NWFF: “Rest assured: we will be in Capitol Hill for at least a couple more years, but the pandemic has illuminated the need for organizations like ours to secure ownership of their venues. We have seen arts organizations lose their spaces all around the city. In each year of our 26-year history, we have welcomed more audiences and offered more services; we want to continue that work well into the future.”
Hua
The art house chain theaters disappeared long ago. Now, Capitol Hill’s remaining independent and nonprofit screens are struggling through the pandemic to stay lit including on 12th Ave where the neighborhood’s Northwest Film Forum has started a search for a new home. First, the organization must find a new leader.
After leading the organization through months of pandemic restrictions and its time within the borders of the CHOP protest zone, executive director Vivian Hua has announced plans to step down from the nonprofit film and arts center to start 2022.
“It has been a wonderful adventure to serve an arts organization which intentionally takes action towards evolving for the better,” Hua said in the announcement. “l have been heartened to welcome new audiences and hear personal stories from diverse creators who feel the Film Forum has become a home for them. Being NWFF’s first POC Executive Director has also been a significant milestone.”
Earlier this month, Hua told CHS the NWFF’s new capital campaign is the start of what should be about a two year process of finding a new home for the organization.
“We’ve outgrown the space, especially in terms of education,” Hua said, saying the forum is interested in long term stability. “Owning the space is loosely the goal,” the filmmaker and writer said.
Hua took the helm of NWFF in 2018. “There is no more powerful medium than film said at the time,” Hua said. “I work at the intersection of using art as a means of social change and discussion.” The executive director talked with CHS earlier this year about the work and challenges in reopening the theater and center under COVID-19 restrictions. During the CHOP period and following months, Hua made the 12th Ave facility available as “a bit of a ‘safe house’ or ‘safe space’ for grassroots journalists who were on the ground” and, later, “a mutual aid station for houseless and under-resourced people within Cal Anderson Park.”
As Seattle’s reopening continues and NWFF’s board looks to the future, it is likely the forum’s mission has outgrown its longtime home.
NWFF traces its origin to the 1995 launch of WigglyWorld Studios, a post-production outfit that got its start in the neighborhood. The organization quickly grew into other aspects of film, including teaching and screening, and moved into an old 12th Ave storefront in the early 2000s, creating the theater and film arts center we know today.
The building, once home to the Klineburger Brothers taxidermists and neighboring the fortress-like East Precinct, is part of real estate investor and arts supporter Elizabeth Linke’s 12th Ave holdings. In December 2020, Velocity Dance Center, another arts organization that called a Linke building home on 12th Ave, announced it was ending its 24-year run on Capitol Hill and searching for a new location.
Hua said it was unclear if Northwest Film Forum could find the stability the organization seeks remaining on 12th. “There is an argument to be made for staying and an argument to be made for going, too,” Hua said.
One hope is for NWFF to possibly team up with other like-minded organizations in a kind of community hub, Hua said. Over recent years, Tasveer, producer of Seattle’s South Asian film festival, media nonprofit Seattle Globalist, indigenous arts group Longhouse Media, and more have shared office space with NWFF.
For now, NWFF is gathering feedback and ideas and Hua said the organization especially wants to hear from filmmakers and patrons.
The venue has also reopened for in-person festivals and screenings while continuing to maintain its pandemic-era hybrid and streaming capabilities.
Northwest Film Forum is located at 1515 12th Ave. You can learn more at nwfilmforum.org.
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