It’s the Elles of Cinema, at SIFF

Elles: SAM is still on view at Seattle Art Museum, until February 17. But you have only today through Sunday, January 27, to catch SIFF’s Women in Cinema series, featuring a number of new works from women filmmakers. As with SAM’s exhibit, the overwhelming impression is that of diversity of perspectives and interests.

Opening night, for instance, offers you the chance to take in an erotic sci-fi thriller along with a film about Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. Director Margarethe von Trotta and actor Barbara Sukowa were “remarkably successful” say the Hollywood Reporter in their attempt to dramatize the juridical process that led Arendt to coin her phrase, “the banality of evil.” Hannah Arendt screens just once, this evening.

Vanishing Waves, from director Kristina Buozyte, screens again on Saturday. It’s the European arthouse response to Brainstorm — a young researcher is hooked up to a comatose patient, to see if computers can decode two brains talking. (The coma helps because there’s less “noise” from outside stimuli.) But what no one has anticipated — the research team is an all-Europe, largely male endeavor — is the emotional and sexual loneliness of the coma patient. Many films about dreams fail to supply that know-it-when-you-see-it dreamlike quality, but Buozyte succeeds in creating scenes of great beauty and savagery.

There’s also Australian director Cate Shortland’s Lore, about a grueling cross-country trip made by Lore and her four younger siblings after their Nazi parents are taken by the Allies at the end of World War II, in which the indoctrinated children come face to face with a world their parents have not prepared them for. Rotten Tomatoes is a big fan.

In Love, Marilyn, director Liz Garbus tries to catch the many facets of Monroe with the combined talents of Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn, Glenn Close, Viola Davis, Jennifer Ehle, Lindsay Lohan, Lili Taylor, Uma Thurman, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood, their portrayals interspersed with outtakes, home movies, photos, and interviews. The Dandelions is the French answer to what happens when Isabelle Rosellini is your child psychologist; Satellite Boy, from Australian director Catriona McKenzie, pits Aboriginal culture against the mining of the West.

The documentary The World Before Her contrasts the views of contestants in the Miss India pageant with the women’s wing of the Hindu fundamentalist movement, while Midnight’s Children, directed by Deepa Mehta, is Salman Rushdie’s own adaptation of his picaresque novel.