Yesterday the Seattle International Film Festival announced
its award winners, both those selected by a jury and those voted on by the audience.
I’m sure they’re lovely movies, but as usual, I have little interest in watching
most of them. My tastes tend to run in different directions, and with that in
mind, here are my favorites of SIFF 2016, in no particular order except that in
which they occurred to me. They’re all excellent and you should check out every
last one when you have the chance.
When a photographer witnesses a horrendous crime on the
rooftop of a nearby building, he attempts to take a picture of the event. The
assailants see him, hunt him down, and bludgeon him do death with a hammer in
his own low-rent studio. And that’s just the jumping off point for South Korean
director Park Hong-min’s (A Fish) twisted, nightmarish
thriller, Alone, which makes its North American debut at the
Seattle International Film Festival.
The Seattle International Film Festival is once again upon us, and while many fests are like sprints, cramming a ton of movies into relatively short spans, SIFF is a damn marathon. Covering more than three weeks and 400 films (the final count in 2016 is 481), this is an endurance test. By the end I’m usually a limp pile that vaguely resembles a human being, sleep deprived and twitching in a corner.
