NO MORE DOPE PARTIES Writer/Director/Editor
29 min / 6K / 2019 Essay Documentary
Alongside local heroes Woody Guthrie and weed, two giant sequoia trees in Portland become a nexus point for a local woman’s contemplation of motherhood, creative identity, and the evolving violence of settling down in the Pacific Northwest.
Through a hyper-local landscape essay focused on a pair of trees in Portland’s deep southeast Lents neighborhood, the filmmaker compares her experience as an artist-parent to that of folk singer Woody Guthrie, who once lived blocks away. Guthrie’s lyrics celebrating opportunity for the family man play out against historical and cyclical forces of pioneer land domination, rampant, divisive construction, and homeless and indigenous displacement. While life as a mother challenges the filmmaker’s identity as an artist, truths about Guthrie’s personal life emerge that reveal a more compromised vision of a Western paradise than his lyrics would suggest.
Meditative shots of the sequoia trees and their immediate universe — sub/urban home, freeway, playground, park, construction site — provide a visual topography for the filmmaker’s reflections that register as much a question mark as a valentine to this uniquely storied corner of the city. The sequoias remain visible in almost every frame, alternately serving as witness, judge, symbol, or sanctuary.
Shot and colored to echo the weathered timelessness of a family snapshot, NO MORE DOPE PARTIES is an intimate film about connection to place, meanings of home, and the risks and rewards of stability and longing
"Cambria's film explores the difficult, complicated and ultimately joyous adventures of motherhood through the history of her Pacific Northwest home and Woody Guthrie. She weaves all three story lines together through her unique point of view and gorgeous cinematography." Maria Rhodes, Rooftop Films
“Matlow's may well be the widest-reaching and most experimental of the entries, a languid, first-person script that touches on everything from the construction of Interstate 205 to Woody Guthrie's 1941 residence in Lents.” Chance Solem-Pfeifer, Willamette Week
OFFICIAL SELECTION Portland Film Circuit POW Film Fest Seattle Transmedia & Independent Film Festival Time/Space @ Eugene Contemporary Art
NO MORE DOPE PARTIES was made in conjunction with NW Documentary’s anthology project Canopy Stories. 13 films showed collectively in Portland, OR over four nights at the Hollywood Theatre, Clinton Theater, Cinema 21 and Northwest Film Center through the Portland Film Circuit.