It’s been a tough year for SIFF.
The nonprofit, which runs the annual Seattle International Film Festival each May, as well as three year-round cinemas, has been hit hard by the last 12 months. The multiple rounds of layoffs, the sudden exit of their former executive director, and the fall of the beloved SIFF Egyptian, which the nonprofit stopped renting after a pipe burst. (Repairs to the sodden theater were completed, but the organization’s leadership at the time bailed anyway. Now, the Egyptian sits mostly unused.)
In the tumult, some staff left for other jobs, or simply stepped away from the organization, just as preparations for this year’s festival began. SIFF, even to those who have attended it over the years and seen it shrink, has always been considered a smaller festival. At the same time, while not on the level of Sundance or SXSW, it is by no means a podunk little festival. According to tax filings from 2024, the nonprofit’s operating budget is $10 million a year. One half of that comes from grants and donations, the other half is revenue. But as a result of cuts, this year’s festival is comparatively threadbare, and it’s not gone unnoticed, says one staff member.
“People are noticing that the program is smaller, the lineup is smaller, the guests are smaller, the films are smaller,” they said.
After all SIFF’s upheaval and downsizing, more than a dozen past and present staff who spoke to The Stranger expressed a cautious sense of optimism. But it’s a bit like laughing through the pain. What option do they have? A positive outlook is the only way to keep things moving, they say, though there have been promising signs that, after a year of derailment, the organization is getting back on the right path.
Staff have managed to make it all work with less resources and fewer people to run the festival, even as the organization delayed the starting date of some key seasonal roles in order to cut costs.
“It’s good that everything seems to be moving full-steam ahead on having a film festival,” one staff member said. “I do think, just in general, it always sets kind of a bad precedent to prove that you can get away with doing more with less. Because then there’s the expectation that you can always get away with that. That’s my fear, is for festivals moving into the future, three, four, or five years, that it will always have these cost-cutting measures.”
It’s been a long and bumpy road for staff. At this time last year, SIFF cut hours and nine full-time employees, or 21 percent of its administrative staff. SIFF leadership spoke of the state of the organization in dire terms, warning of a potential closure if these steps were not taken. Morale was at an all-time low just as those remaining had to continue working to keep things moving.
It came as a shock. They would receive information in bits and pieces, though nothing to indicate that things were this serious until they learned they or their colleagues were being laid off. It was a painful way for staff to learn the financial picture was less stable than they were being told. Several staff said that, while they were occasionally given updates during all-staff meetings, they weren’t being told critical information about finances until it reached this breaking point.
The acquisition of SIFF Cinema Downtown, formerly the Cinerama, was an example of what one called “obfuscation,” as some staff didn’t know that the “giant operational change” was coming until they heard the news in May 2023 from then–executive director Tom Mara at the same time as the general public. Soon after the Cinerama’s reopening that December, it became clear to staff it would be a harder lift than many in leadership understood.
The big challenge of programming the space—a single screen that had already been dark for several years—was working with bigger studios. To get bigger blockbuster films that will perform well, you also have to shovel their crap that will likely underperform for weeks on end. A multiplex with multiple screens can take a hit. One screen? Not all the chocolate popcorn in the world can lure audiences to Joker: Folie à Deux.
The theater wasn’t always able to get around this, and, even as they’ve been able to bring in more creative programming in recent months, many staff saw it as a false start.
SIFF leadership later acknowledged that their projections for Cinerama attendance in 2025 were way off, and had to readjust their “targets and finances accordingly.” Since then, there have been more repertory screenings at the Downtown, including series for acclaimed auteurs like Akira Kurosawa, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese, as well as the more recent anime series “Ani-Marathon” in partnership with Sea Slug Animation.
Then came the Egyptian, which has still been a bitter pill for many based on how its historic run ended. According to staff, they were concerned about reopening the space because they were already working with less staff and with the Downtown added to their plate. They wanted to make sure reopening and relaunching the Egyptian was done strategically. Staff said that former executive director Mara misinterpreted their worries, reaching out to some of them to tell them their concerns helped motivate the organization to not renew the lease. This rankled many of these staff, as they felt like they were being misrepresented and blamed for the closure.
Mara himself closed out in November of last year, with Diana Knauf, then SIFF board president, saying in an email that “SIFF Board of Directors and Tom have mutually decided not to renew his contract as Executive Director.” However, in a personal message to staff, Knauf acknowledged those who raised concerns about the organization under Mara’s leadership, saying, “I understand that your feedback comes from a place of deep concern for the health and future of SIFF and that for many of you, it took courage to speak up. I am so grateful that you did.”
But now? Things are feeling a little brighter. The current leadership team—which includes director of administration Michael Clark, director of advancement Jeanne Nickelsburg, artistic director Beth Barrett, and director of cinema operations Melody Smith—serves as a collective operating in lieu of an executive director. Staff say they, and a new human resources manager named Kyle Bradford, have “been much more communicative about policies and why they’re doing things this way” and “have taken the extra time and steps to talk to staff” about the current challenges that exist as well as where they can grow. A search for an executive director remains underway.
Staff say leadership’s straightforward approach to their concerns rather than just “managing people’s reception of information” has eased tension. Before, the strategy of leadership seemed to be about keeping the organization’s problems close to the chest. Now, staff feel like they’re in the loop, and are engaging in good-faith conversations with superiors who want to keep them from being caught off guard by any financial troubles.
“For them to actually break down numbers and be like, ‘Hey, this is actually how little money we have and this is how much we made this month.’ That’s been really nice,” says one staffer. “For a period of time there, every all-staff meeting came with some insane thing that none of us knew was coming, and I feel like that hasn’t happened in a while.”
Multiple staff say that in previous meetings they had been told by leadership at that time that they couldn’t be given financial information out of concern that it would be shared with the press. Several staff say reticence and secrecy kept them in the dark in regards to this critical information.
“People were asking questions that they probably should have already had answers to quite a while before, or people were hearing things for the first time in these all-staff meetings,” one staff member said. “I think that’s changed a lot for the better. People are hearing more from management in terms of ‘this is why we’re doing this.’”
Staff also said that the festival itself is being better managed from the top. Specifically, those who have come aboard into higher-level leadership positions have been better at communicating with the remaining staff about both the day-to-day operations and preparations for the festival. There’s a feeling that the organization has risen to meet its financial challenges as one, several staff say.
This has included conversations about taking steps to resurrect the 70mm Film Festival at SIFF Downtown with hopes that, given the proper resources, it could soon make a return. Staff also said that they’ve been able to more successfully make the Downtown work. They also benefited from a strong run of the film Project Hail Mary (which has proven to be a box office juggernaut) and the fact that the next best place to see it in the city, the Boeing IMAX Theater, has been shuttered since February 1 while being sold to the Space Needle corporation. It’s an open question whether the theater, now apparently being called the awkward mouthful of a title “IMAX ‘at the Center’ (Space Needle)” according to the IMAX website, will return to showing theatrical movies at all.
Staff said in the run-up to the festival that those attending should expect things to be smaller this year, and people are already noticing now that the lineup is out. Some of this surrounds programming, with there being fewer films than previous years as well as fewer venues to show them at. Namely, while the Egyptian did recently briefly reopen for a smaller Latin American punk film festival put on by those working at Seattle Central College, it won’t be part of SIFF.
The festival will be making use of the PACCAR Theater, the smaller IMAX theater adjacent to the Boeing at the Pacific Science Center.
As for the final big change this year audiences will see, there will be no closing night party, a longtime tradition of the festival. As veteran SIFF artistic director Beth Barrett told the Seattle Times back in April following the announcement of the closing night film, The Invite, “budgetary concerns really didn’t allow us to invest in a closing night party this year.” There will still be an opening night party following the Seattle premiere of the upcoming Boots Riley fashion-heist satire I Love Boosters, a maximalist, anti-capitalist, pro-union romp starring Keke Palmer, at the Paramount.
The Stranger asked SIFF if someone in leadership could speak more about the state of their finances, but they told us they wouldn’t talk about it until after the festival in June.
Multiple sources said this raised the greatest unknown in SIFF’s future: What will happen with ongoing contract negotiations with the SIFF Cinema Workers Union? Will the organization, showing an unabashedly pro-union film as its opener, do right by its own union? Will the current floor staff workers, essential to the ongoing operations of the organization, be given a fair contract? That remains to be seen—and, just a few years back, some staff walked out at the conclusion of the 2022 fest. Thus, just as the lights again go down on the opening night film as another, albeit smaller, year of the festival takes place, this big question remains for the workers. As one said, there will never be “an absence of issues” to tackle next.
Editor’s note: If you want to know more about the latest on the SIFF Cinema Workers Union, Chase has the latest here.
Clarification: This story has been updated to indicate that Kyle Bradford, human resources manager at SIFF, is not on the nonprofit’s leadership team. But staff told The Stranger that Bradford has, along with the leadership team, improved management’s relationship with staff through clear communication.