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 Box Man

The father of Japanese cyberpunk releasing a new film is an incredibly exciting prospect – Gakuryu Ishii’s career is littered with masterpieces that bend the form of cinema to his will. Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001)is one of the most dynamic and stunning punk films ever made; August in the Water (1995) and Mirrored Mind (2005) are resonant, tranquil explorations of the human condition; The Crazy Family (1984) is a lighthearted family comedy spiraling into psychotic oblivion beneath the weight of modern existence. There is every reason to show up for a new Ishii film for the slightest chance that you could experience another one of his masterpieces for the first time. The Box Man, despite starring former Ishii collaborators and Japanese cinema titans Masatoshi Nagase and Tadanobu Asano, is an unfocused mess that edges on ideas of voyeuristic perversion and fetishistic desires to forsake our sleek surroundings for filth and grime. What presents as a hypnotic and dreamlike fluid reality where narrative need not apply cannot cohere into anything substantial – leading to a film that is above all else, borderline incomprehensible. Worse, it overstays its welcome by a significant margin only to blunt force drive the film’s thesis through the lens with a painfully literalized final sequence. It’s nice to see Ishii is still swinging – this is just a hell of a miss.

Dragon Superman

Taiwan’s first tokusatsu production, a response to Japan’s practical effects cinema boom in the 1950s, was lost to time and has been painstakingly restored to return to the big screen. The film stock is rife with scratches and stutters, and the audio ranges anywhere from actively grating to mostly intelligible, but that’s also what makes watching Dragon Superman such a fascinating cinematic experience. A relic from the past, a view into what was once a booming box office success that spawned two rapidly subsequent sequels. For the seasoned tokusatsu fan, Dragon Superman offers a fascinating alternative take on the genre, if The Golden Bat (1966) was made with a tenth of its already shoestring budget but with twice the confidence. Scattershot and sparse, struggling frequently to reach the highs of tokusatsu’s most invigorating output, but nonetheless a worthwhile piece of cinema history.

Terrestrial Verses

Beautifully composed and razor sharp Iranian cinema, as incisive and politically precise as any of its contemporaries but with an exaggerated edge, taking the injustices of an archaic and oppressive culture and weaving a narrative that layers an unending generational struggle through nine separate vignettes. Paints a powerful image of a people who are cut off from so many simple freedoms, these desires that feel so trivial to the rest of us yet seem so impossibly out of reach within a society that has ingrained such regressive conservativism. When simple acts of personal expression become screams of protest, all that’s left is to knock it all down to rubble. There’s a people worth building back up again.

The Missing

Soul-crushing, heartbreaking, resonant and empathetic cinema. Trauma and its lingering effects filtered through layers of animation that can realize a reflection of inner turmoil. As brutally inevitable as the emotionally rending Mysterious Skin (2004), The Missing charts a story of self-discovery and understanding through repressed abuse, perception and reality blending to display what is lost in efforts to forget the past. Creativity begs to burst forth from its protagonist while the environment is slowly lost to a transparent emptiness, fragmented sketches of a forgotten suffering long twisted into a more palatable framework. The form collides with the narrative, its occasionally crude rotoscoped aesthetic presenting a malleable existence, shaped and reshaped to create walls in the mind. It begs for empathy and understanding displaying the rippling impact a simple notion of acceptance can become. We deserve love.