Seattle’s Film-Festival Marathon Winds Down with Rock and Politics

North America’s longest and best-attended film festival finishes with a slate of scathing documentaries and gentle character studies

It doesn't have a 10-, 11- or 12-day run, the way most major film festivals do. And it's certainly not a single-weekend blast, as many smaller fests are.

Instead, the Seattle International Film Festival is a marathon: 25 days of films, beginning on May 19 with "The First Grader" and ending three-and-a-half weeks and more than 400 films later with "Life in a Day."

By the numbers, that makes it the largest, longest and most high-attended film festival in the United States — and one that, as it entered the final weekend, had left many staffers and volunteers visibly weary.

Also read: 'Gandu,' 'Hot Coffee' Win Top Jury Prizes at Seattle Film Festival

"We're 24 days in, one day to go," said the festival's artistic director, Carl Spence, at a Saturday night reception at the festival's host hotel, the W. "Push me and I might fall over."

The final weekend lost one of its marquee events when Al Pacino bailed out of an announced Saturday tribute in his honor at the Paramount Theatre in favor of staying in New York for Sunday's Tony Awards. But that hardly slowed down the festival's momentum.

Crowds were big during the last few days of the festival, which takes place at venues around the city, ranging from new multiplexes to a pair of historic theaters now operated by Landmark Theaters in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Also factoring in are the Egyptian and the Harvard Exit, the latter of which looks like a comfortable old clubhouse, complete with fireplace and bookcases.

The Life of FishThe films are even more diverse than the venues — if it's hard in a short visit to get a handle on a SIFF programming personality, that may be because there's room for a bit (or more than a bit) of everything in its selections.

Films range from small, quintessentially Northwestern indies ("Letters from the Big Man," in which the big man is Bigfoot) to Algeria's 2010 Oscar nominee ("Outside the Law"); from topical documentaries ("Revenge of the Electric Car") to a psychedelic road trip ("Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place"); from the action-packed Korean film "Yellow Sea," with elaborate car chases, to the marvelously intimate Chilean drama "The Life of Fish" (left), shot in real time and almost entirely in closeup.

In an attempt to make sense of the sprawl, SIFF this year instituted "pathways," a new way to categorize movies that, according to the festival catalog, puts each film into one of "ten areas that help answer the question 'what sort of film do I feel like seeing tonight?'"

Among the films that screened over the final few days, the buzz was strong for the likes of Na Hong-jin's "Yellow Sea," Errol Morris' documentary "Tabloid," the Japanese film "Norwegian Wood" and the sexy French detective story "Poupoupidou ("Nobody Else But You)," a playful whodunit about the murder of a French starlet who fancies herself a new Marilyn Monroe.

But few films had the impact of Susan Saladoff's documentary "Hot Coffee," a sobering and eye-opening look at the famous case in which a woman sued McDonalds after being scalded when she spilled her coffee.

Saladoff takes what most people think of as a poster case for frivolous lawsuits, and uses it as a launching pad for a devastating indictment of a systematic, decades-long attempt to limit the Seventh Amendment right to recourse in the courts, and make corporations impervious to the legal remedies once available to the public.    

The Most Important Thing In Life Is Not Being DeadStriking a completely different tone was "The Most Important Thing in Life Is Not Being Dead" (right), which probably had some points to make about life in Spain under Franco, but hid them in a stylish, playful and absurdist black-and-white tale of a piano tuner who finds that his instruments tune themselves while he's asleep.

The film is the work of three young directors: Olivier Pictel, Mark Recuenco and Pablo Martin Torrado, the last of whom was in Seattle, noting that one of his fellow directors is currently with the film at the Singapore International Film Festival, another SIFF.

Joining "The Life of Fish" as a marvelous small-scale character study was the Dutch film "Heading West," director Nicole van Kilsdonk's low-key drama focusing on a single mother in Amsterdam, with a charming and heartbreaking lead performance from Susan Visser. (Photo of Visser, below, by Nicolas Burrough.)

Susan Visser"Roadie" is another character study, this one a rock 'n' roll character study from director Michael Cuesta, whose career after the well-received "L.I.E." in 2001 has focused largely on episodic television.

The film chronicles a 26-year veteran roadie for Blue Oyster Cult who returns home to Queens after being laid off, where he encounters his high school tormenter and the girl who got away (played by Jill Hennessy, who makes her character's musical ambitions entirely credible).

It's significant that the film ends with a version of the Jackson Browne song "The Load-Out," a tribute to roadies that is in many ways the most obvious, most literal, clunkiest and corniest song Browne has ever written, but also one of the most endearing. Buoyed by an engaging performance by Ron Eldard, Cuesta's film is clunky in its own way, but in the end touching.

But when it comes to the vastness that is Seattle, of course, those films aren't even the tip of the iceberg.

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