A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Seattle International Film Festival
Although “International” is right there in SIFF’s name, each festival also showcases a series of films made or set closer to home. This year’s Northwest Connections program includes five films. Here, we review of the two narrative features that’ll play throughout the festival: Evergreens and Monarch City.
The 51st Seattle International Film Festival kicks off tomorrow! Running in person from May 15–25, the festival features 245 films playing in-person across the city — including daily programming at the recently-reopened Cinerama — with many getting online encore screenings the following week. Sorting through the whole program and/or film finder can help you to dial into your exact needs for a cinematic holiday (per SIFF’s vacation-themed, “Trip to the Reel World”), but we’re also here to help.
Last week, we gave you some quick picks in the wake of the press launch. Now, with some more time with the program and some screeners, we have a few more suggestions for how to spend the opening days of the festival.
Starting today, tickets and passes are now available to the public for the 50th Seattle International Film Festival. While we’re digging through the schedule and plotting our own agendas, we thought we’d start by each highlighting a film (or two) from the program that we’re most excited to see or recommend.
People who know me IRL (mostly) know that I’m a cross stitcher. I spend dozens of hours a week on my couch, usually 2-3 hours nightly and more on weekends stitching. Outside of work and sleeping, it takes up the next biggest block of my time. I’ve even made some stitching projects that combine my hobby with movies. This is all to say that I am delighted that SIFF is offering one of their theaters for crafty movie fans this Sunday at noon, promising a place to congregate while the beloved (though not by me) movie Labyrinth plays on screen.
Seattle Film Critics Society has been hard at work bringing attention to Pacific Northwest filmmakers and productions over the last several years. …
Tomorrow begins one of my favorite mini-festivals in Seattle: SIFF’s annual DocFest. It’s a week-long festival celebrating some of the best new-ish documentaries out there (and in true Seattle fashion, this week goes from Thursday to Thursday, so it is actually eight days long).
Sweetheart Deal is 98 minutes of tragedy and heartbreak but it also felt so vital and important to tell the stories of these women who suffer from so much abuse and marginalization. “Sex work is work” and “my body, my choice” are good, rhetorical, platitudes (that I believe) but they are also too vague to meaningfully represent anyone whose choice and autonomy are often taken out of the equation, often by situations far beyond their control.
Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson leverage the chemistry of a real-life family in crafting a drama about a working-class Chicago-area household. When we first meet the family in a principal’s office as they’re still reeling from the aftershocks of an unspecified trauma and the mounting stress of a looming lawsuit.
These are three films Morgen was incredibly eager to view and it ended up being a mixed bag of contentment and disappointment. She talks of a French meta-film about film, an over-the-top South Korean dark comedy, and an intimate portrait of male prostitution.
With a smattering of films Morgen was able to see during SIFF, she tells us why these three, that are all set to have a wider release or show at a SIFF cinema near you, are worthy of your time… or at least strange enough to experience for yourself.
