I just got back from the Seattle International Film Festival, where I spent nearly a week taking in all kinds of movies from all over the world. Although there’s one more day of encore screenings, the festival officially wraps tonight. Here are a few highlights from my time in the dark.
SIFF opened (as it typically does) with a crowd pleaser, a comedy from Ireland called Four Mothers, written and directed by brothers — Darren and Colin Thornton. James McArdle plays a novelist preparing for a book tour when his friends conspire to leave town — and leave their elderly mums with him and his own stern mother, played by the great Fionnula Flanagan. The premise is right out of a sitcom (a lot of the jokes are, too), but the film has a gentle charm when it actually quiets down and lets its characters have real conversations.
Deaf, from Spain, is several years in the life of a deaf woman navigating her relationships with a husband, a child and a world that can all hear. The final 15 minutes, which actually takes us into our protagonist’s deafness, are its most powerful, and it has a very good central performance from Miriam Garlo, sister of writer-director Eva Libertad.
Of the festival screenings I attended, the biggest crowds tended to be for documentaries. One of them was Come See Me in the Good Light, an unflinching look at poet Andrea Gibson and their wife Meg dealing with Gibson’s diagnosis of incurable ovarian cancer. It’s as sad as it is funny, a film that looks mortality in the face and dares to laugh.
The Librarians is a documentary with particular immediacy, tracing the origins of the influencers and conservative lobbyist dollars that have made school libraries the latest battleground for culture wars. It may preach to the converted, but it’s a valuable work of on-the-ground political reporting.
Another documentary, Baby Doe, has a true-crime hook, but it’s hardly sensationalistic. It follows the unusual case of a soft-spoken Christian grandmother charged with the abandonment and death of her own baby 30 years earlier, and it unpacks the social and religious circumstances that may have influenced her.
The Seattle International Film Festival closes tonight with Sorry, Baby, the debut feature of writer-director-star Eva Victor. The film is set at a New England liberal arts college where Victor’s character, Agnes, has recently gone from grad student to professor. We soon discover that Agnes has stayed put because she’s also been stuck in emotional neutral since she was sexually assaulted by her predecessor. The movie handles difficult subject matter with a delicate touch, but it’s also got a disarming streak of off-kilter humor, as well as warm supporting performances from the likes of Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and John Carroll Lynch. Sorry, Baby was one of the best movies in this year’s SIFF lineup, and it will be released theatrically next month.
If you weren’t able to make it to the Seattle International Film Festival this year, you can still see some of its lineup virtually. A selection of nearly 40 features, including Deaf, and several packages of short films will be available as digital rentals from May 26th to June 1st. For more information, visit siff.net/festival.