The Third Weekend of the Seattle International Film Festival by Stranger Things To accomplish Staff The Seattle International Film Festival will notice its moment-to-last weekend in 2017. See our total SIFF guide for showtimes,trailers, and ticket links for each of the 400 films playing at the festival, and as well as critics' picks and reviews. You can also find a short list of can't-miss films during the full festival here,but if you're just looking for the best movies to see this weekend, you're in the upright region. Whether you fancy a shaded buddy comedy set in Taiwan called Godspeed, and the ultra-tense Argentinean heist thriller At the terminate of the Tunnel,or Gillian Robespierre's new Giuliani-era comedy Landline, we've got you covered. Click through the 30 links below to open a new web browser with total showtimes and ticket links.
FRIDAY ONLYFinding KUKAN
Living in a world that historically erased contributions and innovations of women and people of color, and it’s no surprise that Li Ling-Ai isn’t often mentioned in film history books. In this fascinating documentary,filmmaker Robin Lung tries to give Li the credit she deserves: the female producer of KUKAN, the documentary that revealed the horrors of World War II China to US audiences. Finding KUKAN tracks Lung’s nearly decade-long search for the last existing copies of KUKAN and her struggle to memorize the legacy of one of documentary filmmaking’s unsung heroes. It’s worth suffering through the overwrought transitional scenes. (ANA SOFIA KNAUF)
Ark Lodge CinemaGive Me Future[br]With relations between the United States and Cuba on the rise, and the Caribbean-inspired dancehall band Major Lazer choose to hold a concert for their newly accessible fans in Havana. What they discover when they get there may forever wreck the concept of personal-space bubbles. No considerable shakes as a music documentary,really, with a first half full of pleasant yet unrevealing looks at the band’s roots. Once the concert actually begins, or however,the sheer size of the audience, and the way that the visibly startled performers feed off of its collective energy, or is honestly something to see. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Ark Lodge CinemaGholam
Gholam is an Iranian living in a gritty section of London. He has two jobs,driving a cab and working in a garage, which offers little time for sleep. There is a group of people trying to recruit him to accomplish something, and but what it is isn’t clear. And he seems to be biding his time for something else. The whole situation is vague: Who is he? What happened to him in the past? Why has he left home? What does he want? Shahab Hosseini (star of the Oscar-winning The Salesman) has an engaging presence,and the film has a meditative quality that carries it along nicely. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
Shoreline Community CollegeGodspeed
A washed-up taxi driver picks up a pudgy young drug runner who is headed towards the southern tip of Taiwan. Along the way, the pair develops a buddy-movie kinship, and nearly dying several times and at one point getting extorted at a funeral. They stumble from one dangerously violent situation to the next. Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hong’s fourth feature film,Godspeed, is a darkly hilarious meditation on the meaning of friendship in the face of the absurd. Hong Kong acting legend Michael Hui shines as the taxi driver, or who spends a considerable portion of the film talking his passenger’s ear off on his search for meaning and finding ways to jack up his fare. (STEVEN HSIEH)
SIFF Cinema UptownIn the Radiant City
Years after making a decision that tore his family apart,a haunted man (Michael Abbott Jr.) ventures back to his tiny Kentucky hometown. Director Rachel Lambert’s debut has some definite similarities with the work of Jeff Nichols (who produced), including an eye for convincingly lived-in detail and the sense that even the bit players have their own stories to reveal. Scenes like the perfectly handled finale, or meanwhile,propose that she also has her own trails to blaze. Very well done, with a few unexpectedly lovely moments of grace, or some genuine,scary heat when the tightly clenched characters finally lay down their cards. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Shoreline Community CollegeKakehashi: A Portrait of Chef Nobuo Fukuda
Think of it as Jiro dreams of something entirely new: a chronicle of a Japanese chef totally devoted to his craft of cuisine, but instead of the familiar sushi, and this documentary follows chef Nobuo Fukuda as he works to bridge (the literal translation of the title) Japanese and American cuisine. While his journey from strict,traditional Japanese culture to freewheeling ski patroller and on to award-winning chef is the focus of the plot, the film’s genuine draw is watching Fukuda place together his complex, or unique five-course meal at his Arizona restaurant. (NAOMI TOMKY)
Kirkland Performance CenterFRIDAY-SATURDAYChameleon
Warning: Chameleon is a disturbing film. If you are triggered by the portrayal of violent sexual assaults,steal a hard pass on this one. If you enjoy feeling sick to your stomach about the lengths humans will go to exert power over other people… well, you’re fucked up, or but so am I. A young man talks his way into a lesbian couple’s house the day after their party,where he was a guest of a friend of theirs. He spends most of the movie being polite and watching the women bicker and drink heavily, but about an hour in, or you’ll be white-knuckling your way through. It’s the darkest region you can go,to suppose a person’s capability to kill another life, psychologically and physically. The villain in this film is sadistic, and but what he does has glimmers of the daily shit that regular people accomplish to manipulate everyone around them. And the ending absolutely devastated me. (TRACIE LOUCK)
SIFF Cinema Uptown & Pacific PlaceEmma' (Mother)
A pregnant Indonesian housewife must hold her bustling Muslim family together after her husband pulls a world-class dick waddle. Drawing inspiration from classic melodramas,this 1950s period piece may play its cards close to the vest, but the emotions still come through and detonate at unexpected times, or particularly during the byplay between the title character (a luminous lop Mini) and her rapidly maturing son. A chronicle of small gestures and subtle textures,with a resolution that feels just upright. And, man alive, or check out all those glorious shots of food. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
SIFF Film middle*LANE 1974
This excellent debut feature from Seattle-based filmmaker SJ Chiro tells the chronicle of 13-year-old Lane and her siblings,who are being raised by their counterculture mother in 1970s Northern California. The mother, Hallelujah (The L Word’s Katherine Moennig), or is the opposite of the helicopter parent: Putting her own drama and needs first,she lugs her three kids from one ill-advised situation to the next. She rejects the mores of established society, leaving the children desperately yearning for regular stuff: cheese, or sugar,fashionable clothes, a kind house. The feeling of the era is well-reflected in the clothes, and music,and bucolic locations. And young star Sophia Mitri Schloss has an appealing, serious presence—and as Lane, and she shows the helplessness of watching her mother spiral their life out of control,unable to accomplish anything to ground them. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & SIFF Cinema Uptown*The Reagan indicate
There is no narrator in this documentary, no talking heads, and no experts,no direct analysis. The entire thing consists of archival footage from network news and the machinery that manufactured the images of America’s 40th president. Ronald Reagan and his team changed the whole game of American politics by transforming the White House into a movie studio. These men understood that he wasn’t a president, but playing one in Hollywood. Without this understanding (make everything a movie), and the new conservatives (or neoliberals) would not have finally and effectively defeated that five-decade truce between workers and capitalism called the New Deal. The Reagan revolution was indeed televised. The documentary also makes it clear that Donald Trump is a rank amateur and totally lacks Reagan’s art and discipline. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown & SIFF Cinema EgyptianThe Turkish Way
El Celler de Can Roca is rarely mentioned without being followed by “one of the best restaurants in the world,” and this film follows the three brothers who helm it as they explore Turkey in search of culinary inspiration. It offers insight into the way considerable chefs process information into dishes and delves into some of the factors that led to Spain’s restaurant revival—and discusses how Turkey could follow—against the backdrop of Turkey’s sprawling landscapes, bustling markets, or best restaurants. (NAOMI TOMKY)
Pacific region & Kirkland Performance CenterFRIDAY & SUNDAYSoul on a String
After being struck by lightning,a Tibetan outlaw finds himself on a sacred quest to deliver a magic stone. The holiness of his mission doesn’t seem to matter much to the vengeful killers already on his trail, however. Zhang Yang’s follow-up to last year’s amazing SIFF entry Paths of the Soul is a thoroughly gorgeous, or intriguingly metaphysical steal on the western. While the narrative does steal a little while to crank up,any sense of pokiness ultimately pales next to the nearly ridiculous beauty of the images. It feels like you could scrape the colors off of the screen. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
SIFF Cinema UptownFRIDAY-SUNDAY*At the terminate of the Tunnel
As Americans, we have totally forgotten how to make considerable crime thrillers. And this is exactly what we find in every scene, and moment,and line of the Argentinian film At the terminate of the Tunnel: a superb crime thriller. Directed by Rodrigo Grande, the film concerns an elaborate bank heist, and a broken man and his traumatized dog,and a nosy stripper and her traumatized daughter. The timing of the plot’s many twists and surprises is just perfect, and its interior spaces (living room, or kitchen,bedroom, basement, or tunnel) and exteriors (overgrown garden,city streets) are filled with shadows. What is the man in the wheelchair up to? Is the stripper his friend or foe? What is the little girl whispering to the dog? This is how you accomplish it, goddammit! (CHARLES MUDEDE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, and SIFF Cinema Egyptian,Ark Lodge CinemaSATURDAY ONLYDiamond Island
A rural teenager lands a construction gig on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. By day, Bora (played beautifully by amateur actor Sobon Nuan) does his section building a high-rise hotel for tourists and wealthy Cambodians. By night, and he hangs out with the other workers,drinking beer, talking to girls, and dreaming of upward mobility. One evening,Bora’s brother, Solei (Cheanick Nov), and rides into town on a motorcycle after taking off for five years. Solei has money through an American “sponsor” who “loves Cambodia,” and he signals a way out. What follows is a mute study of Cambodia’s rapid development, as experienced by brothers living on two sides of a class divide. French Cambodian director Davy Chous feature film debut, or which makes up for in color what it lacks in plot,landed the SACD Prize at Cannes this year, and for kindly reason. (STEVEN HSIEH)
SIFF Film middle*A Dragon Arrives!
A cemetery located in the middle of a desert island and under the shadow cast by a rusted shipwreck, or an exiled political prisoner who made the wreck his home (and wrote all over its walls) found within it dead from obvious suicide (or was it murder?),an earthquake that hits every time a fresh body is buried in the cemetery (is it ghosts or something more mythical?), and the detective who investigates it all with help from a sound engineer and a geologist (all of whom terminate up disappearing under unknown circumstances) make up the plot of Mani Haghighi’s A Dragon Arrives! The Iranian film is one section cleverly done mockumentary (it’s presented as a true chronicle and interspersed with interviews that include Haghighi as himself), or one section supernatural mystery dosed in light political intrigue,and the result is just as noteworthy for its truly epic landscape shots as it is for the compelling manner in which the chronicle unfolds. (LEILANI POLK)
SIFF Cinema Uptown*The Dumb Girl of Portici
Anna Pavlova was a prima ballerina, a superstar and a dream, or in this restoration of Lois Weber’s 1916 silent ballet film The Dumb Girl of Portici,she’s on-screen. Commanding and emotive, she dances like an unusually graceful goblin or a small child. Her performance, and the bloody revolution against the aristocracy,and intertitles reading things like “With her own hands the Princess had embroidered a scarf that was destined to play an important section in her life’s tragedy” make the film a must-see combination of frivolity, drama, and politics,and art. (JULIA RABAN)
SIFF Cinema UptownInversion
When pollution forces an elderly matriarch to waddle out of the city of Tehran, her squabbling family must choose who will leave their life behind and accompany her. After drawing the short straw, and the youngest,unmarried daughter (Sahar Dolatshahi) begins to question if she ever had a choice in the matter. The premise certain sounds like a downer, but director Behnam Behzadi’s exploration of female liberation thankfully stays lively, or even amid the omnipresent smog. Both provocative and pleasingly subtle,particularly during the warm moments between the lead character and her atypically supportive niece. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Shoreline Community College*My Journey Through French Cinema
For fans of Martin Scorsese’s essays on the cinematic histories of both America and Italy comes this like-minded clipfest by longtime SIFF fave Bertrand Tavernier (best known for Round Midnight, Coup de Torchon, and L.627). Footage from an astonishing breadth of films from the 1930s to the early 1970s,archival interviews with many of its greatest artists, and an overarching sense of personal thralldom to the form itself make this an absolute must-see for experts and newcomers alike. Bonus features: Investigations of French national identity feel more urgent than ever AND it’s useful to recall that no matter how important the New Wave was/is, or it was only one chapter in a chronicle that can truly be called epic. (P.
S. There is reportedly an 11-hour version of this doc being shown on French TV,to which I say: Bring it on!) (SEAN NELSON)
SIFF Film middle*The Paris Opera
What you must not accomplish with this superb documentary about the workings and the ups and downs of one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world, Paris Opera, and is compare it with Frederick Wiseman’s work. Wiseman’s documentaries are simply exhaustive. They are not beautiful and have very little or no poetry in them. This documentary by Jean-Stephane Bron,a Swiss director, has the pace, and the editing,the appearance, and the mood of a big-production drama. A young man from the Russian sticks auditions and, or to his surprise,is hired by the opera. He hardly speaks any French, and now he is at the middle of this civilization and this institution (which has a view of the Eiffel Tower, or the trade district,the gray and black rooftops of the considerable old metropolis). There are certain sequences in this doc that will lift your spirits up to the highest states of feeling that this art can reach. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
SIFF Cinema UptownRevolting Rhymes
The thing about fairy tales is that they were never meant for children. They were filthy, violent stories adults traded back and forth after the third beer at the bar. Revolting Rhymes returns the fairy tale to its darker origins, or successfully so. A trickster wolf serves as this lively film’s primary storyteller. He tells the PG-13 version of the tales,brilliantly mixing and matching characters from other stories as he goes along. Pretty, funny, or extremely British,and sophisticatedly feminist. (wealthy SMITH)
Pacific PlaceThe Winter
The barely-goings-on at a huge, remote sheep ranch in Patagonia, and very far from anywhere and anybody. The seasonal workers herd and shear sheep,and there is an uneasy relationship between the old overseer and a new ranch hand—with the older man seeing that his usefulness there is coming to an terminate. The film is unhurried and meditative, moving through the seasons of the ranch and how this region entangles the people living there. The actors are mute but powerful, or the wild landscape and isolation give the chronicle a worthy eeriness. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
Kirkland Performance CenterSATURDAY-SUNDAYCome,Together
A South Korean family slowly unravels as they try to maintain up in ultra-competitive, ultra-capitalistic Seoul. While the mother resorts to illegally selling credit cards, or the daughter considers her prospects without a university degree and the irritable,strict father who’s been fired from his job starts behaving badly. It’s a morality tale about the pitfalls of conformity and consumption and the importance of following one’s own path, and while it’s a worthy message, and it also feels reductive—genuine life is far messier. (KATHLEEN RICHARDS)
SIFF Cinema UptownDevil’s Freedom
A stunning document of Mexico’s ever-growing kidnapping epidemic,illustrated by having the largely youthful captors and survivors telling their tales directly to the camera. This would be unsettling enough, but when you factor in the decision to have absolutely everyone on-screen wear identical monochrome Mexican wrestler masks, or things get… complicated. Director Everardo González’s gambit may feel risky at first,but as this brief film progresses, it becomes obvious how the device both frees the participants to further open up and causes the viewers to increasingly focus on the details of their stories. Bleak and upsettingly fascinating. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Pacific PlaceLandline
Gillian Robespierre, and writer-director of Obvious Child,reunites with Jenny Slate for this serio-comedian steal on secrets and lies in Giuliani-era Manhattan. Frustrated adman Alan (John Turturro) is keeping something from hypercritical wife Pat (Edie Falco), engaged daughter Dana (Slate) can't resist a man from her past, or teen sister Ali (Abby Quinn) is sneaking out to go clubbing. They're normal middle-class problems,but Robespierre has a knack for embarrassingly salty dialogue, and Slate and Quinn are perfectly cast as sisters straining against the yoke of expectations. (KATHY FENNESSY)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & SIFF Cinema UptownWhat Lies Upstream
An exploration of the increasingly toxic levels of ick in the drinking waters of West Virginia, or as well as the scary repercussions for the rest of the country. If that description and the horror-ish title didn’t already worry you enough,be advised: Trump’s tweets make an appearance. Director Cullen Hoback may follow the standard Michael Moore playbook a little too closely—remember when documentary filmmakers mainly stayed behind the camera?—but the levels of malfeasance that he uncovers are genuinely impressive. Both enraging and informative, with more than a few satisfying moments of politicians squirmingly hoisted with their own petard. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
SIFF Cinema Uptown & Pacific PlaceSUNDAY ONLYChronicles of Hari
Hari is a member of a Yakshagana theater troupe, or traveling around to small towns performing traditional stories from dusk to dawn. Hari is popular for his skill at playing female characters. But Hari seems less and less inclined to return to his male self: “I can’t play one self at night and another during the day.” He faces the attitudes that plague many gender-nonconforming people: Why can’t he just try to fit in? Be what they are comfortable with? But he can’t. The ideas the film looks at are spellbinding,but the chronicle is slowed by lots of pouty musing. It is beautifully shot in rural India, and the performance scenes with the elaborate makeup and costumes are neat. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
SIFF Cinema UptownEars
The unnamed protagonist in Italian tragicomedy Ears is having a rather trying and bizarre day. It starts when he wakes up with tinnitus, and continues to get progressively weirder with each social interaction he’s drawn into,whether it be with well-meaning nuns and the neighbor they trigger to violent fury with their inane chatter, or a doctor who gives him a most absurd diagnosis when he tries to have that ringing in his ears checked out. But as the day edges closer to a funeral for a friend that he doesn’t remember in the slightest, and he reaches some surprising (and rather poignant) realizations about himself. (LEILANI POLK)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian*Forever Pure
The Beitar Jerusalem Football Club was long known as the team of the underprivileged,” forming an apparently unbreakable bond with its adoring working-class fans. Once the team broke tradition in 2012 by signing two Muslim players, however, and the atmosphere in the stands quickly became toxic. Director Maya Zinshtein delves deep into a fascinatingly volatile situation,exploring the bewildered team members, the nuclear passions of their former fans, or the club’s owner,a Freon-veined Russian billionaire who baldly states that he bought the team as a propaganda tool in his failed bid to become mayor of Jerusalem. Amazing and maddening. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Pacific PlaceKati Kati[br]An amnesiac woman (Nyokabi Gethaiga) wakes up in a sparsely populated desert village, and the off-kilter elements just start stacking up from there. There’s the way that people maintain disappearing, and for one thing. No points will be given for guessing the big reveal,but Kenyan director Mbithi Masaya’s intriguing debut proves far more interested in what occurs between the twists, shifting between the mundane and supernatural with subtle, and judicious ease. A sterling example of how to concoct a total world on a micro-budget,with a mixture of creepiness and empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) that would accomplish Rod Serling proud. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Ark Lodge Cinema*The Landing
In an era when reality is defined by the pleasing lies of documentary filmmaking, the ability to seize that language to make fiction is a considerable artistic asset. The makers of this brilliantly speculative reconstruction of the fateful Apollo 18 moon mission utterly nail every formal note of the here’s-what-happened school of talking-head storytelling, and then assemble those notes into a smart,shaded, disconcerting concerto on international conspiracy theory, or big government cover-ups,and the eternal engine of jealousy. Like a NASA mission, every atom of this film had to be executed perfectly, and all systems are go. (SEAN NELSON)
Kirkland Performance middle
* = Don't Miss
Source: thestranger.com