The Port Townsend Film Festival lasts three days, and presents 15 blocks of films, five per day.

Because I covered a news story on the morning of Friday, Sept. 20, I was only able to watch four of that day’s five blocks of films, but I made sure my schedule would be free and clear to watch all five blocks on both Saturday, Sept. 21, and Sunday, Sept. 22.

I came armed with 21 bottles of soda, two bags of potato chips, one bag of extra-sugary cereal and one fresh tin of raw cookie dough, to supply me with lunatic strength.

And I’m writing reviews for every feature-length and short film that I’ve watched this weekend.

Maximum effort. Total coverage.

We’re doing this.

Day one

THE BOWMAKERS

“The Bowmakers” not only elevates an oft-overlooked musical instrument, but also performs a deft interweaving of the historic origins of the bow, as well as the ongoing harvesting of its components, with a collection of profiles of modern-day bowmakers, including a few who are based here in Port Townsend.

Director Ward Serrill admitted that the craftsmanship of violin bows is not an inherently dramatic tale, so like his mentor Robert Altman, Serrill presented multiple parallel narratives:

• Internationally renowned Charles Espey, captured on camera as he painstakingly crafts a single bow while the film touches upon a number of other bowmakers whom he helped school in the art.

• Fellow Port Townsend bowmaker Paul Siefried, whom we follow through his job tribulations of losing his health, his employment, his home and his marriage in seemingly rapid succession.

• A hike through the Brazilian forests with “Senior Mario,” who leads the documentary camera crew to one of the Paubrasilia trees which have been harvested for hundreds of years to make bows.

“I wanted this film to be a river of discovery,” Serrill said. “I also wanted a film about music that actually allowed audiences to experience that music, rather than simply playing 10 seconds of people playing instruments before they started talking.”

Given how much bowmakers are like “hobbits working in man caves,” Serrill soon learned his interviews would be more successful if he conducted them while he allowed the bowmakers to continue working.

Rose Theatre co-owner Rocky Friedman appreciated that Serrill made him feel his voice was heard as a producer, and in turn, Friedman not only raised roughly $425,000 for a project whose original fundraising goal was just shy of $400,000, but he was also a hands-on, on-site partner in the process, which included getting eaten alive by mosquitos as they hiked the forests of Brazil.

Looking ahead, Friedman not only plans to produce another film by Serrill, but is also working with Andrea Love, who rendered the history lesson segments of “The Bowmakers” in stop-motion puppetry, to produce a film by her as well.

FROM SHOCK TO AWE

“From Shock to Awe” profiles two American military veterans and their wives, all of whom are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as they explore the use of the psychedelic medicines ayahuasca and methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine, the latter also known as MDMA, to treat their PTSD.

Matt Kahl served in the 101st Airborne Division from 2007-11, while Mike Cooley was deployed three times, once to Afghanistan and twice to Iraq, before he returned home in 2009.

Brooke Cooley met her husband Mike in 2007 while working at the 148th Military Police Detachment, and Aimee Kahl married Matt in 2007, after they first met in high school in 1994.

Both couples are raising children and are shown coping with the challenges of civilian life, but along the way,

Matt attempted suicide via overdose, Mike found himself flying into flashes of rage at his own family, Brooke became hooked on cocaine and methamphetamines to try and keep running the household while Mike fell apart, and Aimee felt shut out by Matt’s withdrawal and refusal to share the experiences that traumatized him.

In one scene, director Luc Côté conveys Mike’s PTSD in a subtle but effective way by filming him as he drives to his college classes and explains what he’s feeling to the camera, and the busier the traffic around him gets, the more twitchy Mike becomes, reflexively checking his side and rear-view mirrors with ever more frequency, because as he points out, when deployed to a war zone overseas, getting caught in a halted convoy could spell death.

Although both men report vastly improved symptoms with the use of cannabis as a treatment, it’s not until they join a retreat where they take ayahuasca that they seem to experience emotional breakthroughs.

Côté was asked if he felt the need to show instances where ayahuasca or MDMA hadn’t worked for those suffering from PTSD, but he claimed that all of the patients whom he followed over the course of four years of filming had positive experience with the psychedelic medicines.

Indeed, while the first rough cut of “From Shock to Awe” ran for five hours and included testimonials from medical experts and activist groups such as “Weed for Warriors,” Côté ultimately winnowed the film down to the Kahl and Cooley families, whom he deemed “the heart of the story.”

Preceding this film was the documentary short “Constant Thought,” about Iraq war veteran Brandon Kuehn’s attempts to manage his own PTSD through outdoor therapies.

While his initial approach, an attempt to walk the 2,650 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, is less than successful, Kuehn comes to realize that the key to healing is for his wife and son to join him as partners on his outdoor excursions, rather than cutting himself off from the emotional support that they want to provide him.

THE PRIMARY INSTINCT

As Stephen Tobolowsky jokes in “The Primary Instinct,” he’s been a supporting character actor in films dating back virtually to prehistory, and over the course of three decades and the better part of 300 credited movie and television roles, he’s become a more canny raconteur than many of his deadpan performances might indicate.

“The Primary Instinct” is an expansion of Tobolowsky’s popular podcast, “The Tobolowsky Files,” which began as a vehicle for anecdotes culled from his acting career, but eventually became a showcase for whatever storytelling he wished, including tales of his Texas childhood and his since-deceased parents.

Tobolowsky employs a disarming earnestness and gentle sense of humor to identify what he regards as spiritually profound moments in his life, as he argues that all true stories contain an element of surprise and that everything we do as human beings, from indulging in epicurean pleasures to seeking out deeper truths, is motivated by the quest for transcendence.

Tobolowsky pointed out to the Port Townsend Film Festival screening audience that “The Primary Instinct” was filmed in a single night, in a single take, unlike most live comedy and storytelling concerts, which film multiple showings and then choose the best moments from each one to air.

Even as a child, Tobolowsky took meticulous notes, and now, armed with a smartphone, he can take electronic notes whenever he happens to recall real-life stories or dreams from his younger years, although his wife eventually took his phone away, during the post-screening question-and-answer period, because he pulled it out once too often to remember the details of certain events.

Although Tobolowsky has written a number of “intentionally derivative” screenplays that he wasn’t able to sell, he did co-write the first draft of the screenplay for David Byrne’s “True Stories” in 19 days.

“In particular, David loved my one story about a character who heard sounds in his head, like I did, so he wrote the song ‘Radio Head’ for the ‘True Stories’ album,” Tobolowsky said. “And when the band On A Friday heard the song ‘Radio Head,’ they changed their name to Radiohead, so I can say I inspired two bands in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is not bad.”

JON GANN PRESENTS

Jon Gann, founder of the DC Shorts and Sunderland Shorts film festivals, has been treating Port Townsend Film Festival audiences to hand-picked selections of short films for the past six years, and this year saw him present eight such compact dramas.

“The Bird and the Whale” uses lush hand-painted animation to portray the brief and bittersweet friendship of a lonely young whale and a caged bird who’s the sole survivor of a shipwreck, which Gann considered an automatic choice because of the quality of its artwork.

”Seven” switches to live-action, and evokes shades of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in a manner that Gann described as “chilling,” by depicting the ritualistic response of a rural Norwegian community toward an oil company employee who has killed the village’s elder leader.

“I love monologue films,” Gann said, explaining why he chose “One Cambodian Family Please for My Pleasure,” a family comedy narrated by Emily Mortimer, here playing a lonely Czech refugee living as a neglected housewife and mother in Fargo, North Dakota, as she struggles to praise her frigid and provincial American hometown, so that a charitable service organization might send a Cambodian refugee family to resettle there as well.

“Bini” offers a far more harrowing tale of refugees, as director Erblin Nushi draws upon his own childhood to show 6-year-old Bini and his family, in Nushi’s hometown of Kosovo in 1999, just as they’re rounded up by Serbian soldiers and forcibly transported to the Albanian border.

“Nushi was able to return to Kosovo to shoot it, which is why it looks so authentic,” Gann said. “It’s a real punch to the gut.”

“Are We Good Parents?” proceeds like a comedy of manners rewritten as a parody of modern liberalism, as the parents of a 14-year-old girl agonize over whether they’ve been sufficiently accepting of what they suspect her sexual orientation to be, with the white dad and the black mom descending into the absurdity of seeing which one can out-“woke” the other.

As for “The Boat,” Gann said he had to show it because of the relative novelty of being able to offer a Russian comedy on the lineup, even if the comedy revolves around warnings of a global flood, and one young man’s seemingly naive conviction that he’ll be able to weather those storms in a modestly appointed boat, barely big enough for two.

The French film “Automne” uses creative computer-generated and hand-painted animation to imagine autumn as one of four creations of a celestial workshop of the seasons, while the German “Heartstrings” centers around an outwardly lovelorn but emotionally manipulative old man who attempts to guilt a former flame into picking up where they left off, even if it means misrepresenting his own plight to ply her sympathies.

“Every film festival’s audience is different,” Gann said. “I chose ‘The Boat’ because I felt like you would understand it, while other audiences might not. I wanted to provide a diversity of storytelling styles and messages.”