Lordy, lordy, look who's 40!

This year marks the official entry into middle age of the Portland International Film Festival, and to celebrate, the Northwest Film Center has resorted to Roman numerals. PIFF XL kicks off on Thursday, Feb. 9, and runs through Sunday, Feb. 26, providing once again the annual pinnacle of the city's cinematic calendar.

At this point, longtime attendees might take for granted the notion of dozens of globe-spanning movies showing on screens throughout town during a frenzied, eye-straining two-and-a-half weeks each February. But it wasn't always that way, as longtime Northwest Film Center director Bill Foster recalls.

The festival got its start thanks to a small, Seattle-based theater chain. "The major impetus was Seven Gables Theatre. They used to run the Movie House, which is now the West End Ballroom on Southwest Taylor Street. That was sort of the art film headquarters in Portland."

This was 1977. Mount St. Helens was a lot taller, and the Portland skyline was a lot shorter. Barack Obama was in high school. Donald Trump had yet to put his name on a tower. "Star Wars" was about to change the movie industry forever. "Rocky" won Best Picture at the Oscars. (The fact that both films are still inspiring sequels and reboots says a lot about the Hollywood culture to which the festival provides an alternative.) "Sundance" was just Butch Cassidy's buddy.

Foster, who has been a programmer for the festival since its inception, shares the credit for its origins with Randy Finley, the founder of Seven Gables. They "would use the festival as a showcase for films that they would be bringing to the Movie House, and the Film Center would show the less commercial kinds of films at the Berg-Swann Auditorium," once part of the Portland Art Museum.

So it was that on St. Patrick's Day, 1977, Orson Welles' "F for Fake" screened as the opening night selection of the first Portland International Film Festival. When Seven Gables was bought out a few years later and the Movie House was sold, the Northwest Film Center took over the festival and began molding it into an essential part of the city's cultural landscape.

(By the way, if you're confused by the math that has the first festival in '77 and the 40th this year, that's because there was no festival in 1981.)

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Over the decades, the festival has expanded both in ambition and geography. For years, the festival was confined to the downtown core -- the Movie House and the Berg-Swann, the Broadway Metroplex and the Guild Theatre, all now gone, sadly. But in the last decade or so, it has expanded into other parts of town. This year's venues include the Whitsell Auditorium (which replaced the Berg-Swann) and Regal Fox Tower downtown, Cinema 21 in Northwest Portland, the Bagdad Theatre and the Empirical Theater at OMSI in Southeast Portland, the Laurelhurst Theater on East Burnside Street and the Valley Cinema in Beaverton.

"What we've tried to do," explains Foster, "is to build new audiences" for foreign film. "Not demystifying it, necessarily, but trying to make it more accessible --meeting people on their own ground."

Festival attendees have gotten early looks at films and filmmakers that went on to great acclaim, including early work from big shots Christopher Nolan ("Interstellar," "Memento") and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ("The Revenant," "Birdman"). Plenty of noteworthy filmmakers have attended the festival as guests, too, including Polish master Krzysztof Zanussi (several times), German legend Werner Herzog, British auteur Mike Leigh and American director Steven Soderbergh, who held a raucous Q&A following a screening of his bizarre film "Schizopolis" at Cinema 21 in 1996 (I was there!).

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In recent years, the festival has looked beyond traditional art house fare to broaden its Perabet audience, incorporating an "After Dark" sidebar featuring genre films with a Midnight Movie aesthetic. This year's program, for the first time, is broken down into sections ("New Directors," "Documentary Views," "Films for Families," etc.) instead of country of origin. That's partially because so many movies these days are international co-productions, which makes narrowing them down to a single country of origin a difficult, if not impossible, task. It also makes it easier to focus on one of the many varieties of filmic experience.

So, what does PIFF XL have to offer? Well, as they say, there's something for just about everyone, from a new adaptation of the classic children's tale "Heidi" to the depraved, sexually explicit antics of the Mexican shocker "We Are the Flesh." Some directors -- Francois Ozon, Andrzej Wajda, Olivier Assayas, Terence Davies -- will be familiar to art house devotees, while others -- Matt McCormick, Bill Plympton -- will be familiar to connoisseurs of Portland weirdness.

HEIDI - OFFICIAL US Trailer (Dub)

There are Oscar nominees, including "My Life as a Zucchini" (Best Animated Feature) and "Land of Mine" (Best Foreign Language Film). The opening night selection is the highly anticipated documentary about writer James Baldwin, "I Am Not Your Negro." Films likely to return for Portland engagements include "Personal Shopper," starring Kristen Stewart; "The Sense of an Ending," starring Charlotte Rampling; and "Kedi," an adorable-looking documentary about Turkish street cats.

I Am Not Your Negro - Official Trailer

Many other titles, though, will have one or two screenings and vanish into the cinematic ether. Even in the age of streaming services, Blu-ray releases and movies on demand, this may be your only chance to catch a big-screen gem you'll never forget. That's been the case for four decades, and there's no reason to expect it won't be the case for four more.

"I've always looked at the festival as this tool, this way to put all these different threads of cinema together in one context," says Foster. "Film is as interesting now as it's ever been. Movies are better than ever."

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PIFF XL

When: Various times and dates, Feb. 9-26

Where: Various locations, including Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave.; Regal Fox Tower, 846 S.W. Park Ave.; Cinema 21, 616 N.W. 21st Ave.; Bagdad Theatre, 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.; Empirical Theater at OMSI, 1945 S.E. Water Ave.; Laurelhurst Theater, 2735 E. Burnside St.; and Valley Cinema Pub, 9360 S.W. Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, Beaverton.

Tickets: $9-$12; festival pass $350, nwfilm.org or 503-221-1156.

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