the girly who shall end all girls

since 2021 SIFF has had festival films available for streaming. it's typically a small subset of the fest, but enough to help with schedule conflicts. i don't enjoy the experience as much as going to the theater - while it's nice to eat real food and pause for the bathroom, it reminds me of a really low point for me during pandemic lockdown. anyway...

first thing was to rewatch Porcelain War with C, who has been tracking the war in Ukraine obsessively since it started. i already thought the film was great, but on rewatch i appreciated the editing and soundtrack more. really great film, won the audience award for documentary, deserves industry recognition.

399: Queen of the Tetons
this one will be on PBS. perfectly cromulent story about a grizzly bear who has figured out the safest place to raise her cubs is near the road (males who are likely to kill cubs don't like it). this is a great adaptation inside a national park, wandering outside it, not so great. full of beautiful scenery and sweet bears. also full of not-great human-bear encounters and the ick of national park traffic jams.

Fish War
the story of the Northwest Treaty Tribes' fight for their fishing rights before, during, and after the Boldt decision. this was produced by the tribes and has a strong POV but also amazing access and interviews - lots of great stories from the elders who were there. whatever your thoughts on the reach of Boldt, there's no question that Washington royally fucked up. glad i arrived here after Slade Gorton lost his senate seat, what a tool.

Grandpa Guru
doc about Srđan Gino Jevđević, the leader of Seattle band Kultur Shock on his 60th birthday. it's not really made for the US audience - it's mostly in Croatian. he was a pop star in Yugoslavia before he became a war refugee. really interesting backstory; he ended up in the US because he was part of a wartime production of Hair and a Hollywood director was trying to have them perform it here. lots of fun Seattle and NW recent history interspersed with more usual Behind the Music kind of stuff

My Sextortion Diary
mostly phone camera, about the experience of having a laptop stolen that had some semi-nudes on it. the thieves were trying to extort money, and they were ramping up their harassment by sending these photos to her professional and personal contacts. it's intimate, and scary, and weird. definitely one that was fine on the tv since it was mostly vertical phone cam, screenshares, and text messages.

The Primevals
a midnighter I skipped for streaming (and because I knew C would want to talk over it). this is a film that had a bunch of stuff go wrong during production, including its director dying before it could be finished. there's a yeti, a secret temperate valley in the Himalayas, and lizard people. there are also randomly cast and un-researched sherpas and a young female lead who is completely vacuous. the yeti and the lizard people are done with incredibly charming and expressive stop motion. there was an arena scene with an entire crowd animated! it was absolutely MST3K fodder (C started riffing almost as soon as it started) but it was also weirdly good for what it was? it would have been nice to see on a big screen, but i had a really good time listening to C go off.

Sono Lino
a local glass legend who is not Dale Chihuly. i didn't know the name but i totally recognize his signature pieces. unfortunately i was dozing on and off for this one so i don't know a lot beyond that he was very talented and well-loved, pretty sure i used to walk by his studio all the time, and i really need to get to Tacoma Museum of Glass (they have a glassblowing demonstration auditorium) which is a thing we have never done for some reason

Subterranean
i think this will be on public tv in Canada. i love crazy rock climber and mountain climber documentaries. like i think what they do is terrifying and kind of foolhardy but i can't look away from the trainwreck, which is also generally breathtakingly beautiful, and i love the anthropological view of the subculture and the grit of the subjects.
so this film is kind of Dirtbag meets Free Solo/Dawn Wall but they're going down instead of up. which i think is even scarier and crazier than the climbers, although they also have to be climbers for these caves (and sometimes scuba divers). the film is following two cave exploration groups, one trying to beat the record for the longest cave in Canada, and the other for the deepest (they're both in BC, although the deep exploration group is folks from Alberta). this film is not for the claustrophobic, or if you're squicked by mud that looks like liquid shit, or have any kind of nightmares about being trapped, or my personal terror of being underwater and unable to surface to breathe. but it is interesting and there are some cool rock formations to see; i grew up in a region with limestone cave tourist attractions so it was both familiar and strange. i did wonder where all the money comes from - the deepest cave entrance was up a mountain in the Canadian Rockies and they got there via helicopter and didn't seem to have sponsors like the climbers do

Ultimate Citizens
sweet doc about Jamshid Khajavi, a school counselor in a Seattle K-8 school who coaches Ultimate Frisbee. he's a real character - chicken rescuer, endurance racer, former high-powered business guy, Iranian immigrant. he goes the extra mile to make sure that his students can participate in the sport and succeed in school. we see a slice of his life, and a bit of a sports doc about the team prepping for and participating in an open tournament. they don't have the money or time to do traveling league, so they come into the tournament as an unfamiliar element. it includes interviews with some of the parents, and it was shocking to me - two they spoke to were working two full-time jobs and running on almost no sleep. so he does a lot of extra work to make sure that those kids get to do extracurriculars, giving them rides home from practice, helping them get to appointments for glasses, etc. he seems genuinely lovely and the kids are learning to be better people together. it's nice

and that's a wrap on the film festival. the last time it felt right was 2019, i'm glad to have it back. next year i'll take a week off for it again.

That was fucked up

Frothy comedy about Switzerland after a referendum passes to make the country monolingual - French only!
learned from the intro that this was the same team who made Streaker. Shared some actors, had a fab trio of retiree revolutionaries and a wannabe spy. good times

Doc about the Blackfoot buffalo herds. Complicated by politics, special interests, and generations of cultural erasure, the goal of free-roaming buffalo on their land was finally realized just last year.
The crowd was amazing - lots of people involved in the film were there for Q&A, and there were tons of local Native folks.* So much joy in the crowd, spontaneous whooping and cheering. I ended up sitting by some of the buffalo stewards, and got info on a nonprofit that is all about indigenous-led environmental restoration.



*as someone noted at the Q&A there are 29 federally recognized tribes in Washington (plus the Duwamish but that's kind of a third rail).

There is so much going on in this film! It's a mystery about a stillborn intersex baby. It's about life in rural Czechoslovakia in the 30s. It's about starting a planned community/factory town and all that is good and bad about "progress". It's about intersex people and their place in the world. It's about a marriage disintegrating.
It's a period film, so it's a complicated watch because of period appropriate terminology and attitudes. but I think it's also a good conversation starter. I went on a wiki tear afterward - the setting is a real place that seems to have been portrayed pretty honestly. (It's wild as an American to think of a place in Europe as so remote that it's being accessed by plane like it's Alaska)
it seems like other pass holders were less into this than I was, but there was enough complexity that i felt compelled to learn more about everything going on politically and socially at the time; the friction of Czechia and Slovakia being glommed into one country is an underlying theme but it's assumed that the audience is familiar. (I'm guessing there's a whole dynamic about how people speak that is lost with subtitles)

anyway I dug this and want to have C and varina8 see it to get their takes on the historic moment and the ethnic conflict. it's the kind of thing I love getting from the festival

A furious powerpoint about Western powers' collusion in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba's government of Congo. It's entirely an assemblage of period news footage, interviews, and pop culture - mostly jazz. There is too much to cover, which is why it was a solid two and a half hours. The shit the US did because of the cold war, the racism, the way of all things Khrushchev was telling the truth... now very sorry I couldn't schedule the Hammerskjold biopic since he was so central

Come for the wild fantasy couture, stay for the tabloid drama of a blackout drunk alcoholic spouting racism and anti-Semitism. The doc is entertaining and well-made, I particularly like the framing and lighting of Galliano as a talking head (he remains a very handsome and charismatic man).

The doc doesn't take a strong editorial position but I don't believe that he has grown and changed since the public outbursts that got him fired (other than getting rehab). After working with a rabbi he still dressed up like a Hasidic man while in NYC, and said "now I know how the Jews feel" when his house was vandalized. Oh honey, no.

There was a local fashion networking event after the show, so the people watching was amazing. Lots of folks dressed to the nines, women in insane high heels

I would die for these kids. Sweet doc about Wayfinder Experience LARP camp in the Hudson Valley. It walks a fine line, but it's definitely laughing with not at*; even mundanes understand being a teenager. they had a delightful conceit of going to an ultra-wide aspect ratio when they were showing the actual game. great to see the kids change through the course of the camp

*FUCK THE BIG BANG THEORY

Seeing it here in a sellout crowd was delightful. I wasn't here for the golden age of Rainier beer ads, but they're part of the fabric of life here (like Almost Live). the film is mostly the story of one very influential ad agency, and full of remarkable footage of the commercials, outtakes, and AN INDUSTRIAL FILM WITH ALFRED HITCHCOCK. enjoy their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rainierabeerodyssey337/videos
I think this plays if you don't know Seattle, but if you do, wow

Title is the name of a reservation in BC - doc about the survivors of St Joseph's residential school. Canadians will be familiar with this - the tribe did ground penetrating radar on the grounds of the school and collected testimony (they have a murder board) tracing the atrocities that happened there. It is not an educational journey as much as an emotional journey, giving elders as much space as they need to speak. Often they are ceremonially cleansed as they speak (smoke, drumming, or sweat). It's a tough watch. The co-director is the son of the only known survivor of the infants born at the school - literally found in an empty container in the garbage destined for incineration. His dad is an artist here in western WA and I'm familiar with his work (will add a link later) so his history was a bit more shocking for me.

It will hit Disney+ in the fall.