Josh: You guys! We made it! It’s a wrap for the fortieth Seattle International Film Festival. We’ve all been returned home safely, but have been forever changed by three weeks of moviegoing.

Let’s begin with the awards. My desperate plea for an invite in our roundup of weekend picks did not fall on deaf ears! So I woke up bright an early on Sunday morning to rendezvous with Chris to attend the annual Golden Space Needle awards where the results of 90,000 torn ballots and hours of jury deliberations were revealed while we enjoyed a delicious buffet from the comforts of the Space Needle’s low altitude observation deck.

For the audience awards, the People of SIFF chose their favorite movies of the festival and Richard Linklater cleaned-up with a Golden Space Needle for best film and best director for Boyhood,  for which Patricia Arquette also won a best actress statue. Dawid Ogrodnik was the audience’s favorite actor for his role in Life Feels Good; Keep On Keepin’ On was the won the documentary prize; and Fool’s Day took the prize for best short film.

Grand jury prizes went to 10,000KM (dir. Carlos Marques-Marcet) for Best New Director; Marmato (Mark Grieco) for Best Documentary, and Red Knot (Scott Cohen) for Best New American Cinema. Panels of youth juries named Dear White People (Justin Simien) the best FutureWave Feature; Belle & Sebastien (Nicolas Vanier) the best Films4Families feature, and awarded the FutureWave Wavemaker Award in Youth Filmmaking to Malone Lumarda for Black Rock Creek. The full list of award winners is online; and while the food and view were great, the nicest part was that a handful of the winners and recipients of special mentions were in the house to accept their awards.

Now that the audiences and juries have spoken, it’s our turn. After a long nap and some time to reflect, what are your top  films from #SIFForty?

Josh: For once, I don’t disagree with the wisdom of SIFF crowds! I have to admit that as I heard the runners up for the Best Picture award being read off at the SIFF Awards Brunch Breakfast on Sunday morning, I breathed a sigh of relief when Seattle collectively managed to make Boyhood (one of my favorite films of the festival) this year’s Golden Space Needle awardee over runners-up How to Train Your Dragon 2 and The Fault in Our Stars. Not to snobbishly discount the wild enthusiasm of kids and heartbroken teenagers (or the justifiable local affection for Big In Japan, the fourth runner up), but selecting Linklater’s ambitious and affecting triumph as seems to add a note of more serious but still accessible film credibility to our little city’s giant festival.

In stark contrast to Boyhood‘s loose and sprawling indie epic aesthetic, my other contender for best narrative was Ida.  I would’ve been thrilled just to watch a silent presentation of the beautifully composed still camerawork from this film. That Pawel Pawlikowski fits a story of spirituality, familial and historical revelations, a little romance, and an examination of the multifaceted personal consequences of war into an 80 minute package is an astonishing achievement. My favorite documentary was Ballet 422 the slim documentary about young (ascendant) choreographer Justin Peck’s creation of a new piece for the New York City Ballet. Running just over an hour, it captured almost every facet of a diverse and unfamiliar (to me) workplace with incredible economy: no talking head interviews or explanations, just a lot of watching a range of seasoned professionals doing their jobs. Putting the spotlight on the creators rather than the creation made their collective success all the more engaging. Plus, I just find it fascinating to see how things & people work.

Tony: It was a relief that SIFF audiences got it this year re: Boyhood. I shuddered at the prospect of Henk Praetorius’s slight Leading Lady following up his equally slight 2013 effort Fanie Fourie’s Lobola to a Best Picture Golden Space Needle.

Whatever the reason, whether fate was on my side or the overall programming was extra-sharp this year, many of this year’s festival entries actively captivated me, so I’m fudging a bit and giving out 5 Golden SunBreak Awards, in order.

1. Life Feels Good: Don’t judge this Polish drama by its forced, feel-good trailer. This fact-based story takes a tougher and much more satisfying route, with hard-earned emotional epiphanies that literally had me fighting back tears (sometimes unsuccessfully). That it does so with considerable artistry and its own distinct flavor just amplifies its effectiveness for me.
2. My Last Year with the Nuns: Local boy Matt Smith’s incredibly evocative, hilarious snapshot of mid-60s Seattle was a masterpiece of monologue, seasoned by director Bret Fetzer with just enough visual ingenuity to make it feel like a real movie.
3. The Babadook: Even with my long-standing genre jones, I’m vividly aware that not every horror movie is effective enough (and well-done enough) to recommend to civilians. This perfectly wrought, psychologically sound, and well-acted chiller is resolutely one of them. Oh, and it scared the shit out of me.
4. BFE: Shawn Telford’s affecting directorial debut sported one of SIFF 2014’s strongest ensemble casts, and an eerily, hilariously accurate portrait of life in the middle of suburban nowhere.
5. Bound: Africans versus African Americans: My favorite doc of SIFF 2014 (and the winner of this year’s Lena Sharpe Award, which goes to the female director’s film that receives the most votes in public balloting at the festival) found director Peres Owino approaching an eye-opening issue with a personal stamp that felt absolutely integral. It’s a movie that finds a lot of universality in an ostensibly narrow topic.

I’m really with you on Boyhood, too, Josh. If I had a Top Ten, it’d be there.

 

Chris: I share your enthusiasm with My Last Year With the Nuns. I loved Matt Smith’s monologue and his sense of storytelling. It was funny and provided a nice history of Capitol Hill that was before our times. I think I’ll give it a Golden SunBreak award too.

My top three are:

• Regarding Susan Sontag: The best documentary I saw (and I saw plenty). Nancy Kates did a remarkable job of making one of the twentieth century’s greatest public intellectuals seem both human and accessible.
• Lucky Them: Megan Griffiths’ fourth feature film features Toni Collette, who I always love seeing on screen, and Thomas Haden Church, who always makes me laugh whenever he’s on screen. I don’t think it’s an accurate portrayal of music journalism (or at least it doesn’t resemble my experiences), but it’s a well-crafted film that made it easy to overlook its shortcomings. It’s not a perfect movie, but I don’t think I enjoyed a narrative feature at SIFF as much as I enjoyed Lucky Them.
• My Last Year With the Nuns: I hope this film spurs a higher profile for Matt Smith because I can’t wait to see his next monologue, whatever it’s about.

Tony: It speaks to the voluminous depth of SIFF programming that the first two of your Top Three were super-high on my must-see list…and I didn’t get a chance to catch either.

Chris: If it makes things any easier, Lucky Them begins a week-long run at the Northwest Film Forum on Friday.

 

Having crowned our own bests of the fest, let’s not forget about what we saw during the final week. First, there’s the matter of the Duplass-a-palooza during the closing weekend:

Tony: Josh, we both caught two Mark Duplass genre flicks with twists, Creep and The One I Love. What’d you think?

Josh: I basically saw then back-to-back on Sunday and really liked them both! Duplass sure seems to relish being a part of these these lean filming operations — both had approximately two-person casts, small crews, and were shot on location in nice places outside of LA. Although they got a lot of scary mileage out of the limitations and quality of found footage with Creep, I definitely preferred the polish of The One I Love.

Tony: Yeah, on the balance, The One I Love rates higher, but I was also impressed with Creep, which gave the hoary found-footage horror format a funny and genuinely surprising shot in the arm.

Josh: The One I Love also worked within the framework of a clever “concept” [not sure how to say much more about the Twilight Fantasy Island Zone couples retreat premise without getting into spoilers — just see it as soon as you can!], but the way that they revealed it and continued to find ways of letting the plot take surprising turns was really well handled. At post-screening Q&A at the Cinerama for closing night, Duplass won over the hometown crowd by recognizing the involvement of a lot of Seattle’s filmmaking community in the making of The One I Love, even providing the office of Film & Music a free motto: “super tech acumen at an affordable price”.

Also, if we’re looking for a tiebreaker between these two, Elisabeth Moss is a terrific actress who elevated the whole project beyond its gimmick with impressive levels of emotional depth. I was a little bit disappointed that she didn’t make it to Seattle with the rest of the crew for the closing gala.

What else did you manage to see in the closing days of the festival? 

Tony: The last week of SIFF always ends up being my Cram Week, so I saw a lot.  My strongest runners-up for Top Five status were Stefan Haupt’s wonderful period romance/documentary hybrid The Circle (4 of 5 stars); Patema Inverted (4.5/5), an anime just shy of Miyazaki-level greatness in its visual brilliance and emotional pull; the quiet, funny, and just-right love story, Sam and Amira; Boyhood; and Ryan Worsley’s scrappy and smart Funhouse doc, Razing the Bar.

In addition to those we’ve already mentioned, my list of week 3 viewings, with accompanying 1-to-5 star ratings: Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (3.5/5); Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women in Jazz (3.5/5); Beneath (3.5/5); Helicopter Mom (1.5/5); To Kill a Man (3.5/5); Leading Lady (2/5); Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (2.5/5); A Masque of Madness (3/5);  Finding Fela (3/5);  Gold (3.5/5); B for Boy (3.5/5); To Be Takei (4/5); Rigor Mortis (4/5); Late Phases (3/5).

Josh: I didn’t squeeze quite as many movies in! For the sake of time and space, the other things I saw but haven’t yet mentioned, with star ratings and tweet-length reviews:

• 10,000km: Introducing the film with a special balance of humility and confidence, the director described his unbroken 20 minute opening shot that starts with a sex scene and ends with a long-distance airline ticket as “kind of boring at the beginning”. From here, the technologically enabled long distance relationship remained compelling enough that there was no need for the audience to accept his invitation to take a siesta during the middle.  (4/5)
• West: paranoia, justified and otherwise, for a mother and her son in a West Berlin refugee center decades before the fall of the wall. (4/5)
• Big in Japan: Lynn Shelton says: “Lost in Translation meets Hard Day’s Night meets the Monkees.” A beautifully-shot local charmer that showed a lightly fictionalized version of Tennis Pro  on the rise in Tokyo. (3.6)
• Boys: shot like a Dutch Abercrombie catalog it’s a SIFF BINGO: small town, foreign, gay, sports, single-parent, coming-of-age movie with culturally-relevant mopeds as a symbol of danger and freedom! Yet the gauzily shot track & field romance of self-discovery remained evocative and not cliche within the PG-13 constraints. (3.7)
• The Great Museum: displaying all the cogs in the intricate clockwork of maintaining a vast Austrian cultural institution. (3.5)
• Alex of Venice: Chris Messina’s multi-faceted debut has a great look, laconic pace, and strong performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Plus, Don Johnson as aging actor struggling with Chekhov. (3.5).
• The Better Angels: If one must make a little messiah Lincoln movie why not in black and white Tree of Life outtakes. (3.2)
  
• What is Cinema: Demonstrates that it takes more that great clips, quotes, and interviews to make a decent documentary about film. (2.5)
• They Came Together: I definitely needed to eat more drugs before watching this rom com parody that had its absurdly funny moments, yet played like an overlong skit from the State. (2.5)

A look behind-the-scenes of the most-watched short film at SIFF 2014 from World Famous on Vimeo.

General Comments about SIFForty — what left room for improvement?

Tony: I still miss the dedicated SIFF App from a couple of years ago that allowed you to cobble together your own schedule in advance. It was a great, forward-thinking service for festgoers. The interface on their regular site seems to be a bit more mobile-friendly at this point, but I’m still a little nostalgic and misty-eyed for that app.

Chris: I’m not even an iPhone user, but it is my understanding that wishing for a return of iSIFF is official SunBreak policy.

Josh: Someday our beloved will return to us as long as we keep the dream alive! But at least they figured out that the mobile website’s calendar by time of day and list the location of the screenings; so hope springs eternal.

I’ve got one entitled gripe: most films had at least five SIFF-related ads per screening, plus two coming attractions trailers. At an individual level, it’s only a few cute minutes, but by the end its hard not to calculate that you’ve seen enough commercials to fill a feature length film or two. Plus, I still don’t understand the humor of “501”.

Tony: There seemed to be an attempt to address this with the slight variation in the ‘Emotional Calibration’ bumpers and the SIFF Flashback spots, but even more variety would help deflect passholder burn-out. 501, by the way, is riffing on the colloquialism for a tax-exempt non-profit, 501(c). Non-profit joke! Non-profit joke!

Josh: Ah. I thought it was something more complicated than that! On a slightly more substantive point, at multiple closing night speeches, Artistic Director Carl Spence voiced some reservations about the wisdom of running a film festival for more than three weeks. Assuming that SIFF decides to keep its “biggest” claim-to-fame, my suggestion would be to use the long duration of SIFF as an asset: I would love it if the festival was able to spread a film’s run more evenly across the festival. Many times, a film played twice in a couple days, allowing little time for buzz to build an audience between screenings. With rights, permissions, guest availabilities, and other commitments, the logistics of scheduling are a headache that I don’t even want to imagine; so this could be a complete pipe dream.

Enough whining — What went well?

Tony: At the risk of sounding like we’re sucking up, we as press interact with SIFF’s PR team more than probably any other festival staff members, and they kept things especially streamlined, efficient, and unfailingly pleasant.

Josh: The whole SIFF team –paid staffers, concessions crews, ticket sellers, and the legions of volunteers alike –maintained consistent composure, great attitudes, and obvious enthusiasm for film throughout. That they were still standing on closing night is a real miracle.

Chris: Content-wise, I thought that the local filmmaking was particularly strong. Maybe it’s because there wasn’t a Lynn Shelton movie to lean on, but a large sampling of the films I caught were from local filmmakers and I enjoyed a large percentage of those, including My Last Year With the Nuns, Lucky Them, Razing the Bar, and Fly Colt Fly. I was initially disappointed that SIFF didn’t get Laggies, for whatever reason, but maybe it was stronger without it?

Josh: I do think that it was a good year for SIFF! I never see as many films as I had hoped to, and tallying my list, I was surprised that I saw just over 30 despite feeling like I’ve done little other than watching movies during the 25-day festival.

Aside from being out of town for Memorial Day weekend, I tried to make it to at least one screening per day, yet when the credits rolled for The One I Love and it was time to head over to MOHAI for the closing gala, the festival wrapped without me feeling terribly exhausted and mostly enriched by having seen a lot of good movies and a few that will probably be my favorites of the year.

Optimistically, I like that this indicates some combination of me knowing how to choose films I’ll like and SIFF doing a great job with programming.

Chris: I also think SIFF did a remarkable job in who their high profile, out-of-town guests were: Richard Linklater, Laura Dern, Mark Duplass, Isaiah Washington, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. By the time they paid tribute to Quincy Jones during the final week, it felt appropriate and long overdue.

My final count was sixteen, but I enjoyed a high percentage of those, only really being disappointed in JIMI: All is By My Side and A Brony Tale. There were a lot of fims that I am kicking myself for missing but I’ll hope to catch them on Netflix or in general release.

Already Feeling SIFFdrawal? Dive back in to the Best of SIFF Programming?

Of course, just when you thought you were done with SIFF, they pull you back in. This weekend, they’re running a Best of SIFF spectacular at SIFF Cinemas at the Uptown to give you another chance to catch: My Last Year with the Nuns (June 12), Red Knot (June 12), Marmato (June 13), Keep On Keepin’ On (June 13), 10,000 KM (June 13), Borgman (June 13), Belle & Sebastien (June 14), I Am Big Bird: the Caroll Spinney Story (June 14), Dior & I (June 14), Life Feels Good (June 14), The 100-year-old man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (June 14), Boyhood (June 15), the Nightengale (June 15), In Order of Disappearance (June 15), and a Best of SIFF Shorts program (June 15). In addition to these special screenings,  How To Train Your Dragon screens in 2D and 3D starting June 12 and Ida opens on June 13.

 

It’s been a great pleasure to attend and cover SIFF with you guys! In total, we must have seen nearly a hundred features during the festival, did our best to make the #SIFForty hashtag a thing, and  probably all added dozens of films to our must-see lists on the basis of these reviews and recommendations. Hope everyone in the home audience had as much fun as we did.

Until next time, revisit the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2014 page, plus stay tuned for news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.