The 51st annual Seattle International Film Festival kicked off Thursday night, and I’m here now, filling my days with movies from around the world. I’ll have a full recap next week, but I was able to preview a few titles in the SIFF lineup — some of them are only playing in-person, but others will be available as at-home rentals starting May 26th. Here are the highlights.
Hong Sang-soo is Korea’s most prolific filmmaker, and By the Stream (his ninth feature in five years) is another of his deliberately paced studies of intellectual life. It’s made up of long, unbroken takes where the characters eat, drink and talk — in this case, about the creation of art and how audiences respond to it, which is appropriate for a director whose work is so thematically oblique. By the Stream plays at SIFF on May 20th and 21st, and is set to be released in the coming months.
I saw two coming-of-age stories that are quite different, despite both being about young girls in Brazil. Rafaela Camelo’s The Nature of Invisible Things focuses on the friendship between two little girls who meet in a hospital — one because her mother is a nurse, the other because her grandmother is a patient — and it ends up being earthy, soulful, bittersweet and unexpected. It will be available as a digital rental after the festival.
Marianna Brennand’s Manas is not so spiritual. Set along the banks of the Amazon, it’s about a 13-year-old girl grappling with the predatory leer of men, from the workers on nearby barges to her own father. It’s a chilling portrait of an insular, patriarchal community shielded from societal influence but protected from consequence. There’s a SIFF screening of Manas on Sunday the 18th.
One of the running themes of this year’s films is social services leaving vulnerable people behind. Brittany Shyne’s terrific documentary Seeds, shot in lustrous black-and-white, is a lyrical study of Black farming families in Georgia. It’s about systemic shortcomings, but also about life as it is really lived. Home Sweet Home, a narrative drama from Denmark, follows a home health aide as her work begins to weigh on her — and her patients. It has a no-nonsense, almost clinical approach that’s effective and sometimes hard to look at. It screens on the 20th and 21st.
Souleymane’s Story, meanwhile, is about the intricacies and inconsistencies of the immigration system. It gets its title from a West African man (played memorably by first-time actor Abou Sangare) seeking asylum in France, and who’s rehearsing an embellished story that he’s been told will justify his legal status. Director Boris Lojkine finds propulsive drama in the mundane, as well as unexpected empathy amidst the misery. Souleymane’s Story plays at SIFF on May 22nd and 24th, and will later be available to stream.
The Seattle International Film Festival continues through May 25. And if you aren’t attending in person, some of the titles I mentioned above — and quite a few others — can be rented digitally during the window of May 26th to June 1st. To see a full festival lineup and buy tickets, go to siff.net/festival.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.