ANU (2023 |  USA |  80 min. |  Sudeshna Sen)

Seattle-based director Sudeshna Sen assembles a large regional cast and leverages local settings for her adaptation of the children’s book Looking for Bapu. It’s a sweet, family-friendly film about a young girl dealing with the trauma of her beloved grandfather’s sudden death. With seemingly extremely busy and easily distracted parents (a doctor and software engineer), her “Bapu” moved to the US from India to be her primary caregiver, frequent companion, dance cheerleader, and excellent cook. After his passing he appears occasionally to her as she last saw him: as a ghost in dad jeans and sensible checkered shirts. Where the film stumbled — for me at least — was in transposing the story’s protagonist from a the perspective of a young boy to a teenage girl. Some of this may relate to Covid-era casting and filmmaking delays, but it causes a sense of dissonance between the script and the people portraying the roles.

As she reconciles grief by exploring her somehow perviously barely explored South Asian heritage, Diya Modi is good in the title role, but having an older actor in a role seemingly written for a child often felt at odds with honoring the level of sophistication that the source material used to address the weighty themes. Still, with birdwatching trips in woodsy Seattle parks playing a pivotal role in the plot, chaste yet forbidden ferry rides, Bellevue’s thriving Indian grocery scene, and a shout-out to the since-closed (or is it?) Museum of Mysteries as backdrop, it’s fun to see the area celebrated on screen, especially with an enthusiastic audience of families and friends.

Anu has a second screening at Shoreline Community College on Monday May 15th and streams as part of SIFF.tv’s “encore week” from May 22-28th.

I Like Movies (2022 |  Canada | 100 min. |  Chandler Levack)

Shot with the digital home video aesthetic to match its gray early aughties suburban Toronto setting and the sensibilities of its teen wannabe film director, I Like Movies is sure to get some knowing chuckles of approval from a film-loving audience at SIFF’s closing night festivities. Centered on a very-self-centered seventeen-year-old cinéaste (Isaiah Lehtinen as the deeply awkward Lawrence Kweller) with unreasonable expectations of a life-changing admission to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, director Chandler Levack makes the welcome decision of not letting her protagonist off the hook for his bullshit.

Lawrence says terribly hurtful things to his only friend, is utterly oblivious to women, insists upon wearing a ridiculous hat to a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and constantly slacks at the parts of his much-coveted video store job he doesn’t like doing. Like Lawrence, the film has a bad habit of divulging tragic backstories as a crutch for gravitas at convenient moments, but I appreciated how Levack never sought to make this messy kid with a retroactive glow up as a quirky charming cliche of a burgeoning auteur. We can feel bad for him and the way that his past traumas have stifled his present day behavior, but that doesn’t make it OK. It might be a challenging look in the mirror for some SIFF fanatics, but is gentle enough to also make for great conversation fodder at an afterparty full of people who remember the halcyon days of video store late fees.

I Like Movies gets the gala treatment for SIFF’s closing night with a screening on May 21 followed by a party at MOHAI. At $85 ($75 SIFF Members), tickets are selling fast.