The 2017 iteration of the Seattle International Film Festival is here, friends and neighbors. The festival officially opens with a fancy gala presentation of Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick on Thursday night at McCaw Hall. Opening night films are known for being hit or miss, but this one comes with great critical buzz out of Sundance (where Amazon picked it up for $12 million, making for back-to-back Amazon Pictures as SIFF openers). Along with the director, lead actors/co-writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon are scheduled to walk the red carpet.
You can join them by dressing up in what passes for Seattle finery and gathering for the traditional Thanking of Sponsors, the screening itself, the mad-rush for hors d’oeuvres, strategic deployment of drink tickets, chatting up your film festival friends, and maybe just a little bit of dancing with tickets ranging from general admission ($75/$65, members) to unlimited drinks ($100/$90) to full-on valet and gift bag fancy ($275) still available.
Never fear, if history is any indication, the gala will end before midnight to give you time to recover before charging into the next three weeks of filmgoing that starts in earnest on Friday afternoon. To SIFF like a pro, revisit our time- and fest-tested tips, updated for 2017:
PLANNING
- Plan ahead. Get to know the freshly-facelifted 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.
- The festival is organized into multiple intersecting systems. For the left-brained, there are programs and competitions: completists might try following along with the juries in collections like the official competition, the documentary competition, or the new american cinema competition; extremists could consider seeing the full collection of WTF or Alternate Cinema; hedonists could check out the Culinary Cinema series or soak up the Face the Music program. There are also regional collections, from the far-flung to films with Northwest Connections. If you like secrets and Sunday morning matinees, check out The Secret Festival. If this all sounds too complicated, you can also select “moods” like Creative Streak, Love, Make Me Laugh, Open My Eyes, Provoke Me, Show Me the World, Thrill Me, or WTF (both a mood and a program).
- If you’re still stuck, choose one of SIFF’s tireless programmers and follow their Programmer Picks (fun fact: 143 of the features are at least one programmer’s pick, 92 are orphans, and six were highlighted by four different programmers as festival favorites — probably safe bets: The Big Sick; Give Me Future; I, Daniel Blake; Prom King, 2010; Sami Blood; Struggle For Life; and Whose Streets?)
- 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 the mobile website and an app to keep track of your tickets are still there to fill the void. Online, you can make use of the My SIFF to build your own calendar and email your schedule to friends who still use email. Getting it onto social media or your own Google calendar, however, remains a pipe dream.
- Luddites can print the whole schedule grid out on a couple sheets of paper.
- 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.
- The festival also posts daily updates (as PDFs) alerting eagle-eyed planners to films that are selling quickly or are already on standby on their Resources page.
BUYING
- Consider buying in bulk. Even if you don’t want to commit to a full series pass, you can still get a ticket packages (in sets of six or twenty) to cut down on service fees and save a bit of money compared to individual tickets. a space
- Or be adventurous, swear yourself to silence, and buy into the exclusive Secret Fest — you’ll get four Sunday morning screenings that you can see only by signing a contract promising never to reveal what you saw.
- 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 that scary-looking line is just hard-core SIFFers with time on their hands and/or an ingrained sense of promptness.
- Many 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.
- Print your tickets out at home (or save the PDF to your phone). If that absolutely doesn’t work, 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, we’re mostly speaking to you, unless you’re a dude at a dude-heavy Egyptian 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. However, if you’re planning a Lisbon summer excursion and want to practice your Portuguese comprehension, this is a perfect opportunity to practice your manners too, and sit in the subtitle-less seats.
- If you’re a passholder, the queue cards of yore have vanished. 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. [Note: this was the protocol in 2016 and always changes each year; we’ll update with any 2017 line control developments]
EXTRACURRICULAR
- 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.
- Alternatively, The Egyptian and Pacific Place are within relatively walkable/quickly bus-able 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.
- You can still enjoy SIFF outside of Seattle proper! Between the Majestic Bay in Ballard, Columbia City’s Ark Lodge Cinemas, Shoreline Community College, the Kirkland Performance Center, and Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, there are plenty of satellite venues where you can Get Your SIFF On (see the SIFF website for more details).
- One bit of convenience for non-drivers: The 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 2017 page, plus news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.
