Morgan Dusatko does not waste time on bullshit: "There are a lot of people who are like, 'I love fucking films,'" he says, about three minutes into our interview about his filmmakingcareer. "But I am not one of those people. I like films sort of." If he had his way, he explains, he'd be a great musician or a painter or something. He'd play guitar. Dusatko glares at his hand. "But I know, after playing guitar for 10 fucking years, that my hand just physically can't do it. I have this really antagonistic relationship with the physical world."

Dusatko spent his younger years in Los Angeles, and the region is still closely tied to his identity and creative impulses—maybe, it seems, even more so than Seattle. "I like the epicness of California," he says with affectionate respect. And California is where Dusatko first learned how to not fit in, a feeling he's still exploring extensively in his work. His elementary school was massive—out of 1,500 kids, only three of them (including Dusatko) were white. After an only slightly less racially fraught adolescence in Seattle (he lived in South Park and attended Garfield High School), Dusatko headed back down to L.A. and immersed himself again in that city's particular capacity for alienation. Working in the hardware department at Sears, he was one of only four white employees out of 300. He recalls the experience with forthright humor: "They'd say weird things to me like, 'You remind me of that guy Pacey from Dawson's Creek.' Like, the one goofy white guy they could think of. They called me Chad because it was the whitest name they could think of. I'd sometimes invite them to a party, and they'd say, 'Is it a Chad party?'" After a few years, out of options down south, he returned to the north and wound up in the experimental film program at the Evergreen State College—despite only liking films "sort of." "I just really, really connected with it. It was the only time in my life where I felt like I was doing exactly what I should be doing."

Dusatko makes short films ("Unlike some of my peers, I don't feel like I'm practicing for a feature, and I don't believe that the feature-length movie has some sort of mystical power to reveal the human soul"). He makes comedies about poverty, mental illness, and—unsurprisingly—not fitting in. He makes mundane narratives about unicorns and hot dogs, documentaries about fictions, and quiet mumblecore forays into the limits of mumblecore. "Personally, I have two shticks," he says. "I do narrative films and I do experimental documentaries. Both are about the line between documentary and fiction." Dusatko plays with that line relentlessly. His documentaries are "not altogether true," while his works of fiction are about "real people doing real things." Most recently, in the most logical of logical leaps, he's become fascinated with the lo-fi fiction-blurring genre of mumblecore: "It's not a reaction against plot; it's a reaction against plot for no reason. And production values for the sake of production values."

Of equal importance, Dusatko would very much like you to see his movies. His four-man production company, the Last Quest, also has a distribution wing—unusual for such a small enterprise. "It's a filmmaker's duty to try and get the work seen," he says over coffee at Empire Espresso in Columbia City. They are about six months into a five-year plan to build a real market and distribution scheme for short films—an underrepresented genre, in his eyes ("Out of everything, the short film gets picked on the most"). The finish line of the five-year plan involves a traveling short-film festival (to "out-of-the-way places—Boise, Spokane, Eugene, Juneau"), a quarterly DVD of shorts from the Pacific Northwest, and "experimental short films playing in half the bars in the city. Instead of sports. Instead of whatever's on TV—like fucking Beetlejuice AGAIN. Wouldn't that be cool? Who wouldn't want that?"

Dusatko's enthusiasm is endearing and contagious. "I function as the idealist in the group. I'm the one who says, 'We can do it.' There are some other people in my company who aren't so sure, but luckily they're sweet enough that they're willing to give it a shot." Their first step along that five-year plan is a quarterly series of showcases, called Tall Beers and Short Shorts, in local bars. Dusatko believes in his fellow filmmakers and he believes in his form. "We'll take stuff that's rough around the edges—we'll mix genres, production values, skill levels. As long as the film has something compelling to offer. We feel that there are a lot of films that deserve to get seen."

Learn more about Morgan Dusatko's work at www.morgand.org.