Seattle International Film Festival: May 11 - 21

Looking to the international festival circuit, there is abundant evidence that the world of cinema is not only expanding and developing in its style, content and form, but thriving. Reviews from the recent string of years since pandemic restrictions were lifted have seen reporting coming back from Cannes Film Festival, where "A Great Festival went Pear Shaped, Awarding the Palme d’Or to Ruben Östlund’s "Triangle of Sadness", or in the case of Berlin, where last year's festival it was seen "Women Dominate Berlin Film Festival Awards as 'Alcarràs' wins Golden Bear", and this year, where the festival was one of, "Prestige, Politics and Ethical Starpower". Then there's the two-year knockout of Venice, where both 2021 and last year produced historic festivals, even in the wake of the pandemic, setting the barometer, "As the Film Industry Aimed for a Return to Normality". Smaller but no less notable festivals in Locarno and Rotterdam presented vanguard work, detailed in RogerEbert.com's "Rotterdam International Film Festival Highlights", and the "Locarno Film Festival Returned to Pre-Pandemic Glory". Domestically these were then reflected in the programming seen in Toronto and New York which followed. All of the above were shared content agendas that once had prominence within SIFF. Those times though, are now many many years in the past. Very little of the above can be seen corresponding to the programming or general curatorial ethos of the Northwest's largest film festival. Annually, looking to San Francisco and Vancouver, one bears witness to these institutions programming festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned. Even our neighbors in the relatively rural setting of the Orcas Island Film Festival have annually put together a significantly more incisive assembly of films.

This year's program continues the downward trend that began a decade ago with the painfully omissive lineups we saw in 2010 and 2011. What followed was a short string of years that suggested relief from the lackluster programming described above, which waned a bit in 2012 and expressed a further positive direction in 2013. For the 2014 festival, their 40th Anniversary was celebrated with SIFF's strongest programming in almost a decade, suggesting a renewed vision for the festival. Both 2017 and 2018 also saw a nominal return to the strength of seasons past. Those years marked a trend away from the previously seen glut of middle-ground postmodern contemporary romances and knowingly-clever dramas seemingly conceived for the Sundance and SXSW sects. One can speculate that this middle road approach to programming, clearly expressed by the programming of the 2015 festival and 2016 after it, has been conceived to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their suburban hobbles and inner-city condos. One can't help but consider these factors alongside the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle and what may be SIFF's conception of programming that corresponds to these changes. After the 2020 edition was cancelled outright due to the conditions of the pandemic, the 2021 edition shifted to online virtual exhibitions, in 2022 the Seattle International Film Festival returned to in-person programming for the first time since 2019. Until this most recent decade, Seattle International Film Festival existed as a focal point of visionary cinema curatorialship, with the resources, funds and the legacy of a hugely influential institution. Yet due to SIFF's ongoing detachment from the values and perspective of the larger international festival circuit, a majority of the films listed below in this year's lineup are simply of interest, rather than what could be considered essential viewing. Such is the festival that we have now.

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Thursday, May 11
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7:00 PM - Celine Song "Past Lives"
Paramount Theatre 

https://www.siff.net/festival/past-lives

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Friday, May 12
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3:30 PM - C.J. Obasi "Mami Wata: A West Afrikan Folklore"
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/mami-wata-a-west-afrikan-folklore

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Friday, May 12
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9:00 PM - Dominik Moll "The Night of the 12th"
SIFF Cinema Uptown

https://www.siff.net/festival/the-night-of-the-12th

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Saturday, May 13
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11:00 AM - Felix Van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch "The Eight Mountains"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/the-eight-mountains

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Saturday, May 13
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2:00 PM - KD Davison "Jonas Mekas: Fragments of Paradise"
SIFF Film Center

https://www.siff.net/festival/fragments-of-paradise

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Saturday, May 13
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7:00 PM - Charlotte Le Bon "Falcon Lake"
SIFF Film Center

https://www.siff.net/festival/falcon-lake

 

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Saturday, May 13
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9:00 PM - Sam Pollard & Ben Shapiro "Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes"
SIFF Cinema Uptown

https://www.siff.net/festival/max-roach-the-drum-also-waltzes

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Saturday, May 13
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11:59 PM - Matthias Hoene "The Last Exit"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/the-last-exit

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Sunday, May 14
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5:30 PM - Manuella Martelli “Chile 76”
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/chile-76

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Sunday, May 14
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9:00 PM - Ira Sachs "Passages"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/passages

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Monday, May 15
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8:45 PM - Martin Skovbjerg "Copenhagen Does Not Exist"
AMC Pacific Place

https://www.siff.net/festival/copenhagen-does-not-exist

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Tuesday, May 16
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6:00 PM - Doug Ing "Alan Lau @ Work"
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/alan-work

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Tuesday, May 16
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9:00 PM - Rodrigo Sorogoyen “Beasts”

SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/the-beasts

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Wednesday, May 17
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6:15 PM - Clyde Petersen "Earth: Even Hell Has its Heroes”
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/even-hell-has-its-heroes

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Friday, May 19
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1:00 PM -  Chie Hayakawa "Plan 75"
SIFF Cinema Uptown

https://www.siff.net/festival/plan-75

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Friday, May 19
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3:30 PM - Keiichi Hara "Lonely Castle in the Mirror"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/lonely-castle-in-the-mirror

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Friday, May 19
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8:30 PM - Brillante Mendoza "Feast"
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/feast

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Saturday, May 20
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11:59 PM - Marie Alice Wolfszahn "Mother Superior"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/mother-superior

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Sunday, May 21
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2:00 PM - Margarethe von Trotta "Journey into the Desert"

SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/ingeborg-bachmann-journey-into-the-desert

GoGo Penguin "Everything Is Going To Be OK" & US Tour: Apr 27 - May 13

Chris Illingworth, Jon Scott, and Nick Blacka have been on an upward trajectory since their auspicious beginnings as Mercury Prize nominees and Gondwana Records artists. At the time sharing a label with such contemporaries as bandleader Matthew Halsall and modern neo-jazz chamber ensembles like Portico Quartet. As GoGo Penguin they have since released a string of albums on the luminary Blue Note Records label and most recently for Sony's XXIM Records. On their newest, "Everything Is Going To Be OK", they embark on a rare US tour with a night at Seattle's Neptune Theatre, presenting a sound which owes as much of a debt to the repetitive minimalism of Philip Glass as it does techno, drum and bass, and big rock-oriented crescendos sourced from such bands as Godpseed! You Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky. Theirs is a sound that has cannily adapted this rush of electronic and indie rock music to a traditional acoustic lineup of piano, double bass and drums and produced a fusion that leans heavily into the quadrant of jazz. Other references can be heard in the ECM Records sound of Jon Scott's spare yet dynamic approach to the drums, and specifically in Chris Illingworth’s Esbjörn Svensson Trio influenced piano sound. The rhythm thrum of Nick Blacka's bass may be the most central jazz-focused of their characteristic sounds, but even he varies widely between laidback flow and breakneck pacing. As many of GoGo Penguin’s tracks shift between an inclination to speed up tempos, allow them to cool off, and then only return at even higher speeds. Yet their albums often shine the brightest as their least hurried, and it's these passages that define their strongest works like "V2.0" and "A Humdrum Star". When they move into the rhapsodic territory that they share with the late Svensson’s trio, they are at their most compelling, building slow ascents back toward percussion and bass grooves that underpin the lightning flashes and small accents of Illingworth's piano.

“Life is a Feast: The Cinema of Federico Fellini" at SIFF Cinema: Apr 12 - Jun 14

The future of repertory cinema in Seattle became even more uncertain with the elimination of the position Greg Olson held for a half-century, as film programmer at Seattle Art Museum. With the loss of the programmer of the longest-running film noir series in the United States, and author of definitive books on the subject of David Lynch, Seattle found that the "Fate of SAM Film Series Unclear as Museum’s Longtime Film Curator Laid Off". Three years later, Olson has brought what was initially intended as Seattle Art Museum's Federico Fellini Centennial in 2020, to the big screen at the SIFF Cinema Uptown. His newly relaunched retrospective, in collaboration with Cinecitta Rome, and co-presented with Festa Italiana, will grace screens for two months, showcasing “Life is a Feast: The Cinema of Federico Fellini". Along with Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini's work from the late 1950s to mid-1970s will appear on any critical assessment 20th century cinema. And rightly so. One needs look no further than The British Film Institutes' Greatest Films of All Time Poll for evidence of the greatness of Federico Fellini's standing in the history of European cinema. Having begun under the guidance of Rossellini, while in the midst of his classic neorealist films, he soon found himself working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini's "Paisà", in which Fellini was entrusted to film the scenes in Maiori. Within a short span of years, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor first seen by Fellini in a play alongside Giulietta Masina, and concurrently he contributed aspects of Rossellini's segment in the anthology film, "L'Amore". After traveling to Paris for a script conference around Rossellini's "Europa '51", Fellini was given opportunity to begin his first solo-directed feature, "The White Sheik".

His directorial debut having initially passed through other hands. When the film came to Fellini it was as a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949. At which time, the film's producer commissioned Fellini to rework the script. Its subsequent rejection by Antonioni led the film back to Fellini, and alongside Ennio Flaiano, it was re-worked into a spirited and lighthearted satire on the life of a newlywed couple. This would be the first of many fruitful collaborations between Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Fellini, the three men co-writing the screenplays of some ten films over the ensuing decades. In the first of another decades-spanning collaborations, the film highlighted the music of its composer, Nino Rota, who along with Mastroianni, and Fellini's future wife, actress Giulietta Masina, would all become constants in both his filmic and private worlds. One year following, what's considered the first of Fellini's films wholly his own, "I Vitelloni" found great favor with critics and a receptive public after its Silver Lion win (alongside Aleksandr Ptushko's "Sadko", Marcel Carné's "Thérèse Raquin", and Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu") at the 14th Venice International Film Festival. From here, flying over the expanse of a filmmography too rich and nuanced to surmise, a valiant and intimate account by Anthony Lane for the New Yorker, “A Hundred Years of Fellini”, borders as close to perfection as one could ask. Moving at varied trajectories through specific works, and eras, Sight & Sound’s centennial feature, “The Circus of Life: The Many Faces of Federico Fellini”, offers up a richer array of particulars. In a quartet of pieces, they break down the maestro into four concurrent aspects, first beginning with his relationship to the Italian Neorealist movement, "Part One: The Neorealist", and the studio that was his great enabler, "Part Two: The Felliniesque and Cinecitta Studio".

From there we get a complex portrait of Fellini the man, both behind the camera and as a private and public citizen, "Part Three: Federico by Fellini", and the cast of regular collaborators and cohorts in his art, considered as both a theatre production company and extended family, "Part Four: La Famiglia Fellini". Foremost among them, the writing team of Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, which he retained from his earliest collaborations, alongside composer Nino Rota, production and costume designer Danilo Donati who's work appeared on many of the director’s more visually extravagant films, alongside Norma Giacchero for script supervision and continuity, actress Giulietta Masina, and Fellini's avatar and surrogate, Marcello Mastroianni. In an excerpt from a 1964 interview around "La Dolce Vita"'s production, The Criterion Collection presents this rich and disarmingly personal account of, "Marcello Mastroianni on Fellini". Further reading hosted by Criterion appears in a series of essential essays on the director's central films, "La Dolce Vita: Tuxedos at Dawn", "8 ½: When “He” Became “I”", "8½: A Film with Itself as Its Subject", "Paolo Sorrentino on Fellini’s Roma", "Roma, Rome: Fellini's City", "Amachord's Satire of Italian Provincial Life", "The Nights of Cabiria: My Kind of Clown", and "Fellini Satyricon: Not Just Friends". Of which, a majority will appear in Greg Olson's post-centennial retrospective at SIFF Cinema, including Fellini's two semi-autobiographical masterpieces, "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2", along with a set of earlier films, "Toby Dammit", and his first breakout, "I Vitelloni". From there, the series presents mid-period classics like "La Strada", "The Nights of Cabiria", and "Amarcord", fleshing out the body of his theatrical cinematic world with "Ginger and Fred", and "Juliet of the Spirits".

Nils Frahm "Music for Animals" & North American Tour: Apr 19 - 29

Returning to Seattle for the first time since 2018, Nils Frahm performs in the massive theater space of The Paramount, a far cry from the intimate setting of his west coast premiere at The Chapel Performance Space during the inaugural Substrata Festival. Yet this is in line with the tenuous balance of popularity and personal values the artist has navigated in recent years, as documented in his interviews with The Independent, "Nils Frahm: ‘NFTs are the Most Disgusting Thing on the Planet", and "Is it Classical, or Pop? Nils Frahm is Worried, but Not About That" for the New York Times, and the larger venues and audiences the composer's music has garnered in the last decade. Along the course of this trajectory toward greater popularity, Frahm returned again in 2013 as sounding board to Ólafur Arnalds, heard in their largely improvisational musical dialog during the Decibel Festival night at the Nordstrom Recital Hall. "Trance Friends" describes a similar meeting at Frahm's Durton Studio in Berlin, wherein the two artists improvised throughout the night, documented over the course of 8 hours with no overdubs and no edits, as part of the assembled "Collaborative Works". Outside of classical music, Frahm's personal well of inspiration comes from the more varied fields of jazz, fusion, minimal electronics, world music, dub, and 20th century modernism, as reflected in the selections for, "Music Is Not Sport: Nils Frahm's Favourite Albums". These varied stylistic sources and genre influences were most clearly heard on his "All Melody" album of 2018, which marked a summation of sorts of his work for the Erased Tapes label. Following quickly on the label's launch in 2007 by Robert Raths, within a year the imprint had become home to the growing body of European neoclassical and contemporary chamber music shepherded by the likes of Arnalds and Frahm.

The two artists would supply Erased Tape's breakout albums in 2010's "And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness", and 2012's "Felt", respectively. Bringing a new global audience to their mixing of both baroque and modern approaches to composition and unabashedly sentimental conceptual explorations. These thematic evocations touched on in Arnald's interview for The Quietus, "Escaping the Darkness: An Ólafur Arnalds Interview". On more than just the strength of its releases, the label had become known for its attention to acoustic and production process, as detailed by Frahm in his turn with the periodical, "The Listener is the Key: The Nils Frahm Interview". The question of acoustic character and instrumental voice taken to it's extreme in Pitchfork's cheekily titled, "Nils Frahm’s Piano Is Bigger Than Yours", detailing the meeting with instrument maker David Klavins, and ensuing invitation to play the world's largest piano, the 12-foot-tall upright, known as the M370. Unlike the latest in the line of solo piano recordings, the anthology collection "Old Friends, New Friends", released on his newly founded Leiter label, Frahm's most recent, "Music for Animals", features no piano whatsoever. Centered on almost an exclusively electronic palette, this first collection of wholly new material in four years is more resonant with the characteristics of the early ambient excursions of Em:t or Rephlex Records, than it is of Claude Debussy or Erik Satie. Born in the first year of the pandemic, when life and touring was uniformly on hold, Frahm found a new course in the early months of solitude; "My constant inspiration was something as mesmerising as watching a great waterfall or the leaves on a tree in a storm." He says in the album's release statement, continuing this sentiment with; "It's good we have symphonies and music where there's a development, but a waterfall doesn't need an Act 1, 2, 3, then an outcome, and nor do the leaves on a tree in a storm. Some people like watching the leaves rustle and the branches move. This record is for them."