If your holiday spirit is at large, allow yourself to give up on your annual viewing of The Family Stone in place of something that has nothing to do with the Yuletide season. This week brings some particularly exciting options in that vein, like SIFF's Cinema Italian Style Past Event Like List and World of Wong Kar-wai Past Event Like List retrospective and Northwest Film Forum's Seattle edition of the Champs-Elysées Film Festival's US Tour Past Event Like List . We've rounded up those and other options below, including picks from nationwide platforms. Plus, if you haven't heard, The Stranger's amateur porn film festival HUMP! is accepting submissions through January 8, as is the stoner short film fest SPLIFF, through March 5! And don't forget to check out the second installment of The Stranger's Film Club, a new biweekly video series entering Black films with Stranger film experts Jasmyne Keimig and Charles Mudede.

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Jump to:  Streaming: Local Connection | Film Festivals | Streaming: Nationwide

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Streaming: Local Connection

Assassins Remind Like List
The global investigation following the 2017 murder of North Korean royal family member Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of Kim Jong-un, drives this documentary from Ryan White (The Keepers, The Case Against 8). It pays particular attention to the upbringings and motives of Siti Aisyah and Đoàn Thj Huong, the two young women who did the deed.
SIFF
Starting Friday

Breaking Surface Past Event Like List
A mid-winter trip to a remote Norwegian fjord for two professional divers (and sisters) goes horribly wrong when a rockfall traps one of them on the ocean floor with a finite amount of oxygen in her tank. In an icy Force Majeure-style conflict, the sister on land must decide between getting herself to safety or risking her life for her family member. A perfect watch if your heartbeat's been a little too steady lately.
Grand Illusion
Starting Friday

The Changin' Times of Ike White Past Event Like List
Released in 1974, Changin' Times was the first commercial album recorded inside an American prison by an inmate, Ike White, who at 19 was sentenced to life for murder and eventually released under the endorsement of Stevie Wonder. This documentary delves into the R&B artist's life and unconventional career.
Grand Illusion
Starting Friday

Virtual Moving History – The Video Artwork of Doris Chase Past Event Like List
Discover a compilation of kaleidoscopic work by the late Northwest School video-art pioneer Doris Chase in this edition of the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound's digital series.
Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only

World of Wong Kar-wai Past Event Like List
Let Chinese director Wong Kar-wai take you over with the sonically perfect, poetic, excruciatingly cool, often blood-soaked love stories and thrillers featured in this SIFF series. It includes all his greatest hits from the late '80s to the early 2000s, including As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, The Hand, and his best-known works Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. With many of the same actors gracing the screen in each film, we have no doubt that taking in his entire oeuvre will feel like one long, wild ride in a singular universe.
SIFF
Starting Friday

Film Festivals

2020 Banff Mountain Film Festival Virtual Tour Past Event Like List
"Is the mountain out today?" This virtual stop on the world tour of the Banff Mountain Film Festival will celebrate action, environmental, and adventure films.
Thursday-Saturday

Champs-Elysées Film Festival US Tour | Seattle Edition 2020 Past Event Like List
The Champs-Elysées Film Festival’s US Tour comes to the Northwest, courtesy of the Alliance Française de Seattle, to bring you a stellar lineup of French independent shorts and feature-length films. Highlights of the virtual two-day hap include Alexandra Pianell's The Kiosk, a visual diary wherein the filmmaker helps her mother tend to her newspaper kiosk in a neighborhood of Paris, and the shorts block The Night, which features an array of reality-bending animation.
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday-Sunday

Cinema Italian Style Past Event Like List
One major benefit of digitizing Cinema Italian Style, SIFF's weeklong mini-festival featuring the best in contemporary Italian cinema, is that all the films will be available on-demand at the same time, meaning you won't have to race to Queen Anne in the middle of a weekday for a matinee screening. You'll have 48 hours to watch your selections, from Salvatore Mereu's Sardinia-set detective story Assandira to Oscar-nominated director Gianfranco Rosi's Notturno, which tells the stories of those on the borders between Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon. 
SIFF
Starting Thursday

FROM AFAR—a film festival Past Event Like List
Roland Dahwen, the Artist-in-Residence at Reed College's Cooley Gallery, presents five recent films by his peers in a free mini-festival presented by the Northwest Film Forum. Each film—including his own 16mm debut Boruffa, about an immigrant woman in Oregon who learns that her husband has a second family—is accompanied by an essay that you can read on his website.
Northwest Film Forum
Starting Thursday

HUMP! Greatest Hits, Volume 2 Past Event Like List
The HUMP! team is bringing back some fan-favorite amateur porn shorts from years past in the second volume of streamable compilations. If you get inspired, find out how to make and submit your own HUMP! film here—submissions are due January 8!
EverOut Presents
Thursday only

Seattle Turkish Film Festival Past Event Like List
The Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington will present the seventh annual edition of their community-driven, volunteer-led festival featuring a rich panorama of new Turkish films. We're excited about Queen Lear, Pelin Esmer's documentary about a group of peasant women from southern Turkey who founded a theater group and now travel on the road with their unique production of Shakespeare's King Lear.
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday-Saturday

Streaming: Nationwide

The Bee Gees: Can You Mend a Broken Heart Past Event Like List
Frank Marshall's new documentary chronicles the early stardom of famous sibling trio the Bee Gees, from their first hit song "Spicks and Specks" to their dip into disco. 
HBO
Starting Saturday

Couples Therapy: The COVID Special
Weekly therapy sessions with four couples in the COVID era will surely provide some much-needed perspective (and comfort) for cooped-up pairs on the viewer's side of the screen. 
Showtime
Starting Sunday

Dr. Suess's The Grinch Musical
Your favorite grumpy anti-Yule creature of Whoville is brought to life by Matthew Morrison in this televised version of the Broadway musical, prerecorded at London's Troubadour Theatre.
NBC

Funny Boy
As civil war rages in Sri Lanka in the '70s and '80s, Deepa Mehta's film follows a young Tamil man who comes to terms with his sexuality and grapples with the fact that his country criminalizes homosexuality.
Netflix

I'm Your Woman
Having premiered virtually at the Chicago International Film Festival this summer, Julia Hart's I'm Your Woman stars Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) as a suburban housewife who's forced to go on the run when her dirty-dealing husband betrays his partners.
Amazon Prime
Starting Friday

Let Them All Talk
Shot aboard the Queen Mary 2 (yes, the one from Parent Trap) during a transatlantic crossing last fall, Steven Soderbergh's new film stars Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, and Dianne Wiest as a trio of college friends reuniting to catch up and heal old wounds. Her nephew (Lucas Hedges) and literary agent (Gemma Chan) also come along for the ride.
HBO

Mr. Jones Remind Like List
James Norton plays Gareth Jones, the journalist who broke the story of the Russian famine to the world in the 1930s, aka Stalin times.
Hulu

The Prom
Ryan Murphy's Broadway musical comedy The Prom is a touching story about a group of stage actors (Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Andrew Rannells, and James Corden) who head to a small town in Indiana town to support a lesbian couple barred from attending their high school prom.
Netflix

A Suitable Boy Remind Like List
With new episodes every Monday, this limited series based on the novel by Vikram Seth follows a university student (Tanya Maniktala) who eschews the marital traditions of her culture to forge her own identity in 1950s India. Mira Nair directs.
Acorn

The Wilds Past Event Like List
Amazon's new teen survival drama melds the other-worldliness of Lost with the harsh reflections on civilization of Lord of the Flies with the coming-of-age bits of, let's say, The Goonies. 
Amazon Prime
Starting Friday

Wolfwalkers
This Apple original film from the makers of Song of the Sea looks extremely magical. In a woodsy fantasy world, a seemingly normal little girl realizes she's among the storied wolfwalkers—people who transform into wolves when the sun goes down.
Apple TV+