It’s the 42nd annual Seattle International Film Festival, friends and neighbors. Opening Night’s just around the corner (Thursday, to be precise), so SIFF like a pro, courtesy of our time- and fest-tested tips, updated for 2016:
PLANNING
• Plan ahead. Get to know the SIFF website well. Check ahead to see if guests will be at the screening for a Q&A, for timing and scheduling purposes, if not for celeb-watching, and monitor the various SIFF feeds regularly for updates, so you’ll have the heads up before a screening sells out.
• The festival is stuffed with panels, parties, and events; book early for these special engagements.
• Technology is your friend! SIFF is never as tech-integrated as one would like — This takes care of our contractual obligation to mourn the absence of a dedicated iSIFF app for one more year– but you can still make use of the My SIFF and the ability to email your personal festival schedule to friends. Getting it onto social media or your own Google calendar, however, remains a pipe dream.
• While your schedule and your online presence might not be b.f.f.s, SIFF itself is riding indiscriminately on various social media bandwagons. Keep up with festival news on Facebook & Twitter; views on YouTube and Instagram.
• Once the festival starts, you can get a commemorative catalog. The glossy pictures and longer descriptions make almost every film look more compelling, and the giant book makes a nice souvenir/scorecard.
BUYING
• Consider buying in bulk. Ticket packages cut down on service fees and are cheaper than individual tickets.
• Flying by the seat of your pants and getting into a film via the standby line is a complete crapshoot — don’t count on it for a popular film. But if a miracle does occur, those tickets are full price and “cash preferred.”
• However, it doesn’t hurt to try your luck with whatever happens to be playing on whatever night you happen to be free. Not every screening has an interminable line, sometimes those scary-looking line is just hard-core SIFFers with time on their hands and/or an ingrained sense of promptness.
Many times you may walk right in to a half-empty theater. It’s the chance to experience seeing something you enjoy on some level, if only just a window to a different world/experience than what you’re used to.
Give in to the festival, Young Skywalker.
• Head to a SIFF box office to get your tickets in advance and avoid an extra line at the venue for will call. If you must pick up tickets at will call, try to drop in between screenings and have them print all of your pre-ordered tickets at once.
ATTENDING
• If you’re particular about where you sit, there’s no such thing as arriving too early. Expect every screening to have a long line and a full house. Still, as long as you have a ticket, you’ll have a seat. If you’re a passholder, you can usually show up about 20-30 minutes in advance of the screening and still get a good seat. Ticketholders, try at least 30 min. All bets are off in the case of movies with big buzz. In that case, take whatever seat you can get, but just sit down already. There’s not going to be some magical super-seat in the theater if you scour the entire venue.
• Be prepared with umbrella and light jacket. Bringing some snacks is acceptable, but don’t be That Guy who sneaks in a four-course meal.
• Find your path of least resistance. For example, at the Egyptian, nearly everyone enters the theater and goes to the left. So break away from the herd and go to the right.
• Bathrooms! (Ladies, I’m mostly speaking to you, unless you’re a dude at a dude-heavy midnight screening.) One way to avoid the line is to either head straight to the restroom as soon as you get into the theater, or wait until the lights go down and the SIFF ads start. You’ve still got about 7 minutes of ads, trailers, and announcements before the film begins–especially handy at the bathroom-unfriendly Egyptian.
• Consider subtitles. If your film has them and you’re not fluent, find a seat with a clear view of the bottom of the screen. Aisle left or right is generally a good bet. The seats on the center aisle (exit row) at the Egyptian have tons of room to stretch your legs, but the raking of the theater flattens out for the aisle, so you’re likely to have an obstructed view of the subtitles if anyone of average height or above average skull circumference sits in front of you.
• If you’re a passholder, the queue cards of yore have vanished for 2016. Good news: You don’t have to keep track of those little sheets of colored paper. Bad news: You get to engage in the time-honored and shudder-inducing tradition of waiting in line.
EXTRACURRICULAR
• The Harvard Exit is now history (sad emoji), but the Egyptian and Pacific Place are within relatively walkable distance from one another. The former is also right next to a Walgreen’s, if you need reasonably-priced water, snacks, or eye drops after endless hours of movie viewing.
• Alternately, Lower Queen Anne offers you the closest thing to one-stop SIFFting you can get. All three SIFF Uptown screens will be showing festival films, and just two blocks or so away the SIFF Film Center beckons. Festgoers who usually stick around the Downtown/Capitol Hill area theaters (Pacific Place, the Egyptian) will want to plan some extra travel time accordingly: the roster of SIFF entries playing the Uptown is just too diverse and strong to ignore. However, heading to Queen Anne leaves you reliant on Seattle’s not always timely bus service.
• One bit of convenience for non-drivers: The newly-minted light rail stop on Capitol Hill, as well as the existing stops at Westlake Center and in Columbia City, make the light rail a viable option for traveling between The Egyptian, Pacific Place, and/or Ark Lodge.
• If you’re not in the market for industrial-strength volumes of movie snacks, most of the theaters have semi-secret human scale snack options on the menu (though the only way to get an actually small soda is often when paired with an actually small popcorn). At Pacific Place, it’s the “light snacker,” and at SIFF, it’s blissfully and accurately called a Small.
Keep track of the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2016 page, plus news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.