Festivals Reviews SIFF

SIFF 2022: Opening Weekend Picks

It’s here! SIFF returns to in-person (and online) format this year beginning on Thursday night with a screening of Navalny at the Paramount followed by a gala in the street (like audiences and juries, the vital and thrilling documentary wowed us at Sundance; it’s a home run for a SIFF opener). By now, we’re all used to outdoor dining; so the springlike weather with its cool temperatures and ever-present threat of showers shouldn’t pose too much of an imposition. This is a city that knows well the virtues of layering so a little weather shouldn’t dampen the mood of a crowd eager to celebrate the return of its signature film festival. 

Below, we each highlight a few films to look forward to in the opening days of the festival as it kicks into full gear on Friday.

Festivals SIFF

SIFF 2022: Quick Picks, Tips, and Tricks

Starting today, tickets and passes are now available to the public for the 48th Seattle International Film Festival. Running from April 14-24th, the eleven-day festival features hundreds of films playing in-person in venues across the city, with more than half of the selections also available online. We’re still soaking up the trailers, digesting the full lineup, and strategizing the best ways to get the most out of this year’s event, but we thought we’d start by each highlighting a film (or two) from the program that we’re most excited to see or recommend.

Festivals SIFF

SIFF 2022: It’s Alive

At long last, a sense of “semi-normalcy” for Seattle and Springtime. After last year’s fully-virtual festivities, the 48th Seattle International Film Festival is upon us, restoring to our fair city an excuse to venture back out into theaters (or to watch from our homes) for eleven straight days and nights. Yes, this April 14-24th sprint is somewhat slimmer than the monthlong marathons of yore, but honestly, it feels a little bit healthier for all parties.

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SXSW 2022: Midnighters Round-Up

SXSW ended a week ago, but Jenn’s been brewing up this coverage of the virtual offerings from the festival’s iconic horror/WTF section and just finished it up…better late than never, right? Right??

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SXSW 2022: Omoiyari: A Song Film by Kishi Bashi

Omoiyari is a Japanese word that means to have sympathy and compassion towards another person. This is not only the title of Japanese-American musician Kaoru Ishibashi’s (known professionally as Kishi Bashi) film, but the very soul and purpose of it. We travel with Ishibashi around the United States as he embarks on a path of discovery both of his roots and the two worlds he’s torn between: culture and country. Those two aspects are not in opposition, but his entire life he’s kept them separate and at times hidden; now he’s finding a way to bring them together.

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SXSW 2022: Hypochondriac

Destroyed as a child through the violent fits, paranoia and hallucinations of a mother unable to care of herself or her family Will does everything in his power to forget and move forward with a normal life. He’s managed to find a loving partner, a decent career (even if he is bullied by an overprivileged white woman with no talent other than berating her employees) and a calm happy life. Things start to go sideways when his mother makes contact, first through odd boxes of cult-related reading materials followed by unwelcome and traumatizing visits. Soon his life is thrown into chaos and we start to wonder if it’s his mind playing tricks on him or has the world gone completely mad?

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SXSW 2022: Pirates

Three kids on the fringe of adulthood from North London at the turn of the millenium have their sights set on fame and fortune. Ready to kick off the new century and rest of their lives with a crazy New Years Eve together, they’ll do anything to get tickets to the best party in town. As aspiring djs with a pirate radio station at their fingertips and a growing fanbase (or at least they hope) this party is their ticket to making it out of their hometown and into the limelight, but their friend and manager drops a bomb on them that threatens the future they’ve planned.

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SXSW 2022: The Kids In The Hall: Comedy Punks

When I was young, The Kids In The Hall sketch comedy show felt like some kind of underground secret. Something that none of my friends or schoolmates knew about whose ridiculousness I could quote on queue like some big shot. Little did I know they’d been around in the Canadian comedy scene creating weird wonderful sketches for years before landing on my little television set. The Kids In The Hall: Comedy Punks brought all of that sassy schoolyard fun back but adds in the back stage frustrations, heartbreaks and growing pains of that amazing quintet of goons.

This Much I Know To Be True
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SXSW 2022: This Much I Know To Be True

“Thank you for the words, the music, the grounding sanity that your words bring to me in times of strife. I’m curious, behind it all: the music, the words, the suits, the grief, the tenderness, and shame, and guilt, and joy, who are you?”

This quote is from just one of a dozen fan letters, notes and emails that Nick Cave is sifting through on a given day in his new documentary/music video/love fest This Much I Know To Be True. It attempts to answer just that, even if only a small portion of what makes up this mystical creature. We’re taken for a stroll through the life and times of Cave during the pandemic and treated to an extended concert of sorts from his upcoming release with Warren Ellis, CARNAGE.

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SXSW 2022: Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets

My most striking reaction while watching the crisply-packaged incredible true story of that time when an army of Reddit-affiliated retail traders rallied to cause seemingly worthless GameStop stock price to rocket to the moon was that all of this happened just a little over a year ago. I suppose that time flows differently in a pandemic. The burst of trading pitting little internet “apes” against over-leveraged hedge funds captivated the media somewhere between the insurrection on the Capitol and the rollout of the first vaccines, before hot vax summer and the revenge of the omicron. So, something like a million years ago, yet a remarkably quick turnaround to get some of the key players on film and telling their stories of how amateur stock trading during a shutdown transformed their lives.