portland police and asks larger questions about how society treats mental illness.

Best of the Northwest Filmmakers Festival with Steve Doughton:
April 19 at 6:30 p.m., Bijou

Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse with Brian Lindstrom:
April 20 at 6:30 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.