Smart Words About Cinema
The 38th Annual Seattle International Film Festival opened on Thursday, May 17, with a screening of Lynn Shelton’s locally produced Your Sister’s Sister, and runs 25 days through Sunday, June 12. Here is Parallax View’s coverage and guide to SIFF resources. SIFF Week by Week: The Eye of the Storm (Kathleen Murphy at Straight Shooting) Week [...]
Updated through Sunday, June 12 The 37th Annual Seattle International Film Festival opened on Thursday, May 19 and ran for 25 days through Sunday, June 12. Here is Parallax View’s coverage and guide to SIFF resources. SIFF Week by Week: SIFF 2011 Dispatch 8: “Life in a Day” and “Norwegian Wood,” final screenings and return [...]
Screenings will continue late into the evening of Sunday, June 12, the 25th and final day of the 2011 edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (see below for the films scheduled in the numerous TBA slots of the program). But the festival marks the conclusion with its closing night gala film – the lovely [...]
SIFF’s program notes states that The Night of Counting the Years (1969, Egypt), directed by Chadi Abdel Salam, is “universally recognized as one of the greatest Egyptian films ever made,” a statement that isn’t quite accurate. I’m not refering to the “greatest” part of that statement, just that it is “universally recognized” for anything. While [...]
Seattle International Film Festival audiences bestowed top Golden Space Needle Awards on Paper Birds, To Be Heard and The Whistleblower (among others) while juried awards singled out Gandu and the documentary Hot Coffee at the awards brunch of the Seattle International Film Festival this morning. Over 450 features, documentaries and short films from more than [...]
The crime-gone-bad thriller is a staple of the crime genre. Na Hong-jin’s The Yellow Sea, a South Korean box-office hit making its North American debut at SIFF 2011, runs with the concept in a jittery thriller of a desperate taxi driver in Yanji (an autonomous region in Northern China dominated by ethnic Koreans) hired to [...]
The white meadows of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadows (Iran), a stunning and startling odyssey through the salt marshes of Iran’s Lake Urmia, are the desert islands where almost medieval cultures exist in isolated pockets on otherwise dead lands. The salt that coats every beach white has left this place bereft of vegetation, giving it [...]
“You know, the director will be in town on Friday. Would you like to interview him?” That’s how I was welcomed today by an eager young publicist to SIFF’s 10 a.m. screening for press and passholders of Hong-jin Na’s The Yellow Sea. “Let me check out the movie first,” I replied. But that was not [...]
In her dark, totally unsentimental films about children (Devils, Devils; Crows, I Am), Polish director Dorota Kedzierzawska has always gifted her youthful, mostly female protagonists with old, outlaw souls hungry for family and freedom. Even the lonely old woman facing her Time to Die (2007) possesses the lively face and maverick spirit of a wild [...]
One virtue of film festivals is that they provide an opportunity for small-scale, unheralded movies of distinction to get discovered, if only by a less than mainstream audience. It’s not necessary that they be great; being unexpectedly good carries its own satisfaction. Small Town Murder Songs, a 75-minute picture from Canada, is the best example [...]
Don’t expect vampire gore and supernatural thrills in this long, slow exploration of youthful angst and alienation. In his first English-language movie, writer-director Iwai Shunji clearly didn’t have commercial prospects or mainstream audiences in mind. Since he shot, edited, and composed original music for Vampire, it’s clear that Shunji knew precisely what kind of world [...]
Week Two of SIFF opens with the promise that the screening experience at The Neptune will be, if not restored to previous standards, at least improved. According the Paul Constant in Slog, SIFF is replacing some of the sound baffles removed by STG in the ongoing renovation and transformation of the theater into a performance [...]
Decades of attending film festivals bring a lot of memories. Obviously, it’s a thrill to encounter new films that go on to challenge or captivate audiences in general release. But there’s another kind of encounter that’s at least as exciting and valuable, and can leave as deep a mark: the festival showcasing of a vintage [...]
The Neptune, which closed earlier this year as a theater in the Landmark chain, had its unofficial unveiling under Seattle Theater Group’s management on Friday, May 20, the first full day of public SIFF screenings. Though renovations are not complete—the official reopening of the theater as a venue for music and live performance is set [...]
Spain, 2010; Carlos Saura Often, watching movies like Thor and The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, not to mention SIFF’s overload of uninspired fare, a movie-lover can sink into despair, convinced that contemporary directors are totally incompetent when it comes to creating coherent form and movement within framed spaces. Then you luck into [...]