SUE CORCORAN

Director, writer, and one half of the production team Von Piglet Sisters, Sue Corcoran specializes in cartoonishly garish melodramas. Her first short explored desire through a clown-on-clown love triangle. Her first feature, 2003's Gory Gory Hallelujah, skewered religion through the collision of an Elvis-impersonating motorcycle gang and a town of nefarious Christians. Corcoran's 2005 short, Circus of Infinity, cowritten with fellow Von Piglet Sister Angie Louise and created as part of SIFF 2005's Fly Filmmaking Challenge, compressed the whole of a woman's life—from birth to death and beyond—into 10 minutes, presenting human existence as a vast, colorful practical joke ending with a glamorous splat. Corcoran is now at work on a second feature. "It's a sci-fi gothic horror movie, somewhere between The Silence of the Lambs, Frankenstein, and The Twilight Zone," says Corcoran. "It's gonna be pretty... something." DAVID SCHMADER

JAMES KEBLAS

In March of this year, Greg Nickels appointed James Keblas to head Seattle's film office. At the time, Keblas had plenty of cred in the music community. He had co-conceived, launched, and run the all-ages Vera Project. But did he give a crap about film? So far, Keblas has garnered nothing but praise from members of the film community, including Grant Cogswell and Dan Gildark (Seattle filmmakers currently working on the feature film Cthulhu) and Northwest Film Forum's Michael Seiwerath. Seiwerath describes Keblas as "passionate and opinionated—he knows exactly what he wants," and was especially impressed by Keblas's effort to preserve the ultra-low rental rates for filmmakers using the Magnuson Park hangars as soundstages. It's a decent start, and we're looking forward to even bigger achievements. ANNIE WAGNER

LINAS PHILLIPS

Linas Phillips is a young, local filmmaker who is in the process of completing an impressive documentary called Walking to Werner, coproduced by Phillips and Dayna Hanson (better known as half of the Seattle dance troupe 33 Fainting Spells). The film is literally about Phillips walking from Seattle to Los Angeles to meet his hero—the great German director Werner Herzog. The documentarian's mad feat corresponds with the famously mad cinematic feats accomplished by his subject. En route to L.A., Phillips comes across the lost, the bizarre, the obvious, the hungry, the fallen, the forgotten—in a word, America. The documentary works (and it could have easily failed) because the quest is described with equal amounts of seriousness and silliness. It would be nothing short of scandal if Walking to Werner failed to enter Sundance. CHARLES MUDEDE

DAN GILDARK

Cthulhu, directed by Dan Gildark, is a gay/antiBush/antisprawl horror flick based on the aquatic monster mythology of H. P. Lovecraft and featuring, among other eminent performers, Tori Spelling. Some of it has already been filmed, but production just went on hiatus for financial reasons. If finished, the movie could be sly, campy, and mind-blowingly scary; it could be numbing liberal flatulence. Either way, it will star Tori Spelling. The script sprang from the mind of civic activist and one-time city council candidate Grant Cogswell, and the writing isn't half bad. It's Gildark's job to wrangle the merged paranoiac visions of Cogswell and Lovecraft into something coherent, riveting, and not wholly undermined by the distracting presence of Tori Spelling. We wish Gildark luck in finding the money he needs to complete this project. ANNIE WAGNER

CARL SPENCE

With the sad and surprising departure this past summer of Seattle International Film Festival Executive Director Helen Loveridge, America's largest film festival suddenly found itself creatively adrift. Thankfully, a stellar replacement for head of the festival was just down the hall. Carl Spence, who has been with SIFF off and on since 1994, most recently as its director of programming, has been promoted to the position of artistic director. Spence will oversee the creative vision of the festival, while a yet-to-be-named managing director will oversee the business end. Festivals live and die not by the quantity of famous faces, or the number of deals closed during their runs, but by their programming. Spence has already proven he has the programming chops, and now that he's being given the opportunity to craft SIFF's artistic future free from much of the business bother, the festival can only improve. BRADLEY STEINBACHER