I’m sitting in Beth Barrett’s office at the SIFF Film Center in Seattle Center. The office has an ordinary desk, a few casual chairs, and a wide window with a view of the popular International Fountain, whose jets of water dance to the sound of music. Because it is one of the hottest days of the year, the fountain is packed with people. Because the windows are open to keep the room cool, the voices of children in the bowl of the fountain can be heard. I’m in the office to talk with its occupant, Beth Barrett, SIFF’s director of programming, about what I rate as one of the city’s best festivals, French Cinema Now.
Barrett selects the films for this event, which is in its fifth year and runs from September 29 through October 6. She does this job with the view that the festival’s content should not be so touristic (though there is some of that—it’s hard to avoid), but more importantly, should provide the audience in Seattle and other cities it visits with a sense of the current spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and political state of the francophone world. And though the festival involves 20 or so films, there has generally been one movie around which all of the others orbit. Sometimes, this core movie is well known and has made a big splash at an elite festival, such as 2014’s Two Days, One Night, which is directed by the famous Dardenne brothers and stars the great Marion Cotillard as an ordinary mother struggling to survive in the age of German-imposed austerity. (Cotillard was nominated for an Oscar for this performance.) Other times, it is not a flashy film, but an obscure one, like Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Grigris, which screened in 2013 and concerns a Chadian handicapped man who can dance with like Michael Jackson with his “broken legs.”
