It’s day two of the PDX Film Fest, so things are starting to get warmed up. In just a few minutes here, at 4:30 pm (for god’s sake, hurry man!), the first Short Film program begins. This one takes experimental portraiture as its theme, and the subjects include ghosts, elderly projectionists, Danish hermits, and Oregon timber.

At 6:30, the films of Jacqueline Goss and Lynnne Sachs screen. I watched Goss’s “Stranger Comes to Town” and had an enormous “WTF” response. Goss interviews foreigners and immigrants about their experiences with the Department of Homeland Security (so far, interesting enough). But interviewees have designed World of Warcraft avatars for themselves, who tell the story, which is enormously distracting and not aesthetically pleasing (not to mention a really strained metaphor for identity and otherness). Hopefully “States of UnBelonging,” Sachs’s “haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking” holds up better.

And finally, at 9 pm is the latest from Seattle’s Sublime Frequencies, who are “dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional, urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently by academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations.” That’s a mouthful. What you should expect is tons of music, scenery, and culture from places like Burma, the Western Sahara, and Mauritania, provided by filmmakers who posess smart, aesthetically keen eyes.

All screenings take place at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy, and they’re $7 apiece or $40 for a festival pass.