The 2024 Seattle International Film Festival begins on May 9th and runs through May 19th, with select films screening on the SIFF Channel May 20-27. UW Film Club will be covering as many films as possible so that you know which films to see! Throughout the festival, this article will be regularly updated with capsule reviews for festival films. Check back every few days to see what’s new!
The Ride Ahead
In an eye-opening delight of a documentary directed by Samuel and Daniel Habib, The Ride Ahead follows Samuel’s life as a 20-year-old living with cerebral palsy. Like any other young adult, he seeks to live a life of independence, including things like going to college and finding a girlfriend. Told through his own narration atop footage of his everyday life, we see how this is more challenging than for most people. Samuel’s entertaining, often darkly comedic, telling of his journey makes for a fun, engaging film that deserves to be seen for so many reasons. It exemplifies the importance of why stories about disabilities must be told by disabled people. Too often does society outcast disabled people, and The Ride Ahead reminds us that just like any other person, they deserve the bare minimum—respect.
4/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on The Ride Ahead here. The film will be streaming on the SIFF channel May 20-27th.
Saturn Return
Granada—described as the Seattle of Spain by directors Pol Rodríguez and Isaki Lacuesta for its 90s music revolution—is home to the rock group The Planets, the real band inspiring the film Saturn Return. As the group’s success is skewed by the departure of a member, the two remaining friends deal with the rocky future of the band. These late-20s musicians live vibrant but dangerous lives, enjoying the drug-abused lifestyle not uncommon for their time and their occupation. The story of this band feels so real, and with every show they play makes us feel as if we’re right there in the crowd. Through a beautifully shot, intimate look at this band, we’re let into their world of relationships, struggles, and desires that often come with early adulthood.
3.5/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on Saturn Return here. The film was screened in person and is not available to stream the rest of the festival.
Mountains
Told from the eyes of a Haitian family living in Little Haiti of Miami, Mountains is a portrayal of the strenuous nature required for achieving the American Dream as an immigrant. Directed by Monica Sorelle, we observe a father named Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) and his wife and son, along with their differing aspirations for their lives in America. The film’s point-of-view rotates between the three, showing how their unique responsibilities to their family and culture are embedded into the struggles and triumphs of their daily lives. Most notably, Xavier is a demolitionist within Little Haiti, making him a symbol for both good and evil—he portrays the celebration of one’s culture while partaking in capitalist society’s attempts to erase it. While some aspects are more strongly developed than others, the overall story and strong cast performances make this an emotionally moving film that shines light on inequality faced by immigrant families in America.
3.5/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on Mountains here. The film will be streaming on the SIFF channel May 20-27th.
Evil Does Not Exist
Coming off his 2021 hot streak of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi cools down the temperature for this glacial, snowbound drama. Evil follows two rookie ‘glamping’ agents as they attempt to recruit local odd-job man / wilderness expert Takumi to oversee a luxury camping reservation being constructed in rural Japan. The film is an incisive, harrowing tale of environmental– and personal — compromise, gentle in form thanks to the stunning digital photography of Kitagawa and moody Eiko Ishibashi score. Hamaguchi is one of our modern masters, and it was a great pleasure to see the overflowing enthusiasm for his latest work in a packed house screening.
5/5 STARS
-Harrison Hall
You can visit SIFF’s page on Evil Does Not Exist here. The film is opening at SIFF Cinema Egyptian on May 24th.
Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox
If you go back in time and kill your younger self what happens to your current self? This is the paradox Stimson Snead sets out to answer in his first feature-length film Tim Travers and The Time Travelers Paradox. The film is a Sci-Fi comedy following the titular character Tim Travers as he sets out to explain this paradox. Despite its small budget and lack of time, Snead and his crew were able to pull off a hilarious film with pretty decent effects. The film features a great 30-character performance from lead actor Samuel Dunning and is surprisingly scientifically accurate. Overall, Tim Travers and The Time Travelers Paradox is a great time and is sure to have you chuckling.
4/5 STARS
-Lilah Shorey
You can visit SIFF’s page on Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox here. The film was screened in person and is not available to stream the rest of the festival.
The Primevals
After 50 years in the making, The Primevals is a post-mortem addition to Director David Allen’s filmography. The film follows a group of scientists as they set out to find the elusive yeti in the Himalayan mountains. The Primevals is a relic of an era long past, perfectly encapsulating the magic of pre-CGI monster flicks. The stop-motion animation throughout the film is pretty incredible, featuring some pretty fun creature designs. The Primevals is also perfectly campy and full of events and dialogue that will make you laugh from the sheer absurdity. It fills me with joy that after 50 years this film finally made it to the big screen.
4/5 STARS
-Lilah Shorey
You can visit SIFF’s page on The Primevals here. The film will be streaming on the SIFF channel May 20-27th.
July Rhapsody
Ann Hui’s lyrical, poetic style is befitting of July Rhapsody‘s protagonist– a disheartened, middle-aged composition teacher who finds himself contemplating squandered potential after a falling-out with his wife and the arrival of a mischievous schoolgirl who becomes a fixture in his life as a sort of avatar for his own yearnings for youth. Obviously beholden to Nabokov’s <i>Lolita</i>, Hui sands down a lot of the source material’s wicked psychology for a product that is far more pensive and sincere than one might expect going in. There’s no denying that Hui is one of the trailblazers of the Hong Kong New Wave (and is vastly underappreciated by film academia) but July Rhapsody is one of her more minor works.
3/5 STARS
-Harrison Hall
You can visit SIFF’s page on July Rhapsody here. The film was screened in person and is not available to stream the rest of the festival.
Dìdi (弟弟)
Carrying the momentum from his Oscar-nominated short last year, Sean Wang’s debut film is quite the revelation– vaguely autobiographical a la The 400 Blows, Dìdi follows 13-year-old Chris as he comes-of-age in a 2008 Fremont suburb. Wang’s use of digital interfaces and social media is remarkably cinematic and comfortable within the story (something that has long confounded 21st century filmmakers) and befits Chris’ journey of isolation and longing-for-community. Sean Wang is certainly a filmmaker to keep eyes on!
4/5 STARS
-Harrison Hall
You can visit SIFF’s page on Dìdi here. The film was screened in person and is not available to stream the rest of the festival.
The Missing
The Missing is an animated science fiction film by director Carl Joseph Papa. The film follows Eric, an animator with no mouth, who has had constant unwanted run-ins with an alien visitor since his childhood. The Missing is an incredibly poignant exploration of trauma. Papa makes amazing use of visual metaphors to show how Eric’s trauma has affected his life. The mix of hand-drawn and rotoscope animation is beautiful, and the switches between the different styles lead to some very gut-wrenching moments. Even with its exploration of dark themes, The Missing is also a movie about family, queer love and healing.
4.5/5 STARS
-Lilah Shorey
You can visit SIFF’s page on The Missing here. The film was screened in person and is not available to stream the rest of the festival.
Killing Romance
There was no better film that SIFF could’ve chosen as the final festival screening than Killing Romance, by Lee Won-suk. One of the most unabashedly bizarre and unserious movies shown this year, it follows an actress and her next-door neighbor, who’s a superfan of hers, as they plot to kill her controlling, eccentric husband. Aided by spontaneous song and dance numbers and picture-perfect 4th wall breaks, this romance-comedy-revenge fairytale—literally introduced and narrated to be a children’s story—is a uniquely hilarious movie that transports us to this whacky world. What we didn’t ask for, Killing Romance delivers, becoming one of the most unforgettable films of the festival for all the right reasons.
5/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on Killing Romance here.
Scala!!!
I feel like Scala!, wrought with interviews and theater history, suffers from its lack of political history — as this was a promise it made at its outset, and tries to quickly tie it in at the end after a few false endings. Certain choices in the documentary work to take you out of its subject matter, like a persistence in adding lower-thirds each time an interviewee speaks despite already being introduced, detours to less-potent plot at times, and spoiling several movies. Despite all this (maybe as someone who had already seen these films, so that they couldn’t be spoiled) I still found the film wonderfully sentimental as it continues to remember and honor the legacy of the Scala. The Scala having its own character independent from the films it showed was obvious, and I think it makes a lovely documentary subject.
2.5/5 STARS
-Kendall Imus
You can visit SIFF’s page on Scala!!! here.
Three Promises
A wonderful, heart wrenching, and well-crafted archival documentary of a Palestinian mother (Suha Khamis) documenting her family’s life through the Second Intifada (2000-2005). I found Three Promises to be moving portrait of a family dynamic in times of strife and political tumult — and also how the presence of a camera brings out questions of what to document (one’s own daughter sobbing from the bombings somewhere outside, or the flash of the bombs lighting up the sky through one’s window). The strife of raising children in such an environment is not only inextricable in the film’s title, but so clearly the contemporary interviews of Suha remembering her life then; this is also very well integrated into the footage of Suha and Yousef’s lives now.
5/5 STARS
-Kendall Imus
You can visit SIFF’s page on Three Promises here.
Fragments of a Life Loved
I found Barreau’s archival-based film of her own romantic life to be very endearing. I felt it was a true chronicle — one where all the nitty gritty details are preserved in their entirety by those interviewees present in it. Such a premise (of a person obsessively recording and documenting the days of their youthful romances) may lend the regular person to question the sanity of the filmmaker, the documentarian — but it was so lovely to see each and every interviewee speak with the same passion about the past that went into Barreau’s preservation of the keepsakes and photographs. Like something hoarded or obsessively salvaged from the past, this film suffers a bit because of this quality: perhaps it is too sentimental with its editing — not cutting superfluous information and dragging a bit towards its end. However, I can only understand this sentimentality considering its subject matter.
3/5 STARS
-Kendall Imus
You can visit SIFF’s page on Fragments of a Life Loved here.
I Saw the TV Glow
In director Jane Schoenbraun’s second feature film, I Saw the TV Glow tells a journey about discovery, acceptance, and understanding of one’s personal identity. When teenager Owen meets Maddy, a girl obsessed with a fictional sci-fi show called The Pink Opaque, he too becomes engulfed by it. As they both grow up, their obsession with this show changes along with their perception of real life and who they are as individuals. Stylistically, the film is beautiful—it has shadowy lighting adjected to colorful neons, with the show’s creatures that are scarily unsettling, but perfectly fit the tone of the film. Just like how The Pink Opaque is merely a superficial show for some but carries much emotional depth for others, I Saw the TV Glow can be perceived the same way. There’s so much to relate to in this film from all angles, but when viewed from the LGBTQ+ perspective with which it was crafted, there’s even more to be appreciated.
4.5/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on I Saw the TV Glow here.
Wings of Desire
To suffer, to feel, to lust for connection—these are ways Wim Wenders often defines humanity in his work, and his revered 1987 film Wings of Desire is the epitome of such. The story follows an Angel who looms over Berlin, only ever hearing people’s thoughts and never being able to interact with them. Once he finds a trapeze artist whom he begins falling in love with, his desire to be a human is only intensified. Through explorations of all aspects of life, the Angel wants none other than to experience it for himself. Screened as a 4k restoration at the SIFF Downtown, the Angel’s observations around these gorgeous, swooping cityscapes tells a story of his isolation through immortality. A motif of childhood is prominent, such as him singing songs about a child’s curiosity for life, or the children around him seeming to notice his presence. It’s resemblant of the childlike innocence and optimism he maintains; despite all the suffering he’s witnessed, his existence shows the beauty of being human, how everything else that comes with mortality is what makes life worth living.
5/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on Wings of Desire here.
In a Violent Nature
Many slasher films have attempted to replicate the thrills and intensity of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but few evoke the disquieting ambience of Hooper’s rural worldbuilding as well as Chris Nash does here. Nash’s experiment in Killer POV strikes a unique, allusive balance between its trashy Ontario teen-slasher roots and the reserved aesthetic of an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, catering towards both slow-cinema snobs and hyperactive gore junkies– two ends of cinematic fandom usually kept mutually exclusive, no longer!
4/5 STARS
-Harrison Hall
You can visit SIFF’s page on In a Violent Nature here.
Bob Trevino Likes It
In Tracie Laymon’s heartwarmingly empathetic film, Bob Trevino Likes It is about compassion, self-love, and perseverance. Based on Laymon’s real experience, we follow Lily Trevino, who meets a kind man with the same name as her estranged father, Bob Trevino. The film exudes sincerity in its portrayal of overcoming emotional trauma and guilt, and we are left with the joy and gratitude that comes with having the right family, related or not.
5/5 STARS
-Jocelyne Booth
You can visit SIFF’s page on Bob Trevino Likes It here.
Aggro Dr1ft
The World’s Greatest Assassin tracks down one final score… Harmony Korine’s take on the Miami crime thriller is little more than its thermal-imaging + augmented reality gimmicks– which won’t be for everybody — but for those who can attune themselves to its wavelength, AGGRO DR1FT‘s superficial excesses are legitimately awe-inspiring. Korine’s embracement of unrefined digital textures and disarmingly sincere dialogue (for him, anyways) aligns AGGRO DR1FT closer in line to the experimental cinema of Stan Brakhage or Norman McLaren than any contemporary D2V action vehicle it might resemble on its surface. Whether Korine’s shallow videogame platitudes are the words of a shameless hack, or an unrepentant master is really in the eye of the beholder… but I’m personally inclined more towards the latter.
???/5 STARS
-Harrison Hall
You can visit SIFF’s page on Aggro Dr1ft here.