Editor’s Note

While Stranger writers and editors were meeting with our art director to plan this Seattle International Film Festival issue, one editor blurted out, “I’ve never seen a good SIFF film.” The room went wild: What? Really? Not a single one? “Nope!” the editor said. “Their whole thing is being the biggest film festival. And by ‘biggest’ they mean ‘having the most films.’” In other words, they reject the fewest films. A whole brouhaha exploded with arguments and counterarguments while the editor reflected on SIFF screeners of years past, all those endless introverted sepia-toned films about Estonian soccer players doing their laundry. Later, the editor did recall several films shown at previous festivals that he enjoyed, so he wasn’t speaking accurately. Regardless: This year for the SIFF issue, we didn’t kill ourselves creating tiny blurbs about every damn film (fewer than half were even made available to us), but instead we wrote stories about the most interesting films in the lineup. The name of the editor who blurted out the incendiary comment won’t be revealed here, but it rhymes with Mist of Her Jizz Gel.