Suburban Fury (2024 | USA | 118 minutes | Robinson Devor)

One of the best entries in this year’s Northwest Connections program is situated 800 miles south on I-5 and a half century in the past: the biography of Sarah Jane Moore, one of two women who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford while he campaigned for election in California. Eschewing typical documentary conventions, the story of the would-be assassin is told by the subject herself, having been released from prison 32 years into her life sentence.

Although it wasn’t filmed locally, the film has a strong local pedigree. Written, produced, and directed by local documentarian Robinson Devor (Zoo, Pow Wow) with plenty of familiar names among the credits (Everett filmmaker Bob Fink co-wrote and led archival research, Seattle filmmaker and The Stranger associate editor Charles Mudede is another co-writer). Together they allow her story to be told almost entirely through her own voice in evocatively staged interviews around San Francisco. With Devor occasionally chiming in as the voice of her FBI handler, she unspools her personal history and observations from the back seat of a station wagon approximating her covert debriefs, sitting in a mid-century home overlooking the city at night, and returning to jewel-box chapel inside the hotel where she attempted to assassinate the president with a newly-purchased miscalibrated handgun.

At turns effusive and evasive, the nonagenarian remains a sharp an effective storyteller. A well-connected patron of the arts who was drawn to social causes in the wake of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, Moore would have been a fascinating subject regardless of one misplaced gunshot. Four-times divorced, with a mysteriously shrouded life story spanning a West Virginia childhood, young adult military service, and a Hollywood husband uninterested in raising his child, she recounts her turn from wealthy suburban housewife to an FBI informant enmeshed in the Bay Area’s burgeoning progressive movements in the early 1970s.

Alongside her stories, an etherial Vangelis-inspired soundtrack by Paul Moore underscores moody drone shots of a cityscape as shrouded in mist as her motives. Archival news footage accompanies clips from contemporary documentaries from the likes of Sandra Hochman, Agnès Varda and Ira Eisenberg to set the scene of a city and nation waking up to gay liberation, women’s liberation, and the advocacy of Vietnam veterans against the war. Numbered vignettes count up and down, piercing the multi-layered onion of the personal and political. Although we may leave the movie with more questions than answers, it’s a mesmerizing immersion that nevertheless captivates and communicates while letting its subject spin a yarn.

• WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 – SIFF Cinema Downtown – 6:00 PM
• FRIDAY, MAY 23 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 3:30 PM
• Director Robinson Devor, producer Jason Reid, executive producer/head archivist Bob Fink, and co-producer Matt Levinthal scheduled to attend.

Wolf Land (2025 | USA | 71 minutes | Sarah Hoffmann)

After being nearly driven to extinction by westward colonial expansion, recent decades have seen the gradual return of Gray Wolves to the mountains and forests of Washington. As their populations have rebounded, tensions have similarly re-emerged between the wild canines and the ranchers whose livestock graze at the periphery of their territory.

After being nearly driven to extinction by westward colonial expansion, recent decades have seen the gradual return of Gray Wolves to the mountains and forests of Washington. As their populations have rebounded, tensions have similarly re-emerged between the wild canines and the ranchers whose livestock graze at the periphery of their territory. 

Rather than be consumed by fiery rhetoric, this new documentary from Cascade PBS instead centers on two Northeastern Washington men who are working to make co-habitation work for canines, bovines, and humans alike. Rather than bombard the audience with a litany of facts and figures or talking head interviews, director Sarah Hoffmann instead embeds the film on the delicate boundary of the “Patagonia-Stetson Hat Divide”.

Her primary subject is Daniel Curry, an idealistic rangerider and “wolf-protecting cowboy”. Having spent his twenties as a wolf sanctuary specialist, he relocated to Colville to act as an ambassador to ranchers who find themselves twenty miles from the Canadian border and at a hotspot of growing wild wolfpack activity. There, in Colville, he, his beloved dogs, cat, gray parrot, and trusty steed occupy a cozy rustic wood-heated cabin that serves as his base for advocating for and implementing non-lethal methods for discouraging wolves from making a buffet of nearby cows. The relocation is a bet that he’s placed on both his financial and personal life with the hopes of building a small business and educational center.

On the other side is Jerry Francis, an earnest fourth-generation rancher whose grazing lands neighbor three wolf packs. Over hot days buzzing with flies to late evenings keeping an eye on calves, we get a close-up view of the dedication and work required to sustain his livelihood. Over time, their relationship has evolved from skepticism, to practical collegiality, to a deeply respectful friendship. 

Assembling more than two years of verité filmmaking, Hoffman captures the rhythms of the men at work amid changing seasons and natural splendor. The documentary embraces a show-instead-of-tell ethos and an admirable reaction to cookie-cutter docs. Although I found myself wishing for an occasional authoritative voice or title card to explain some of the basic practicalities, what clearly emerges is the framework of hopeful model and best-case scenario for coexistence, both among humans and among the animals that inhabit the land.

• SATURDAY, MAY 17 – Shoreline Community College – 5:30 PM
• SUNDAY, MAY 18 – AMC Pacific Place – 1:30 PM
• Director Sarah Hoffman and editor David Wulzen scheduled to attend.