My second entry on the year’s SIFF festivities covers not just two of the greatest films exhibited at this year’s festival, but two heavy hitters for the year overall — I Saw the TV Glow and Evil Does Not Exist — both essential cinema. Meanwhile, we have some fun with more genre fare with the Ghibli-lite Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, explore new corners of the Screenlife concept with My Sextortion Diary, get a TV-Network like food presentation with Food Roots, and check out some indie SciFi fun from Spokane with Tim Travers & the Time Traveling Paradox.
Evil Does Not Exist
Serious slow cinema is for ardent cinephiles who can find emotional texture in the slowness. It’s for those of us who watch movies not only to be entertained but to deeply feel something. Be moved. Not only for transportation to somewhere else but because we want to transcend our mere physical relationship with film. We want to pass that language barrier and invest in some bigger ideas. That’s what movies like Evil Does Not Exist are for: an ecology-loving movie by great emergent director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi — a site favorite — who frames situations with compassion and caring for his characters but especially for the issues that they care about. When a “glamping” real estate project is presented to the townsfolk of the rural alpine community of Mizubiki, set just outside Tokyo, the project managers are met with communal resistance. This is a graceful and human work of cinema with a big heart for ecology and communal representation.
I Saw the TV Glow
The frequency in the room shifted as we took communion with the image on the vinyl movie screen. Festival buzz energized the room, to be sure, but it was what happened in I Saw the TV Glow that brought us together. It is such a specific work of filmmaking, so intimately individual, a movie about identity and how we find it, that you begin to feel that anyone who has found or lost themselves in their passionate pursuit of movies will once again find and lose themselves in this movie. A generational statement of filmmaking ought to suggest a new lens for how we see the world. In I Saw the TV Glow, the end result is not just about the worldview of a generation, but how this generation sees themselves in that world. This is vital filmmaking charged to the umpteenth degree, our collective media dreams projected back to us, a dreamscape of our record of consumption. What we bring to I Saw the TV Glow is what we will see in it. This is your life: who will you become? How have you become who you are?
Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds
Ghibli-esque and saccharine cute, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds makes for a fun storybook adventure, as two children fall into the pages of their babysitter’s fantasy book and become enraptured in a colorful and fun-loving adventure. While our screener was subtitled, the film is being presented at SIFF in English, which should expand the age group that might enjoy it. It’s a delightful little family story that feels like it lives inside a childlike imagination as the children, now become cat-humans, venture into the Kingdom of the Winds in search of Sirocco who might set things right before they become permanent members of this world. Bright and cheerful animation highlights this unique and airy animated feature, which is not quite up to par with Ghibli and certainly shows the love its animators hold for that legacy in particular, combined with their passion for The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Tim Travers & the Time Travelers Paradox
Made in Spokane, Stimson Snead’s Tim Travers is a full-length feature expanding upon the short film of the same name. It’s zany, goofy, and has names that seem meant for the internet of a decade ago: Joel McHale, Felicia Day, and Danny Trejo are on board. The SciFi concepts never achieve liftoff, the premise too silly and gaggy for its good, Tim Travers’ well-trodden premise of using a time machine to meet your younger self and influence a time paradox doesn’t find much new novelty in the telling. It’s cool enough that some SciFi was made in Spokane and roped some recognizable actors into what feels like an expanded student project, but it never fully connects as a feature film. Some shorts ought to stay shorts. Worth the try and if you’re from Spokane, your support.
Food Roots
Food travelogues occupy a specific need for someone watching television about food. This documentary does not really escape or try anything outside of the format, does not especially feel complete, or like a wholly conceived movie. You do get that the people making it care about what they’re making but they do not make you care very much that they do.
My Sextortion Diary
This is a novel idea for a Screenlife documentary — a movie taking place almost entirely within the context of screens, this time portraying the perspective of a hacker who accesses the subject’s nude photographs, and blackmails them that they’ll send the photos to all their work contacts, unless a certain amount is paid. This is a kind of tech-terror documentary, utilizing the space of our thought-to-be secured information, and what happens when our hardware is stolen, and our privacy is compromised. I want to like the picture because it’s all about this woman taking her power back, and creating through just screen recordings a somewhat compelling true story in the process. I think the movie gets a bit silly with its premise, though, for something that really is serious, and has such head-scratching moments and inserts. There are hard-to-follow text conversations, peculiar choices where you cannot tell if the filmmaker is being funny — the police are written to at Police@Police.com, the digital file containing the nude pictures is just called “DIGITAL VAGINA,” so yeah, they’re being funny. But many of the contextual choices inevitably hold the documentary back and it feels like it limits our transaction of information, that we might be told the fuller story if we could break free of the format, but then, there may just not be enough here to sustain a documentary made in the traditional way. The format, more than anything, serves to cover up how light the content really is.