John Helde
Family documentary is hard to do well. Made in China, by the
Seattle filmmaker John Helde and shown at this past SIFF, marked the
debut of a director with the subtle gifts needed to pull it off.
Made in China is narrated by Helde and is about trying to
reconstruct his father’s childhood, which, given its unusual
circumstances, isn’t easy. The circumstances: Helde’s father was born
to YMCA missionaries in rural China before World War II. Three days
after childbirth, Helde’s father’s mother died. Helde’s father didn’t
like to talk much about his childhood—Helde only began looking
into it after discovering a stash of photos—but Helde talks to
people who knew his father when they were all kids of missionaries in
China, many of them grown women living in the suburban southwestern
United States. They talk into the camera about how different they feel
from everyone else because of where they were raised, even though
everything about, say, their living room screams fitting in.
The quest—Helde’s search for details of his father’s life that
his father would never discuss—becomes as interesting as the
answers Helde uncovers. Eventually, à la Everything Is
Illuminated, Helde travels to China with little information (a
photo and some old maps) and tries to talk the locals (coal miners)
into helping him. Helde has a sense of humor and a talent for drawing
links between things, but when he’s finally standing in the place where
his dad was probably born, he has no idea what to do. He’s seized with
inarticulateness: “I don’t know what to feel. In an ideal world, I’d be
standing here with my dad. But things don’t turn out the way you want
them to.” CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Benjamin Kasulke
This is how the great culture critic Steven Shaviro described the
look of Guy Maddin’s latest film, Brand Upon the Brain!: “In
order to create the decayed-silent-film look, Maddin shot Brand Upon
the Brain! in Super 8, which he then blew up to 35 mm, so that the
predominantly black-and-white images (there are a few seconds in color)
look, at various times, grainy, washed-out, overly high contrast….”
This impressive look was made possible by the local cinematographer
Benjamin Kasulke. And because the best thing about Brand Upon the
Brain! is the way it looks, the best thing about the movie is
Kasulke’s camera work.
A graduate of Ithaca College (he studied cinema production) and
Prague’s National Academy of Film, Kasulke has worked on other major
local productions, too: Linas Phillips’s Walking to Werner and
Lynn Shelton’s We Go Way Back. His impact on local, independent
cinema is distinct and will be lasting. CHARLES MUDEDE
Etta Lilienthal
In the very first Genius Awards issue, in 2003, Etta Lilienthal was
shortlisted for her set design work in theater. Now her talents have
moved to the cinema, where her work in such locally produced films such
as Police Beat and Cthulhu is notable for its
unobtrusiveness. The best production design acts as a silent character
in and of itself, enhancing the bodies occupying it and quietly
transporting the audience into whatever world, no matter how pedestrian
or fantastical, the filmmakers imagine. Whether it’s crafting a
blood-soaked corpse, cluttering the apartment of a drug addict, or
dressing a coastal manor for a wake so meticulously that the
environment comes across as oppressive, Lilienthal breathes realness
into everything she crafts. One of the highest compliments you can pay
a production designer is that you didn’t notice their sets, you felt
them; Lilienthal, no matter the genre she’s working in, makes you feel
the world on the screen. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Adam Sekuler
Since programmer Adam Sekuler started at Northwest Film Forum a year
and a half ago, nothing dramatic has changed. Its two cozy cinemas
still compete with the likes of Landmark’s Varsity Theatre, Grand
Illusion, and now SIFF Cinema to present an omnivorous schedule of
independent, foreign, and classic films; meanwhile, these three
specialty exhibitors continue to fight for viewers with larger chains
and Netflix.
But something has been going very right at NWFF. From this spring’s
entrancing series of little-seen Canadian new wave films made by
renegade National Film Board documentarians in the 1960s to
retrospectives of the canonical but underscreened filmmakers Jacques
Tati, Jacques Rivette, and Kenji Mizoguchi to exemplary contemporary
films from Argentina, Turkey, Mali, and Belgium—not to mention
welcome revivals of Woody Allen classics—there’s something
worthwhile almost every week. Plus, Sekuler goes beyond the call of
duty, inventing intriguing concepts for his “film challenge” group
exercises every quarter (this fall, participants are being asked to
create short “city symphonies” in the tradition of Manhatta or
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City) and achieving absurd successes
outside his usual zone of expertise (see the annual summer Bike-In held
in city parks). Northwest Film Forum is in good hands. ANNIE
WAGNER
