I’m currently at the Seattle International Film Festival, watching multiple movies a day. It goes on for another week, but I was able to preview some titles before the festival, and they’re set to play in the coming days. Here are some of the standouts.
Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend is a time-hopping exploration of human connection. It moves back and forth from the 1900s to the early 1970s to present day, with its various characters towered over by the same ginkgo biloba tree on the campus of a German university. It’s an intimate, earthy epic that wonders if plants observe us the way we observe them.
From Spanish director Isabel Coixet, Three Goodbyes is a tender drama about life, death and relationships. Alba Rohrwacher plays an Italian woman who feels adrift after her boyfriend leaves her, only for a grim medical diagnosis to shift her priorities. It’s made up of small, finely observed moments that add up to a powerful coda.
Although its title is a response to one of the greatest of Iranian films, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, The Friend’s House Is Here is a totally different kind of movie. It’s about two 20-something women, both in an underground art troupe in Tehran, whose friendship is tested when one of their visas expires. Made before the current war in Iran, it’s a gentle character study that touches on themes of immigration and gender roles.
The Finnish period piece Tell Everyone is set in an isolated sanitarium for women and centers on a new inmate who has been charged with “moral insanity.” She starts challenging her fellow patients’ sense of freedom, a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and begins a tentative affair with a loner fisherman, a la The Piano. Despite its oppressive environs, it has unexpected moments of humor and life.
I also saw several movies that critique the adult world through the eyes of children. Amrum, the latest film from director Fatih Akin, is named for the seaside German village in which it’s set, and it follows an adolescent boy who begins to question his parents’ pro-Hitler sentiments in the final days of WWII.
If I Go Will They Miss Me, meanwhile, is about a Black pre-teen whose family, living in Watts under the flight path of LAX, begins to unravel when his father is released from prison. It blends mythology, fantasy and dreams with gritty realism.
The best of the bunch — and, really, the best film I previewed for SIFF — is Sarah Goher’s Happy Birthday. It begins with the seemingly pure friendship between two young Egyptian girls, one of whom works illegally as a maid for the other’s divorced mother. On the eve of the wealthier girl’s birthday party, the poorer girl discovers she won’t be invited, and the film goes from a bittersweet story of childhood and belonging to a cutting critique of social strata in contemporary Cairo.
All of these movies are set to play at the Seattle International Film Festival, which runs through May 17. See a full schedule and buy tickets at siff.net/festival.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.