How do I look? Lee Seong-yeon takes a self-portrait in an apartment in 3-Iron. Directed by Kim Ki-duk, courtesy of Sony Pictures.

SIFF ROUND-UP:
Opening Weekend
Seattle International Film Festival May 19 - June 12

The tenor of this year’s festival has been, perhaps, the most ambitious in recent years as the first weekend of the Seattle International Film Festival unspooled. Miranda July’s debut Me You and Everyone We Know floored many who attended SIFF’s Opening Night Gala at the Paramount last Thursday for many reasons. Here is a film that cast unknowns and handled a family drama with certain freshness, intelligence, and comedic lightness that balances the story’s peripheral drama. July, who recently won the Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique at Cannes for the film, had to fly back to Cannes under short notice and accept her award.

Me You and Everyone We Know weaves the story of a shoe salesman’s separation from his wife and his encounter with a struggling performance artist who is attracted to him. While the story might seem banal and clichéd, July breathes some life to the girl-meets-boy narrative, but not without an undertow of family tension with the man’s children and their coming-of-age adventures depicted in the film. The film’s ending is aspires to a lyrical reflection without neatly tying up all of the loose strings in the narrative. And as an Opening Night film, it was a risk worth taking as opposed to attempts at staking bets on the familiar safe crowd-pleasers, such as last year’s melodramatic gaping yawn, The Notebook, which numb SIFF opening galas.

The party following the Opening Film, it should be noted, was also successful in many ways. First, there was plenty of room to circulate in the vast warehouse loft-like space that was the temporary home of the Downtown Seattle Public Library before Rem Koolhaas’ high-tech soaring new library structure was completed. The party, featuring local band The Posies, was furnished with mod 1960s modular seating and Aarnio bubble chairs, intimate lounge areas despite the vastness of the room, and old films, including Godzilla, projected on the walls. The space for the party was a vast improvement over last year’s opening night reception in the cramped Seattle Art Museum entry foyer and stair-stepped cafeteria corridor.

Kim Ki-duk’s latest film 3-Iron was among the best of the weekend’s selection of films. From South Korea, filmmaker Kim Ki-duk has cultivated a taut leitmotif between his main characters’ muted silence and the tense undercurrent of inner passion and release. His earlier work, like Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . And Spring, Bad Guy and The Isle depict central figures that manifest this polarity packed with restrained passion ready to burst. In 3-Iron, a handsome young man, played by Lee Seong-yeon, fliers neighborhoods around Seoul with adverts for a restaurant, and returns to find an apartment with the flier still attached to the door; meaning, its occupants are still away from home. Working expertly and swiftly, he breaks in to the residence, and proceeds into a routine that includes photographing himself with a digital camera standing next to family portraits on the wall, hand washing laundry on the bathroom floor and hang drying garments on a line, showering, sleeping, listening to outgoing messages on answering machines, repairing appliances, and preparing elaborate meals from food in their kitchen.

His obsessive routine gets him caught when he enters into an upscale home. After settling into bed in the master bedroom, a woman -- visibly battered from physical abuse -- spies on him and catches him off-guard. Interrupted with nagging calls from her husband away on business, she is more curious than threatened by the young man – who never utters a word. Together, she follows him throughout the city and helps with his break-in routine, partly out of spite from her arrogant and overworked husband. But when things go awry – including a potentially lethal accident involving a golf ball, and the discovery of a man possibly dead from a suicide in one apartment – their adventures take a grim turn.

Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron -- perhaps his most accomplished work but some argue not nearly as polished – is a seductively engaging story. The film builds tension between the youth’s invasion of privacy as a past-time but with questionable criminal intent, and the budding mutual friendship with a woman, played by Jae Hee, who finds refuge in their relationship from her scolding husband. The result is drama worthy of Hitchcock, but expresses entirely distinct voice.

Sunday’s rare archival screening of The Gorky Trilogy, Mark Donskoy’s 1938-1940 opus restored in 1977, is a glimpse of a youth struggling through poverty, displacement, and famine under Tsarist Russia trying to satisfy a thirst for knowledge. Denied formal schooling from the obstacles he meets in life, Alexei, at turns, works on the family farm in part one, My Childhood, becomes a cabin boy on a steamboat coursing up the Volga, and later, working at a bakery with dozens of men in rough conditions. The Gorky Trilogy picks up steam in part two, My Apprenticeship, when Alexei leaves an architect’s family and joins a riverboat to work as a dishwasher in the galley, befriending the ship’s benevolent and bear-sized chef who takes him under his wing. Although the dishwashing job fails to last, Alexei’s education is rounded-out with travel and escape, and the compassionate ear of his chef friend who he shares passionate discussions about life and books. Under a moonlit sky, the chef tells Alexei: “There are those men who understand, those who don’t understand, and those who refuse to understand.”

In The Gorky Trilogy’s final installment, My Universities, Alexei falls in with some men who help him find work at a bakery. The bakery owner, who thinks he runs his bakery like a coxswain on a boat, is depicted as a despised buffoon. As one of the bakers shouts in a scene that brings the men together against their employer: “You work for us!” While the standoff lends some vigor to Alexei’s emerging popularity and leadership, he increasingly grows despondent, especially after a student uprising at a nearby university. He longs to be engaged in the university’s intellectual community, but resigns to reading Schopenhauer and other books by candlelight in the bakery’s cavernous din while the men sleep. Towards the film’s climax, Alexei tries to commit suicide, but he’s saved from the night watchman and police who arrive in time to get him medical attention. He later returns to his childhood village and makes peace with his past.

Two men, at different crossroads to make amends with the past, are profiled in different documentaries screened earlier over the weekend. Trudell, Heather Rae’s tribute to Native American activist / poet John Trudell, and Twist of Faith, a glimpse at Ohio firefighter Tony Comes and his psychological struggle to overcome his experience with priest abuse, appeared last Friday at the Broadway Performance Hall. Trudell, which took Rae eight years to make, is a sensitive portrait of John Trudell and his role as Native American activist and father of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. Trudell’s vocal public appearances had him under the FBI radar through much of that period, particularly with his involvement in the Native occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1968, and later at the Pine Ridge Reservation following the arrest and trial of Leonard Peltier in the early 1970s. Trudell has the longest FBI file on record with over 17,000 pages documenting his political activism and background. One of the film’s particularly haunting details describes how Trudell’s family mysteriously perished in a house fire on a Nevada reservation, changing Trudell’s political course and ending over a decade of activism. After some soul-searching, Trudell pursued a music career that continues to this day.

Ohio firefighter Tony Comes, a victim of priest abuse when he was an altar boy in Toledo, is the subject of Twist of Faith, an HBO-produced documentary that chronicles his recent struggle with his past and the threat of his crumbling family life as he seeks legal, professional and marital counsel. Directed by Kirby Dick, Twist of Faith is a timely glimpse at one man’s efforts to confront his past head-on and move forward with the support of friends, family, and others who, like him, have experienced priest abuse from the same man who has since left their diocese and is married but lives in their community.

For more information about these and other films included in this year’s 31st Seattle International Film Festival, check out http://www.seattlefilm.com for details. SIFF screenings are held daily at select Capitol Hill, University District, and Lower Queen Anne theaters. Additional events will be at EMP, neumos, and the Guild 45th in Wallingford. SIFF’s three-week run is from May 19 – June 12. Tickets now available online, and at Pacific Place downtown and at the Broadway Performance Hall on Capitol Hill.

Kickin' it! Maggie Cheung comes Clean with life and rock 'n roll. Directed by Olivier Assayas.

FEAST YOUR EARS: DEAD ROCK STARS
AND MUSIC FILMS AT SIFF

Dead rock stars – no matter how young or old, how sad or tragic the death – live on forever in the popular imagination and culture. Their names, like an honor roll from pop’s hall of fame, capture a singular image; an icon of youthful passion, independence and rebellion. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Buddy Holly, Kurt Cobain, Curtis Mayfield, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Sr., Patsy Cline, Ritchie Valens, John Lennon, Ian Curtis and Sid Vicious – and legions of others -- evoke nostalgic sentiment to an era associated with their name. At this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, an assortment of narrative and nonfiction works culled from the program will focus on music films and personalities – living and dead. This is not the fest’s emphasis this year; rather, just a thread running through some of the films – out of some 350 – in the program. Feast your eyes -- and ears in SIFF's Face the Music program.

In tribute to two local stars whose careers and lives were cut short from early deaths, The Gits – part-memoir of the late Mia Zapata, and Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story will have their World Premieres at SIFF this year. The Gits, directed by Kerri O’Kane, profiles the local hardcore punk band of the same name whose hard-edged sound and charismatic charge was sparked by frontwoman Mia Zapata. The band’s infectious popularity was gaining a foothold in the Seattle hardcore scene, until Zapata’s life was short-circuited in the early-1990s. She was murdered on Capitol Hill by a drifter from Florida. Zapata and The Gits’ energetic live performances in the Northwest are remembered by surviving band members, friends, and others who experienced their mercurial emergence in Seattle’s heady music scene.

Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story also looks back to roughly the same period, but earlier to the late Eighties when the Northwest grunge scene surfaced and injected some vigor in rock music. Andrew Wood, who died from an untimely drug overdose in 1990 at age 24 when his band Mother Love Bone was gaining national attention, was active in the Seattle music scene. Before Mother Love Bone was formed with members of local band Green River, Wood recorded solo work and performed in the band Malfunkshun. Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story, directed by Scot Barbour, brings together friends, including local rock musicians Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Chris Cornell, and Kim Thayil, who remember Wood’s active contribution to Seattle’s burgeoning grunge era.

Echoing these documentaries about deceased Northwest music idols, Filmmaker Gus van Sant comments on the Northwest grunge scene in a fictionalized exploration of a tortured musician’s last days. Van Sant’s new film, simply called Last Days, takes its inspiration from Kurt Cobain and the period leading up to his death. Last Days will have its North American premiere as SIFF’s Closing Night film on June 12.

Documentary portraits of other dead musicians include the following films: Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley, Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, and Fallen Angel: Gram Parsons. Jeff Buckley, whose singing career had a following in Manhattan coffee houses and across Europe and Australia, is profiled in the film Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley directed by Nyla Bialek Adams and Laurie Trombley. Before a drowning accident in Memphis in 1997 at the age of 30, Buckley earned a world-wide cult following for singing jazz and folk songs, including Billie Holiday and Judy Garland covers, and recorded only one album.

Folk singer Townes Van Zandt, whose influence on many musicians span across folk, country and rock genres, is given a warm tribute in Margaret Brown’s film Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt. And Gram Parsons, who died from a drug overdose at 27, is the subject of Fallen Angel: Gram Parsons. Former member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers in the Sixties, Parsons’ musical career pursued a fusion of soul, rock and country, or Cosmic American Music, and spawned many imitators and influenced the emergence of alt country. Former Byrd member Chris Hillman, Keith Richards, Emmylou Harris, among others, remembers Parsons’ active career, his death, and subsequent mysterious body-snatching where his remains were burned at Joshua Tree in California.

While these films pay tribute to the deceased and celebrated heroes in pop music, two films profile the past and present in rock -- much like bookends of the music films at this year’s fest spanning the past thirty years or more. Punk: Attitude, directed by Don Letts, looks back to the formative hey days of punk, featuring plenty of archival footage from the late 1970s when the punk scene in London and New York took the world by storm. Rock School directed by Don Argott is a glimpse at the future generation of rock. Philadelphia musician Paul Green leads a class of young students, ages 9-17, at the School of Rock Music about playing classic rock music from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa. In conjunction with this screening, SIFF will be presenting a Rock School Jam at Neumos on Capitol Hill featuring the young performers appearing in the film Rock School, and surprise special guests from Seattle to jam with them.

French filmmaker Olivier Assayas ties together some of the themes and subjects of these films in a melodramatic new film Clean starring Maggie Cheung as a punk rock musician on the cusp of bigger things but saddled with burdens when things go awry. Addicted to heroin, Cheung’s character Emily Wang ends up charged with her boyfriend’s (James Johnston) heroin overdose in a Hamilton, Ontario, motel room and sentenced to prison. When released, Emily tries to get a clean start on her life and music career in Paris, but extended family ties to her young son raised by her late-boyfriend’s parents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry) in Vancouver, B.C., compel her to make some tough choices. Handsomely shot on location in Hamilton, Paris, London, Vancouver and San Francisco, Clean’s familiar family drama is infused with Assayas’ portrait of a woman who can get it together against the odds.

On the other side of the dial, SIFF’s selections of music-related films encompass music beyond the world of rock, punk and grunge. Drive Well, Sleep Carefully: On the Road with Death Cab For Cutie chronicles the local Seattle band’s recent U.S. tour. Arvo Pärt, “24 Preludes for a Fugue” assembles a portrait of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in twenty-four vignettes about his liturgical-inspired and choral music. Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is nearly deaf, plays music she describes that her body can hear. Thomas Riedelsheimer, who directed Rivers and Tides, profiles Glennie’s dramatic physical connection to sound and music through her body in Touch the Sound. And Tudo Azul’s pan-national portrait of the samba, from Salvador de Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, explores the depth and sound of samba music and dance in Brazil.

For more information about these and other films included in this year’s 31st Seattle International Film Festival, check out http://www.seattlefilm.com for details. SIFF screenings are held daily at select Capitol Hill, University District, and Lower Queen Anne theaters. Additional events will be at EMP, neumos, and the Guild 45th in Wallingford. SIFF’s three-week run is from May 19 – June 12. Tickets now available online, and at Pacific Place downtown and at the Broadway Performance Hall on Capitol Hill.

Dance Battle! Fankick! v. Streetbeat, photos: Eric Gould © 2005.

For those who missed out, Streetbeat took home the trophy for their audacious and tough moves. But Fankick! performed great, and easily worked hard to compete as the evening's winners — hands-down.

» Respond in the Forum.