Diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s what this year’s SIFF slate delivers, at a time where such concepts are being scorned and thrown under the bus by many institutions, we must uphold in the arts what is not found elsewhere — meaningful engagement with intersections of inclusivity in all forms. Some of this year’s best movies at the show are all about what it means to be included.

40 Acres

R.T. Thorne directs the great-as-always Danielle Deadwyler in this thrilling speculative fiction wherein a Black family actually get the failed antebellum promise of “40 acres and a mule,” finding salvation in post-Civil War Canada, yet the systems of violence do not just end because they are granted property — in fact, violence escalates. Deadwyler’s Hailey is a soldier who will protect her family and her land at all costs, as it’s swarmed by violent cannibals. This portrait of post-Civil War alt-history finds R.T. Thorne expanding from his work shooting music videos for Snoop Dogg, into making credible alternative history horror. Between 40 Acres and the exceptional Sinners, something is stirring in the culture, and we’re absolutely in for a deeply reflective and excellent wave of Black filmmaking wherein the next step of reparations stands to be: who gets to tell these stories.

The Balconettes

Star turned director Noémie Merlant — of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire — partners with her former director who acts as co-writer for Merlant’s debut feature. And what a spunky and fiery debut! Expressive feminine sexuality is framed from the Rear Window-like apartment setting, which is the apartment you can imagine their neighbors vouyeristically leering into. Alongside the clear Hitchcock tribute, Merlant meaningfully adapts the stylization of Pedro Almodóvar, pulling the use of color and concept of the auteur’s characters, into French body humor and body horror. The messaging is peculiar and does not fully align but there’s so much fun in getting there, and the sex-positive nature of the movie, ultimately allows the women to still hold ownership of their sex, even against the tides of male violence. Balconettes is an exuberant and colorful film drawn from strong visual influences, with the trademark feminine lens and story afforded by Merlant & Sciamma’s continued productivity as filmmaking partners.

By Design

Ceci n’est pas une chaise. Is the chair just a chair, or a representation of a chair? Can a woman be a chair, or is it what the chair represents that she hopes to become? Must this movie be a movie or is it only what a movie represents that it wants to be? Would make more sense as an art installation with a performer. That’s clear in the only scene that works, where some folks in a showroom discuss the utility of a chair that stands out to them among many chairs and then one woman wishes to embody the qualities of said chair. Then there’s the rest of the movie, where director Amanda Kramer does not find anything else of interest in her design, after the more favorably received Please Baby Please.

Color Book

Composed with elegance and compassion, this story about a father and his special needs child is touching, fragile, and pulls at the heart. Over the course of two days, we join the duo in the Metro Atlanta area. They’re just trying to get on after the loss of the family matriarch. What they want to do is go to a baseball game and this is the simple story of a father and son and their journey to go watch baseball together. But really it’s about parenthood, the human condition, and the resilient elasticity of our souls as caregivers. Love is so powerful and colors in all the empty spaces of grief.

Familiar Touch

Debut director Sarah Friedland worked directly with residents from an assisted living facility to craft her big-hearted portrait of dementia and late-life care. A legend of broadway, Kathleen Chalfant is also an expert at acting on film. That’s evidenced by Familiar Touch — in which Chalfant brilliantly plays an octogenarian wading through the challenges of dementia in an assisted care facility. The tender and reserved performance is made for screens. Exactly what movie acting is for, Chalfant expresses pain and heartache but also passion in equal measure, as her character reconnects with her history as a chef, and we see that even in the darkness of memory slipping away, what we retain still matters — grace and dignity in the face of a deteriorating mind and memory, are warmly portrayed. It’s incredibly refreshing to experience dementia on film, not as a descent into psychological terror and fear, but with the warm-hearted and compassionate understanding that aging, and every step of life, can still be expressions of beauty and love, even in the face of a sad thing happening.

Four Mothers

The opening film for the 51st edition of SIFF, Darren Thornton’s dramedy Four Mothers is an imbalanced but sometimes funny blend of comedy and drama. As the old adage goes, you can make a bad movie out of a good script but you cannot make a good movie out of a bad one. That mostly proves true in Four Mothers, although writer-director Darren Thorton does hard work at out-directing his writing. This means hard switches in format and tone, as the film often vacillates between deadpan funny and modestly heart-felt and uses the camera to adjust to the mood it needs, whether handheld, or more formally treated, it jars up against uneven scoring and an unlikable sort of framing. Queer YA novelist Edward (James McArdle) after endless struggles, is finally breaking through in the market and finding a queer young adult romance audience overseas in the US. But, he must care for his mother (Fionnula Flanagan), who is in declining health and can only speak through an iPad — Flanagan over-achieves here, really good — and so he’s not just stuck in Ireland and unable to tour his new book, but his “friends,” inspired by the idea of his travel, decide to take their own LGBTQIA+ pride festival vacation, and drop their own mothers off for poor Edward to care for them. With friends like these… There’s simply not much cohesion in Four Mothers, wherein it feels like a film of competing ideas and filmmaking modalities, spun out into a partly-affecting story, but also one that doesn’t serve the strength of its key performances.

Sorry, Baby

It’s astounding that Sorry, Baby is Eva Victor’s feature debut, because their control of tone and sense of direction are so profoundly grounded in the text. Sorry, Baby is an exhibition of quiet maturity that is equal parts harrowing in its sadness and achingly funny in its humor. Eva Victor writes, stars, and directs, and the word you keep coming back to is: control. This is what direction is about, really, holding everything together, and directing the audience so that you can achieve multiple threads of feeling, each intricately drawn and shaped around a heart-stirring story. Watching it the first time, I took the movie for granted, but it sat with me ever since, and on my return watch, I was floored by the emotional intelligence and depth of compassion of Sorry, Baby. We bring things into this world with the best of intentions, and it’s rare, but sometimes, it works out beautifully in the end.

Souleyman’s Story

Don’t do it. Nobody wants to hear it. You don’t have to say it. Don’t say the thing. Souleyman’s Story is the movie we need right now. We did it. And we’re all okay. Because it’s true. Souleyman’s Story is about a Guinean asylum-seeker in France. Whether you’re granted asylum, of course, is still a colonist construct. And as the two days surrounding Souleyman (Abou Sangare) and his legal residence hearing play out, we also have to wonder if it’s worth it. Here Souleyman is in France now. He’s doing gig work. Has no community. No friends. No purpose. Except to exist. And dream to be included in this colonial dream. And if they let you in, are the same opportunities really afforded to everyone? Do the socioeconomic forces of a place not then determine, with erratic indifference, whether you’re going to make it? Maybe Souleyman will get a good hearing and make a life in France. But he is still perpetually in limbo, spiritually and in a literal physical sense, a man living between the liminal spaces — navigating the tourist dreamscape of France, but wondering, is it made for everyone? No. This is the feature film debut of Abou Sangare, and it’s incredibly lived in, for good reason. This is like his story, too, as Abou Sangare filmed his part while seeking asylum in France himself, and upon its French premier, held no legal citizenship in this space, where his face was now in front of all the theaters and on the metro. Included in a space not made for him. That French director Boris Lojkine shoots Souleyman’s Story in a cinéma vérité fashion is deeply important. This gives the project resonance. Yes, this is the film of the moment. Damn right. It matters now. It’s made out of the concerns of the moment and it reflects in stark light, the anxious reality of all asylum-seekers trying to get into most Western countries these days. Staggering in empathy and understanding, it’s just true, Souleyman’s Story is so many people’s stories, and it’s right now.

Spermageddon

Puerile as a statement. Infantile by design. Spermageddon is an adult animation by way of Norway (many other places would have stopped them), about the human body, consent, and reproductive choice. That it animates, and thinks should be visually represented, such a young adult sex story, is awkward to deal with at best. The film operates with the plastic figure sheen of Illumination animated films but lives inside the imagination and ethos of Pixar’s Inside Out. “Can sperm have feelings?” is a legitimate thesis of the film. It’s also part Sausage Party (reading some other reviews in awe, which name this is as a good thing). Spermageddon mostly plays as a musical about sexual reproduction but it’s a little too leering and creepy, for a movie about some teens. It’s what you expect: a movie where the animators were absolutely delighted about the absurdities they would get to animate. You can tell the team behind it has had some fun, especially as they draw some sperm navigating through parts of the human body. You can see it as fun and also as an absurdity that anyone had to carefully animate this movie at all. Weirdly not a total lost cause, got an equal amount laughs out of discomfort as designed ones, so for the sake of comedy alone, I’m afraid Spermageddon nearly works. It’s just a bit too far afield and juvenile to fully land anything, but when it does, it’s brash and a bit of fresh air in the increasingly conservative landscape of animated films done in the corporate house style.

Twinless

Trauma-bonding movie about a man who falls in love with someone’s twin, causes his death, and deviously and anonymously befriends the other twin just to get close and bond over their newfound shared trauma. Extracts empathy out of universal experiences of just wanting to live in The Sims and hyper-regional experiences like attending Seattle Kraken games. Otherwise set in Portland, the film is a proud new Northwest friendship movie that’s deeply rewarding to watch.