Although we weren’t crazy about SIFF’s opening night selection, aside from throwing a fantastic party (complete with Hendrix music missing from the film, hundreds of well-dressed Seattleites, remarkably efficient bar queues, and the feeling of a Film Prom), the festival still kicked off with some exceptionally great news.  SIFF announced that they are now the proud owner of the Uptown (thanks to the “Angels of the Uptown”) and that they have officially secured the lease to operate the Egyptian as a year-round theater (thanks to an agreement with Seattle Central Community College). As exciting as it was to hear that the Egyptian would be part of this year’s festival, it’s a tremendous relief to know that SIFF will be permanently unshuttering the Capitol Hill movie palace. In addition to re-opening the venue, they’re planning substantial renovations. An anonymous donor has promised matching funds of $150,000 dollars; those with less deep pocketbooks can join the campaign by texting “SIFF” to 501501.

 

SIFF’s opening weekend is packed with special guests and events, perhaps none more special than Laura Dern, most recently of Enlightened, the brilliant and deeply affecting HBO dramedy that she co-created with Mike White. Unfortunately, SIFF isn’t marathoning the glorious series from beginning to (too soon) end, but on Friday afternoon, Dern will greet hundreds of sobbing teenagers for the film adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The next day, she’ll spend the afternoon at the Egyptian for a retrospective, Q&A, presentation of SIFF’s Outstanding Achievement in Acting, and a screening of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart

The Saturday party series also kicks off this weekend with with Dior and I followed by a gathering at Pacific Place.

Finally, Sunday’s program includes a screening of Serenity along with Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s in town for An Evening with Chiwetel Ejiofor where he’ll also be receiving one of SIFF’s Outstanding Achievement in Acting awards. The presentation and conversation is accompanied by his new film, Half a Yellow Sun.

WEEKEND PICKS

Even if you don’t go to any of these events, your first weekend of SIFF can still be extra-special. Below, we list a few of the films that we’re most excited to see. Caveat emptor, many of these picks are made on hunches, affinity for a director’s previous work, or just general buzz. Please use the comments to dispute our selections or highlight missed gems!

Ida  Writing for the New York Times, A. O. Scott calls Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida “one of the finest European films (and one of most insightful films about Europe, past and present) in recent memory”. The main risk of starting your SIFF with this story of a Polish novice discovering difficult truths in post-War Poland is that it might set an impossibly high bar for the rest of the festival.

• May 16, 2014 3:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
• May 21, 2014 7:00 PM Harvard Exit

Venus in Fur : Roman Polanski adapts the contemporary stageplay about adapting a novella for the screen, casting Mathieu Amalric against his [Polanski’s] wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) for psychosexual shennanigans in a Paris theater. There’s some of the usual front-row awkwardness with plays transferred to film, but the two person show remains compelling onscreen as writer/director and goddess/actress read, workshop, comment on, and become the shifting-power-dynamics theatrical performance.

 

• Friday May 16 (4:00 PM) @  Harvard Exit;
• Saturday May 17 (6:30 PM) @ SIFF Cinema Uptown

 

Skeleton Twins : Craig Johnson’s True Adolescents was one of my favorites from SIFF 2009. He returns to the festival this year SNL-alums Kristin Wiig and Bill Heder playing estranged twins who reunite for some melancholy humor in upstate New York. 

• May 16, 20149:30 PM Egyptian Theatre

 

The Double : Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd, the utterly delightful Submarine) drops Jesse Eisenberg into a Dostoyevsky novella, playing two versions of himself, the brash one coaching the timid other through a courtship with Mia Wasikowska.

• May 16, 2014 9:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
• May 18, 2014 9:30 PM Lincoln Square Cinemas

 Tom at the Farm : I’ll watch anything Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan puts on the screen. He casts himself at the center of his own movies and has enormous confidence in his ability to realize his own particularly saturated cinematic vision; so I’m beyond intrigued to see how his shift away from his “trilogy of impossible love” to this suspenseful noir set at a country funeral plays out.

• May 16, 2014 9:30 PM Harvard Exit
• May 20, 2014 4:00 PM Harvard Exit

Chinese Puzzle : In a somewhat lighter Euro parallel to Richard Linklater’s monumentally affecting Before ____ series, Cédric Klapisch checks-in for a third time with the characters that we fell in love with in a crowded Barcelona international student sharehouse in L’Auberge Espagnole. This time, we catch up with Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, and the rest of the gang in New York where they face more grown-up problems. [In a strange convergence, this is not the only Duris–Tatou feature at the festival this year, but more on Mood Indigo later.]

• May 16, 2014 4:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
• May 18, 2014 8:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Chris’s Pick:

Fight Church: director Bryan Storkel had a SIFF hit a few years ago with Holy Rollers, a documentary about a team of Christian, blackjack pros who specialize in card-counting. Here he details not just how mixed martial arts seems to be a fixation among a lot of Christian men, but how some churches actually host their own underground fight clubs.

• May 17, 2014 1:00 PM Pacific Place
• May 18, 2014 4:00 PM Lincoln Square Cinemas (Bellevue)
• May 26, 2014 12:30 PM Rention IKEA Performing Arts Center

Tony’s Picks:

Desert Cathedral: This combination of found footage, archival clips, and newly-filmed narrative bits uses the true story of real estate developer Peter Collins’ disappearance (and the enigmatic pile of VHS tapes that formed a metaphoric breadcrumb trail) as a springboard for a pretty unusual fiction/fact hybrid. I have no idea if Travis Gutierrez Senger’s shot-in-Seattle feature debut will be as fascinating in execution as it is in concept, but I’m mightily intrigued.

• May 17, 2014 9:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
• May 18, 2014 1:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Lusty Men: The Lusty Men hasn’t acquired the cult cache of director Nicholas Ray’s two most famous movies (1954’s subversive western Johnny Guitar and James Dean’s signature starring vehicle, 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause), but it’s a great 1952 drama revolving around the love triangle between a cocksure young rodeo rider (Arthur Kennedy), his spitfire of a gal (Susan Hayward), and the long-in-the-tooth pro (Robert Mitchum) who comes between them.

• May 18, 2014 5:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Witching and Bitching: I’m a total sucker for Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s feverishly-imaginative takes on genre tropes (The Last Circus emerged as one of my SIFF 2011 faves), so this horror comedy about a group of costumed burglars running afoul of a coven of witches looks utterly, sublimely batshit crazy–in other words, typical de la Iglesia.

• May 17, 2014 Midnight Egyptian
• May 20, 2014 9:30 PM Egyptian

White Shadow: Many of the films in SIFF 2014’s African Pictures series look exceptionally promising, none more so than this reputedly shattering thriller about a young Tanzanian albino on the run from superstitious locals.

• May 17, 2014 8:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
• May 18, 2014 2:00 PM Pacific Place

Another: The trailer for Jason Bognacki’s feature debut about a young woman with a possibly Satanic lineage promises heady, disorienting chills, with 70s-vintage British and Italian horror as jumping-off points.

• May 17, 2014 5:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
• May 18, 2014 2:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Keep track of the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2014 page, plus news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.