Celebrating 50 years of the Seattle International Film Festival, this year’s lineup is a joyous reverie of all things cinema, taking the expected collection of eclectic experiences and making it into an unforgettable festival. This year, we’ve discovered all manner of film, from restoring the impossible to finishing works decades in the making. Documentaries exploring the human condition, from discovering someone through their art to discovering ourselves through the wondrous possibilities of unhinged arthouse programming. International cinema led by tranquil sonic landscapes or reviving punk filmmaking ideology for the modern age. Everything is here, and we’re here to cover it.
The Primevals
Considering the wider oeuvre of Full Moon Features, it’s hard to believe that Charles Band’s lost masterpiece is an ambitious, unearthed artifact decades in the making. But believe in The Primevals, a delirious odyssey of schlocky B-movie cheese blended with earnest bravado and sweeping scale – Band’s charmingly low-rent aesthetic combined with David Allen’s Harryhausen-esque stop motion creature design make for an inspiring combination. It’s the code of Full Moon ethos stripped back to its most basic ideas and then put into overdrive, a kaleidoscope of kaiju yeti, monkey men, primeval lizard societies, and laser cannons. Things that in a perfect world, all movies would have.
Scala!!!
A wonderful portrait both of the deranged nature of cinephiles as well as the genuine magic of the cinematic experience. Transforms the neoclassical beauty of the Scala into a sort of messianic temple where the power of diverse, horrifying, disgusting, and schlocky cinema alike could bring together every sort of offbeat outcast. Captures the indescribable buzz of the cinema as a dream, and the singular experience of hazy all-nighters where your consciousness begins to slowly melt into a slippery twilight and it’s the greatest night of your life.
Resynator
Reaching into the past through the waveforms, memories crushed and reformed ever into something new, passing through the ghosts gliding through the wiring. Searching for humanity behind myth, immortalized in sonic resonance an expression of true self. Alison Tavel’s deeply felt journey to discover who she is through a father she never got a chance to know is a beautiful portrait of existence through creation, the ways we can express who we are and who we wish we could be through art, and of the connective tissues of music.
Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds
Like a beautiful fabric billowing in the warm summer breeze, Sirocco has an effervescent and irresistible charm to it, a colorful tapestry of refreshing creativity and dazzling childlike wonder. It certainly conjures comparison to the work of Studio Ghibli, most notably in its Spirited Away journey into an unknown world, its Whisper of the Heart flashes of growth through the power of creation, and a dash of the offbeat weirdness and feline affinity of The Cat Returns. Thankfully, it never feels derivative – its own sparkling wonder of the possibilities of animation.