VICTORIA — A film by a former Port Angeles High School and Peninsula College student will be screened at the Victoria Film Festival on Thursday.
Rob Grabow’s “The Year of the Dog” will be screened at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Capital 6 Theaters, 805 Yates St., Victoria.
Screenings are in-person only this year.
Tickets can be purchased at https://www.victoriafilmfestival.com/product/year-of-the-dog/.
The award-winning, independent feature film will open in over 100 theaters nationwide on Feb. 24, marking a milestone for independent film in the post-COVID film era, organizers said.
Brandon Smith, president of the Montana-based film distribution company Nova Vento Entertainment, said that, “According to our accounting, this would be one of the widest theatrical releases for a drama of this budget in the past decade.”
The nearest theater to the North Olympic Peninsula will be in Bremerton, Grabow said.
“I’m hoping that at some point the distributor will get it into Port Angeles,” he said. “I’d really like to go back.”
Grabow, 41, attended Port Angeles High School as a junior and Peninsula College as a student in Running Start in 1998, he said.
He was at PAHS only for his junior year; after that he became a Rotary foreign exchange student to Germany and his mother moved to Montana while he was away, so when he returned he joined her there.
The film is about a recovering alcoholic and his relationship to a stray dog.
The dog, who was actually a stray, is a rescue dog who had about six weeks training before the film was shot, Grabow said.
“The Year of the Dog” is Grabow’s first film.
He had earned a degree in finance and then went to Columbia University in New York for international affairs and then studied at The Actors Studio in New York.
“So I got into film late in life,” he said.
The film won a special 10th Anniversary Award at the Chelsea Film Festival in New York in 2022.
