Careful readers will notice the large number of Asian films in this year's festival, both contemporary and archival. The Heroic Grace series (not Heroic Race, as some of my colleagues believe) focuses on vintage kung fu, while the Cloud Kingdom series directs the spotlight toward South Korea, which is never far from North Korea, except at SIFF, where the two nations are separated by more than the 38th parallel. Good Korea is represented by 17 films, while its fascistic northern neighbor has none. How's that for a war on terror?
But as in past years, SIFF 29 is about more than just movies. This year's festival is also sprinkled liberally with documentaries. Forty nonfiction works compose the First Person Singular program. Among these are 10 shorts made by local filmmakers, marking the return of the Fly Filmmaking Challenge. Those artists, Sherman Alexie, Shannon Gee, John Helde, Tanya Hughes, John Jeffcoat, Leigh Kimball, Jen Peel, Brian Quist, Lynn Shelton, and Mark Titus, were each given 12 days in which to create a Seattle-centric short subject from top to toe; the shorts will screen together on Mon May 26 at 1:45 pm at the Egyptian.
But enough about cinema, let's talk about talking about cinema. First up, two personal appearances: An Evening with Jeff Goldblum (Sun June 8, 6:30 pm, Egyptian) and An Evening with Ray Harryhausen (Fri May 30, 6:30 pm, Egyptian), during which a live host will interview a fantastic actor and a technically innovative filmmaker (respectively), while showing clips and taking questions from the audience. Spoiler alert: The audience questions are usually inane and sycophantic. The Harryhausen event will include a screening of his classic Jason and the Argonauts (1963), as well as a new short, The Tortoise and the Hare.
Next come the panels, where filmmakers, critics, doyens, and mavens alike meet on a stage to ponder, pose, and pontificate. All SIFF panels are at the Broadway Performance Hall. At First Person Singular? (Sun May 25 at 11:30 am) the intricacies of documentary filmmaking will be teased out at length; the Female Paradigm (Sun June 1, 11:30 am) examines the role of womanhood in the film industry; and Music Masterclass (Thurs June 12, 1 pm) is a dialogue between Ian Hierons of Milan Records and Mychael Danna, composer of scores for films like The Ice Storm and The Sweet Hereafter.
In addition to the panel discussions, the Filmmakers Forum programs (Sat June 14, Broadway Performance Hall), presented by Independent Feature Production/Seattle, offer a series of instructional presentations designed to further break down the walls between artists and patrons. First, IFP takes you Behind the Scene (11:30 am), loading the stage with a micro-sized movie set, complete with monitors, to allow the audience to see the crashing boredom that is filmmaking in action. Then, the Director's Chair (1:45 pm) gives the stage to a "notable" filmmaker, who will discuss process with various fellow crew people and take audience Q&A. Last comes the Pitch Slam (4 pm), which combines the heady world of movie-idea synopsis with the duke-it-out dynamics of slam poetry in a best-of-three cage match that's a little bit like Over the Top meets Poetic Justice meets The Player meets Adaptation meets....
The Coffeehouse Sessions (Tues June 10, 7:30 pm, Starbucks, 1600 E Olive Way) finds noted film critic/historian Kathleen Murphy in conversation with comedian/monologist/old-school NW-erner Julia Sweeney.
And last but not least among the highlight reels is the Screenwriters Salon (Mon May 26, 11:30 am, Broadway Performance Hall), which will feature a public reading of the new script written by Robinson Devor and The Stranger's own Charles Mudede. Police Beat, inspired partially by Mudede's column and partially by his fevered imagination, follows an African-born bicycle cop in Seattle, where he finds more than jaywalking tickets littering the hard streets.
And so, the question "What is film?" remains unanswered. Fortunately, the Seattle International Film Festival is back to provide clues for the curious.
