SIFF 2017: Closing Roundtable
Tony: Well, after three weeks of rampant, citywide cinephilia, the marathon that is SIFF 2017 has finished.
Josh: Not quite! We still need one last debrief from the SunBreak’s Film Team. There’s a lot to cover since we last convened, including the films of the last week, SIFF’s official awards, our festival favorites, and the Closing Gala. So, as we #gather one more time to get into it, let’s start at the end and work backward.
Closing Night Films
Tony: I’m glad Young Karl Marx was worthwhile. It was on standby for weeks, so I missed it. The trailer made it look almost like a Saturday Night Live parody of a historical drama, with Marx and Engels looking very matinee-idol pretty and lots of slurpy melodramatic music pulsing away. Then again, almost no one seems to know how to make a trailer that’s worth a shit in these devalued times, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the movie’s better than the trailer promised.
Josh: I decided to go at the very last minute; so maybe the thrill of a stray standby ticket (bestowed upon me by a kindly passing sponsor), the rush of Cinerama’s delectable chocolate popcorn, or the sentimental closing remarks from the festival directors, but it definitely exceeded expectations! It definitely had some trappings of the historical drama, but Peck made a multi-lingual, highly conversational, feel fresh and relevant. The only odd part was being roused to the cause of worker only to walk a few blocks into a Seattle-fancy party for the film-obsessed bourgeoise at MOHAI. C’est la vie.
Josh: But before getting to the party, interest in Closing Night pomp and circumstance seems to have motivated SIFF to run some official counter-programming with a Closing Presentation of Ingrid Goes West. What did you think?
Chris: I found Ingrid Goes West to be a fine note to wrap up the film-going portion of my SIFF. Aubrey Plaza is becoming one of my favorite actresses to watch, and she’s clearly become SIFF royalty, having two movies play this (the other being The Little Hours) and had one of her breakthrough performances in Safety Not Guaranteed (SIFF class of 2012). Hell, last year, SIFF even programmed a documentary about her rec-league basketball team. As for Ingrid Goes West, it’s a black comedy about the bad side of social media, and it’s a film that feels like it’s on the cultural zeitgeist and very comfortable living in 2017. Plaza plays Ingrid, a lonely woman who inherits some money when her mother dies, and uses that to seed a new life in Los Angeles, trying desperately to befriend an Instagram influencer that she thinks has the perfect life, played by the underrated Elizabeth Olsen. Plaza brought a lot of humanity to a part that could very easily become cliche. At times, I thought the movie felt a little like it was punching down, but overall, I liked it very much and felt a lot of empathy for Ingrid, as she just wants what we all want: to feel a little less alone in this world.
Closing Night Gala
Josh: Good to hear — I was torn between the two closing film options. Sounds like Ingrid, too, was way more complex than the comedy-forward trailer suggested. As to the gala itself, I’ll just say that MOHAI is an exceptional venue for mixing, mingling, wandering around the exhibits, and running into glazed-eyed friends. I’ve been covering and attending SIFF long enough to remember this party happening in less grand hotel ballrooms; so I hope that they hold onto this sponsorship as long as they can!
Tony: MOHAI is a terrific venue, for sure, and it’s always a kick to hang out there. It did seem like there were a lot of new faces at the Gala, which was nice but curious. Unlike the Opening Night Gala, the Closing Night Gala’s DJs were way more consistent.
Josh: Indeed! I got there early and the DJs already had people dancing under the big Rainier “R”. Maybe selling the extra tickets helped both in terms of bringing in a fresher crowd and in terms of budgeting, because whereas some years have seen the wells run dry early, the caterers didn’t seem to run out of libations all night. In addition to the everlasting spirits, there was a puzzling, apparently always-replenishing never-ending table of unconventional hummuses at the back of the room and most other appetizers — aside from the very popular chocolate buffet — seemed to remain plentiful throughout the evening.
Tony: And food and drink seemed to be, as you noted, well-controlled. The only thing that would’ve made it more fun is if I’d have brought a traffic cone home. Most of the best parties entail somebody brandishing a traffic cone at the party’s end.
Odawni: As you gents know, my face was not among the many new ones at the Closing Night Gala. (Boohoo.) I would have loved to go but I was absolutely out of steam. I am very sad to hear that I missed the “never ending table of hummus.” I’ll have hummus-hopes for next year.
Chris: The exhaustion that comes at the end of SIFF is no joke. It’s one of the things I most remember after covering my first SIFF.
Josh: My only real complaint is that the party didn’t run a little bit later, but after a 25 day marathon, I suppose the staff deserve a break (or at least a private party of their own).
The Golden SunBreak Awards
Josh: Before we get into the other awards, let’s start with the fun part: our own Golden SunBreak Selections. Now that we’ve had a couple days to recover from the party and reflect on what we saw, what were your favorites?
- Lane 1974 – It’s a bit of a slippery slope to offer too much praise to a subtle, quiet, nuanced indie like this, for fear of over-hyping it. But the fact is, it’s a subtle, quiet, nuanced little indie that does everything it sets out to do, brilliantly. The period feel is so effortlessly organic, Lane 1974-o-Vision should be patented for use in all future 70s-set films.
- Small Town Killers – I laughed so hard, so often, at this gleefully inappropriate Danish dark comedy, I was questioning whether I’d become asthmatic.
- Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckey – Documentarian Dave O’Leske’s crafted a rip-roaring yarn, with unexpected layers of complexity beneath the laughs and adventure.
Honorable mentions to A Dragon Arrives! and Without Name, both grade-A examples of one of my favorite flavors of cinematic food, the Mindfuck Movie.
- The Work – Surprise! This is going to sound a bit over-the-top but I stand behind my words that I believe this film will play a big part in changing the perspective of mental health, therapy and what they mean. I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I sat on the edge of my seat…Ultimately, it reminds us that no matter our background, appearance, or situation, treating self and others humanely can help in healing the hefty core issues we carry from childhood and without traditional mental health treatment. Also, the persistence, passion, and patience of Director Jairus McLeary and his crew to get this film made is an amazingly admirable feat. (It took 15 years!) You can learn more about the film in my interview with Jairus, who, by the way, is an affable and gracious soul.
- Say You Will – Speaking of 15, the crew of Say You Will shot the movie in 15 DAYS (!); the quality and authenticity of the film are not lost, however. This film will speak to your inner teenager and incite beautiful memories that adulthood may have stamped out. It seems the characters were made for the actors and the soundtrack is great. Two big, fat thumbs up!
- Time Trap – This one is just fun. It’s got just the right amount of storyline cheese and time warp geekiness. If you’re into multiple dimensions, spelunking and hot chicks in short shorts, this one’s for you.
- A Ghost Story opens with a bump in the night, but it isn’t a horror movie. If anything, it is a love story. After exploring the unexplained sound that roused them from quiet slumber, a young couple played by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck get back to sleep in their modest rural home. They go about the quiet and intimate routines of their lives. He resists her daydreams of moving while working on his music. I hope that it isn’t a spoiler to reveal that that eventually there comes a point where he ceases to be alive, yet remains to observe the happenings in his home — including his grieving wife infamously consuming the better part of a pie — under the cover of a surprisingly evocative sheet. All movies are, by nature, about the unfolding of events over time, but here directory David Lowery makes the passage of time and its relative swells and contractions the main event. The soundtrack is sparse, but deeply evocative (“I Get Overwhelmed” by Dark Rooms is deployed to devastating effect) and many scenes are dialogue-free. Further, many of the spoken lines are either unsubtitled Spanish or a monologue delivered by Will Oldham in the midst of a party. Some may find it dull or difficult, but I hope it’s not too obvious to say that I found it to be a haunting meditation that still lingers in my thoughts.
- The Farthest is almost a scientific companion piece to A Ghost Story in the way that it captures the enormity of time and the vastness of space. The nominal subject of the documentary is the Voyager program, which capitalized on a once every 176 years alignment of the planets to launch a pair of robotic spacecraft on the backs of decommissioned ICBM rockets onto an epic journey to the outer planets. Clever planning, scientific ingenuity, and gravitational slingshots enabled the originally-approved mission to Jupiter and Saturn to be extended into a trek to Uranus, Neptune, and a still-ongoing journey beyond the bounds of our solar system. The most obviously romantic part of the mission is the golden record carried by the each ship — a Carl Sagan-curated mixtape containing scenes, sounds, greetings, and music from Earth — in the unlikely event that they ever cross paths with intelligent life deep in space. But I was equally moved by the interviews with the men and women who conceived the mission, engineered the spacecraft for extreme longevity in the harshness of space, managed its operation on the ground, translated its observations into scientific discoveries, and continued to innovate to allow for new missions and continued contact over the last forty years. The Voyager program was launched only days after my birth and, thanks to things like it, I grew up under the impression that the ability to see pictures of planets across billions of miles thanks to a national investment in science was a completely normal phenomenon. Seeing the obvious emotional attachement of the scientists to these little spaceships made me feel a bit less sentimental about my attachment to them. The movie was both inspirational for the scale of the success and disheartening given the current political climate. It is almost certain that the Voyager twins will outlast us all, though at this point I will be grateful if we’re able keep the lights on at NASA long enough to keep listening until they’re finally too far away to continue their daily calls home.
Honorable mentions to It’s Only the End of the World, Give Me Future, and A Dragon Arrives!
- The Cage Fighter – A locally-made documentary about an aging, mixed martial arts fighter who feels most confident when he’s in the ring, even as his career flounders. He has plenty of demons, and fighting is his temporary escape from them. It’s heartbreaking to watch him let him get pulled back into the ring when everyone, most clearly his patient but increasingly weary family, knows he’s probably going to get beat up.
- City of Ghosts – Third runner-up for Best Documentary, but one of the documentaries I loved that I wish it didn’t need to exist but I hope everyone sees. Matthew Heineman profiles a group of citizen journalists in Raqqa, Syria,who are reporting to the world what is happening to their city as ISIS invades it. It’s an immensely important documentary that offers a sharp contrast between the heroic Syrians who are risking their lives to let the world know what ISIS has done to their community, with the useful idiots that make up our current, political media.
- In the Radiant City – Rachel Lambert’s debut feature is a remarkably moving meditation on something we don’t see often in media: what happens to the family members of people who commit awful crimes. This is an incredibly moving family drama, beautifully filmed and beautifully acted, about a man who returns to his hometown in rural Kentucky twenty years after his testimony helps send his brother to prison for a crime he did commit, and not everyone is happy to see him.
The Golden Space Needles & SIFF Jury Awards
Josh: Of course, the other big news on Sunday was the announcement of the real festival awards. On the audience side, all of those torn and write-in ballots resulted in Golden Space Needle Awards for best picture and best director going to Rodrigo Grande’s At the End of the Tunnel. Rounding out the audience top five were The King’s Choice; I, Daniel Blake; Patti Cake$; and Lane 1974. Dolores was the favorite documentary and acting awards went to David Johns for I, Daniel Blake and Lene Cecilia Sparrok for Sami Blood. (Remarkably, these general audience picks overlapped with unofficial side-balloting of 196 passholders who saw an average of 67 films. Their top five were: At the End of the Tunnel, the Journey, In Syria, I, Daniel Blake, and the King’s Choice.)
Tony: I spent a lot of SIFF watching things on assignment, so I didn’t get a breadth of exposure to a lot of the zeitgeist-y films on the Festival docket. The one exception for me was (I think) Lane 1974, Seattle director SJ Chiro’s debut. The fact that it won SIFF’s New America Film Competition — and that it’s been picked up by prominent indie distributor The Orchard — both ensured that it was a legit topic of conversation at the Closing Night gala. I’ll have to abdicate to the rest of you eminent Knights of the SIFF Round Table for further insights.
Odawni: I somehow managed to not watch any of this year’s awards winners! Like Tony, I look to Josh and Chris for their sterling summaries and witty repartee.
Josh: I did meet my modest goal of seeing all of the Official Competition films, and while I wasn’t both pleased and unsurprised that Sami Blood took top honors (unlike some others, its closing credits were met with rapturous applause rather than introspective silence), many of the others were high on my list of festival favorites (especially Beach Rats and 7 Minutes). I already wrote about this last week, but most of the entries truly succeeded in showcasing SIFF’s belief “in film’s unique power to share original stories, diverse perspectives, and rich emotional journeys.”
Chris: I don’t know if I would say that I caught many of the award winners, but it does feel like there were a lot of parallels between what we discussed in our roundtables and how the Golden Space Needle Awards were decided. I was particularly pleased to see Elina Vaska from Mellow Mud be named as the first runner up for Best Actress. It was a really understated and powerful performance and I’m glad to see that the audience responded so favorably to her star turn in a small, coming of age film from Latvia.
Josh: Somehow, even outside the Competition, I wound up seeing more of the award winners than usual, which feels oddly validating given that I saw just 30 films this year. So, given that I wrote about Patti Cake$ and End of the Tunnel as being worthy crowd pleasers in our last roundtable, I was both relieved and pleased with the results.
The audience awards are often hard to predict — much depends on when, where, and how often a movie screens (special events or previews of animated features often get a boost). So, it’s possible that the riotous Q&A that featured Rodrigo Grande and a special appearance from Woodpeckers director Jose Maria Cabral, who met only earlier that day to commiserating over recent break-ups over an afternoon of heavy drinking was what pushed At the End of the Tunnel into that top spot over the Palme d’Or winner. Given that they’re determined by write-in ballots, the acting categories can often go to the most memorable celebrities. So it was such a pleasant surprise to see audiences rewarding the leads in Sami Blood and I, Daniel Blake. Both films had a high degree of difficulty — conveying a lot through subtle, reserved, and resilient characters — so it was great to see these rich and nuanced performances recognized.
Chris: I did see six of the nine entries for the New American Cinema Competition, and to be honest, I would’ve been delighted if any of the ones I saw won. Lane 1974 was the winner, which was neither surprising nor disappointing because it truly is a great film. When I watched the Friday afternoon screening of Say You Will, I immediately felt like the film understood me when I was a ute: unrequited crushes, uncertainty about whether or not your friends are your friends, the feeling of being a burden to your parents. I was pretty much sobbing throughout the movie because of recognition.
Odawni: Chris, I am so with you on Say You Will (and the producers, Nancy Taylor and Taylor Grabowski said that you cried throughout the movie.) Aside from the uber teen experience of the film, I appreciated that the leads had realistic family situations. Both were parentified teens who had one parent at home, which is typical of the American family in these times. I’m feeling nostalgic about the 90s series, My So-Called Life. I’m still upset that they cancelled it after only one season. Anyway, back to SIFF stuffs!
Chris: Yeah, I told them that if I wore makeup, I would’ve looked like a member of KISS, though Alice Cooper maybe would have been a more appropriate analogy.
Less than Golden
Josh: I always feel like if you don’t see some bombs, you weren’t challenging yourself hard enough. Any notable failures?
Odawni: Escape Room– Though entertaining for what it was, I found this movie relatively disappointing. I’m a puzzle nerd and appreciate a good amount of gore so I was stoked to check this one out. Instead, I left the theater bamboozled by the ending (apparently there was an alternate ending that was worse — good thing they went with the one they did.) I winced when the credits rolled because there was not one clap to be heard –crickets–, and the director, writer and actors were in the audience to do a Q&A post-screening. What I gathered about the genesis of the film was that the writer was talking with a friend one day that there were no movies about puzzle rooms so he wrote one. It felt thrown together and without much depth for such a complex subject: privilege.
Josh: I already savaged Struggle for Life in our very first roundtable; so I won’t subject the French jungle farce to further abuse. By now, most of its broad antics have blessedly faded from memory!
The Rest of the Last Days of SIFF 2017
Tony: For various reasons (scheduling, fatigue, and a harrowing day-long adventure losing–and finding–my keys), my last week of SIFF was very slow. Two movies, both archival screenings, both decidedly worthwhile.
The Triple Door hosted one more live-accompanied film presentation, a screening of the 1920 silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, scored by Austin band The Invincible Czars. The movie’s not in the top tier of silent horror occupied by Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — it’s way more of a potboiler than it is a mood piece — but it’s still a fast-paced and entertaining view. The Czars’ score was a winning mix of cabaret decadence, classical music filtered through an English music-hall filter, and cinematic atmosphere, and it balanced the right amount of respect with knowing humor. Legendary early-film thespian John Barrymore contributes full-throttle work in the title role(s), and he’s genuinely terrifying.
The other archival screening I caught was The Witches, presented as part of the Anjelica Huston tribute. My memories of this 1990 dark fairy tale were strong and positive (I saw it ages ago on VHS), but the movie felt slight through older eyes. That said, there are some lovely practical visual and makeup effects (the movie was an unintended swan song for puppeteer/genius Jim Henson), Huston has a whale of a time devouring the scenery, and I greatly dug director Nicholas Roeg’s funhouse-mirror visual sense.
- The Landing uses the grammar of documentary to interrogate the nature of truth by investigating dueling narratives about the fate of the crew of the Apollo 18, the fictional final mission to the moon, following a botched re-entry that resulted in an emergency landing in a Chinese desert. Resurrected from a 1990s short, the film was made by the same cast and crew over the course of 25 years. Introducing the movie, director Mark Dodson said that they made the movie not knowing the world into which it would be born. Its parallels with the current political situation are either lucky coincidence or simply evidence that obfuscation and officially sanctioned uncertainty are timeless.
- I was glad to finally catch Robinson Devor’s Pow Wow, an eclectic collage that forms a fragmented portrait of the stark contrasts present in the Coachella Valley. Aerial photography shows the absurdity of lush greenery of heavily-irrigated golf communities giving way to dry dusty deserts just across the street. Told in fourteen episodes, the movie is loosely structured around the case (and subsequent play and film adaptations) of a 1908 manhunt of 28-year-old Chemehuevi-Paiute Indian “Willie Boy” and his lover through the desert. Interviews with valley residents span similar divides: jockeys at the polo club, Native Americans living on reservations, a playwright wandering the trails, rich older men driving their custom golf carts or classic cars through giant sprinklers, law enforcement officials recounting tales of dead bodies in date fields, country club denizens in flashy cowboy costumes or inappropriately appropriated feathered headdresses for parties. The conversations from these characters — each, in their own way outsiders to the hipper/gayer/more famous Palm Springs do less to illuminate the criminal case than to illustrate the odd, yet fascinating contradictions of desert life.
- Set on the outskirts of an unspecified Chinese city, with dingy alleys, buzzing neon, unfinished construction sites, Have a Nice Day follows a bag of stolen cash through the hands of a collection of loosely interconnected characters. Told in flat, simple, yet evocative animation, the caper is reminiscent of the Coen brothers, with characters ranging from hapless to absurdly competent, each obliquely considering the meaning of freedom by way of their varying motivations for seeking the money.
- In Nocturama a economically and culturally diverse crew of apparently un-connected twentysomethings enact a series of coordinated terrorist attacks across Paris and spend the night hiding out after hours in a high-end department store. Clearly a tough sell in the current environment. From the intrigue of the tradecraft setup to the glamor of the anxious aftermath in which the perpetrators essentially play dress-up to kill time, the slick production lends the proceedings an almost unpleasant allure. By not diving into their motivations beyond the vaguely economic and presenting violence without affect, it intentionally invites discomfort all around. Very French, very film-festivally.
- The broad outline of Zoology — a dowdy Russian administrator inexplicably grows a tail and discovers herself with the affections of a kindly radiologist — has the makings of a story ripe for a whimsical retelling. But given the Russian treatment, the tail is a body-horror-inducing fleshy appendage with a mind of its own; the woman’s colleagues are truly miserable to her; the townspeople are bizarrely religious and superstitious; the medical community is woefully underprepared to treat her condition with anything other than nonplussed delay tactics. It’s not all misery (there’s a makeover scene and a glittery dance party and a compellingly withdrawn lead performance), but it might’ve worked better as a short. When watching foreign films, it’s too easy to assign storytelling choices to a national mood, but it’s also possible that it’s just a filmmaker who’s skeptical of storybook romance.
- Finally, maybe in part due to the late hour of the screening, Paris Prestige was a miss for me. The fraternal bar drama felt like it was trying so hard to capture the gentrifying Pigalle neighborhood that it occasionally lost track of telling a story.
Odawni: The Oath closed out my SIFFing action. I give it a so-so. The storyline of protective father trying to protect troublesome teen daughter from her drug-dealing, tattooed, angular-faced boyfriend was pretty formulaic. If a helix of Takenand Misery sounds like a good movie to you, you’ll probably dig it. I was hoping for sweeping scenes of Icelandic landscapes but alas. Though, the Icelandic language is quite pleasant, so I didn’t mind that part one bit.
It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye
Tony: Despite the fact this was one of my leanest SIFFs quantity-wise, I somehow managed to almost exclusively pick good to great movies. How about you guys?
Chris: Tony and I talked about this a bit at the closing night party, but I think between us, a lot of the movies we saw were built around longer pieces we wrote (I did 11 total interviews and saw 26 feature films), and that might explain the high batting average in terms of the quality of films we saw. Or maybe 2017 is an exceptionally strong year for independent cinema and the SIFF programmers did a great job of curating that experience.
Odawni: Wait. What just happened? Man, SIFF sure does blow through Seattle like a hurricane of movie-madness. I had a great time participating in the SunBreak conversations (thanks again for the invitation!) and have never had an easier time getting into movies – having a press pass is such a treat. I didn’t get a chance to watch as many movies as I had hoped but I enjoyed just about all the films I did manage to catch. I haven’t watched so many movies in such a short amount of time since middle school Spring break! I also wanted to give a shout out to the folks at SIFF, who were all lovely to work with.
Josh: It’s always bittersweet to say goodbye to SIFF and these conversations. I had a great time at the movies, subsisted too much on popcorn and Coke Zero, and occasionally saw the sun while waiting in the pass holder line. But to help with separation anxiety, we can cling to the festival a little longer via this weekend’s Best of the Festival programming. Audience favorites and award winners will be showing at the Uptown include: At the End of the Tunnel and Bye Bye Germany (June 16); Becoming Who I Was; Lane 1974, Sami Blood, and Swallows and Amazons (June 17); In Syria, Boundaries, Dolores (June 18); The Paris Opera (June 19); The Farthest (June 20); and finally the Best of SIFF Shorts 2017 (June 22). It’s a great chance to catch films that you might have missed or to revisit those you really loved.
And with that, I think we can call this season of SIFF a wrap — I lost count, but I feel like we must’ve collectively seen over a hundred of the features. It’s been a real time hosting these virtual salons of cinema and thanks to everyone at home for following along with our extended film rambles!
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Revisit the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2017 page.
