Hope everyone enjoyed their long sunny Memorial Day weekend! For those looking to escape the drizzly midweek forecast, a few of our picks for the next few days at SIFF.
Thursday night marks the festival’s return to Kirkland with a gala presentation of Footnotes, a “working-class musical comedy” that takes place in a luxury shoe factory. Closer to home, Seattle’s Prom Queen will bring a “girl-group noir” soundtrack to classic B-movie clips curated by the archivists from Something Weird for a one-time performance at the Triple Door.
Also of note: SIFF recently added a special presentation of Aubrey Plaza comedy Ingrid at the Wedding with an option to add-on an invite to the previously-sold-out Closing Night party at MOHAI.
Josh
- 7 Minutes. An Italian “social thriller” finds eleven women deciding whether to sacrifice break time to keep their recently-acquired factory open in the face of multinational concerns. Michele Placido’s dramatic take on changing European socioeconomics screens as part of the Official Competition, so I’m willing to give it a shot.
- THURSDAY, JUNE 1 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 9:15 PM
- SATURDAY, JUNE 3 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 12:00 PM
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Patti Cake$. Australian Danielle Macdonald stars in the title role, a twenty-five-year old aspiring New Jersey rapper, who struggles with both the turmoil of daily life and establishing nightlife credibility. Although the story of an unlikely musician finding escape through music sounds somewhat conventional, buzz from the film’s Sundance premiere suggests that her winning performance as an unconventional pop star elevates the material and must be seen to be believed.
- THURSDAY, JUNE 1 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 6:30 PM
- FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2017 – AMC Pacific Place 4:15 PM (Director Geremy Jasper scheduled to attend both screenings)
Also on my radar: there’s one more screening of Xavier Dolan’s claustrophobic family drama Its Only the End of the World this afternoon (I really liked it, but understand why others didn’t), plus I’m going to try to catch catch Sami Blood (also in competition); a couple of documentaries including On the Road (Michael Winterbottom’s profile of Wolf Alice) and Whose Streets (about the Ferguson protests) look intriguing.
Odawni
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Napping Princess. Japanese anime screenwriter and director Kenji Kamiyama (“Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”) masterfully spins a tale about Kokona, a young woman who finds herself between two seemingly unrelated worlds. In the ‘real world’ she spends her time slumbering between college entrance exam study sessions; while dreaming, she discovers a world of warring machines and princesses with magical powers. Kokona unexpectedly learns about her family history as the line between the two worlds begin to blur.
- WEDNESDAY, MAY 31 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 6:30 PM
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By the Time it Gets Dark. In Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature-length film, we are taken on a circuitously poetic journey surrounding the 1976 massacre in Bangkok where students protested the return of a former military dictator. The beautifully non-linear and abstract style of the film signify the difficulty in fully grasping the experience of this historical event.
- THURSDAY, JUNE 1 – AMC Pacific Place – 9:30 PM
Also on my radar: The Hippopotamus (Stephen Fry’s dark comedy about a cantankerous lush of a poet who drops the bottle to embark on a spontaneous investigative mission involving an alleged miracle healer.)
Chris:
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The Cage Fighter. Local filmmaker Jeff Unay has what looks to me like a very fascinating documentary, a portrait of mixed martial arts fighter/Washington State Ferry employee Joe Carman as he grapples with his compulsion to return to fighting when he’s almost 40, after promising his family he’d retire once and for all.
- THURSDAY, JUNE 1 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 7:00 PM (Director Jeff Unay, subject Joe Carman scheduled to attend)
- SUNDAY, JUNE 4 – Kirkland Performance Center – 3:30 PM (Director Jeff Unay, subject Joe Carman scheduled to attend)
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Behind the Curtain: Todrick Hall. Documentary about a young, gay, black artist as he tries to launch the wildest version of The Wizard of Oz yet.
- THURSDAY, JUNE 1 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 4:00 PM (Director/Producer Katherine Fairfax Wright scheduled to attend)
Also on my radar: Napping Princess (mentioned above) and Kakehashi: A Portrait of Chef Nobuo Fukuda (documentary about the famous chef behind the upscale Nobu restaurant chain). By the Time It Gets Dark sounds completely fascinating to me, too: praised the non-linear storytelling and the beauty of the cinematography, Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong tells three interlocking stories (a pop star, a filmmaker, and a waitress) that revolve around the brutal (and deadly), 1976 suppression of protest at Thammasat University.
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