Rich Lehl and Matt Sellars at Priceless Works Gallery
Through June 26

The stars need to be in alignment for a gallery specializing in challenging, contemporary art to survive. Many such galleries manage to last only a few years before succumbing to harsh economic realities, particularly in a place like Seattle, where commercial space is at a premium and serious art collecting is relatively uncommon. The last few decades have seen the rise and fall of a long list of small, ambitious galleries, with the most recent casualties being Bryan Ohno, Atelier 31, and Eyre-Moore.

Fortunately, new galleries seem to emerge, even as older ones fail. One of the most promising of the new crop of art galleries is the Priceless Works in Fremont, already nominated by several local art critics as one of the best places to find great work in an unlikely location. Founder Regan Peck has assembled an eclectic stable of mostly young and emerging artists, working in styles ranging from funk sculpture to abstraction to pop, the pieces themselves showing a level of mastery not always present in the alternative scene.

This month both the featured shows – works by Rich Lehl and Matt Sellars – and the surrounding art by several others, maintain the gallery’s high standards. Rich Lehl is the best-known artist in the group, having had well-reviewed one-person exhibitions in two of the late and lamented downtown galleries listed above. A 1993 graduate of Cornish, he specializes in a droll, deadpan surrealism, featuring scenes from what could almost be everyday existence, give or take a few unusual life forms, or out-of-the-body experiences.

Works in the current show include prints and oil paintings, both executed in a polished, matter-of-fact style. The prints, spare and linear, look a bit like illustrations from a how-to-manual, while the oils are brightly colored, highly rendered, and dramatically lit, the work of an artist anxious to convince the viewer of the palpable, physical existence of his imaginary world.

The enormous, looming shadow of an unseen hot-air balloon, for example, has been carefully detailed in the painting entitled Ride – the way it changes color as it falls over the grass, shrubs, and path of a pristine rural valley, with the dark shadows of the half-dozen passengers just visible above the shadow shape of the gondola. Only after scanning the rest of the image for a few moments do we notice the tiny, sci-fi flying saucer hovering in the background, almost like an afterthought. In this particular alien encounter, both entities, human and non-human, seem equally unreal. The landscape itself is the only thing we can really trust.

Other works feature other odd encounters teetering in the unstable territory between the sinister and the droll. In Meeting, a man on a bicycle stares in surprise at a giant, disembodied head on a pole – which stares at him in turn with an expression of astonishment. Is the slack-jawed head as alive as it looks, or is it only a signpost, or merely a projection of the cyclist’s own thoughts? The lone pedestrian in Monster appears completely unaware of the giant, Maurice Sendak creature with long fangs and a inscrutable expression watching him from a window as he strolls past. Perhaps such occurrences are more common than we realize, at least for those of us not in touch with our inner demons.

The works of Matt Sellars occupy an entirely different aesthetic realm. Most of his 7 table-top wood sculptures are radical simplifications of the natural world, a process partly documented in the highly accomplished drawings and journal entries that accompany the show. The distinctive sea stacks at Shi Shi Beach on the Washington coast are described in a handwritten narrative, then re-imagined as two rounded, monumental blocks rising from a flat plank, the layered wood stained a bright turquoise and stripped of all texture and detail. Another sculpture takes as its inspiration the dramatic rock arches of the American Southwest. In the Sellars version, a blade-like blond-colored wooden curve balances on two stout wooden pedestals, an homage to the symmetry and fragility of the original rocky form.

The most visionary transformation is a sculptural reinterpretation of a peculiar animal head. In the preparatory study, Sellars presents a lovely drawing of what looks like a desert-dwelling fox, its giant upright ears poking up from a blunt, squarish skull. This relationship – vertical above squat - becomes the point of departure for a long, dark wooden block several feet long, supporting two high, narrow ridges - like the original animal head and ears, only streamlined and stretched out like wood taffy.

No less original, and no less engaging, are nearby works by other gallery artists, including Scott Eiden’s bleak and witty photographs of the Deep South (some working the same territory of everyday surrealism as Rich Lehl); Elise Richman’s tiny, coral-like arrays of closely packed, brilliantly chromatic oil paint drips; and Francesca Berrini’s cut-up and reassembled imaginary maps.

Several decades ago I stumbled into a scruffy, obscure gallery in the Lower East Side of New York called International with Monument. Among the works on display were several aquariums with floating basketballs, works I immediately dismissed as altogether forgettable, perhaps taking them less seriously because of the setting. That the artist was Jeff Koons, displaying works now immortalized in books and museums, is an object lesson in both the peculiar nature of the art world and the peculiar attraction of the undiscovered. In contemporary art, most every career starts at the margins, and there are aesthetic – if not monetary - rewards for the intrepid viewer, collector, or critic, particularly in venues as intelligently selective as Priceless Works.

SIFF ROUND-UP:
Obsessions, ghost stories and private demons
Seattle International Film Festival May 19 - June 12

SIFF’s Emerging Masters series, acknowledging four young filmmakers from around the globe who have films at this year’s fest, awarded the program’s Emerging Masters award to Attila Janisch, the Hungarian filmmaker whose Long Twilight (1997) and After the Day Before (2004) appeared last weekend. Janisch’s Escher-like narratives in both films invert waking dreams and nostalgia with loneliness and alienation. Both films share similarities featuring solitary individuals traveling through Hungary’s pastoral landscapes in search of a lost past connecting them to the earth and the present. The late summer twilight and verdant countryside in both films – with their hidden mysteries – envelop their central characters, as they encounter strangers who regard them with stern suspicion like lost travelers trespassing on the wrong side of the road. Adapted from Shirley Jackson’s meditative story of aging, personal memory and private ghosts, Janisch’s Long Twilight presents the central character’s confusion in dream-time haunted by repressed memories of her childhood.

While Long Twilight succeeds with its crafted simplicity, After the Day Before drifts listlessly across the Andrew Wyeth-like tableaux. The central character, in search of an inherited property in the countryside, comes to symbolize his vulnerability in his social and physical environment. Unlike the character in Long Twilight whose presence may or may not be a spectre revisiting her past, his past eludes him in a cloak of secrecy. Both films, while visually compelling but requiring patience, bring to the table portraits of a troubled psyche in an environment of anxious longing and fear.

As an Emerging Master, it is difficult to compare Janisch to Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke, whose films in competition -- Platform and The World -- resonate more substantially. Jia Zhang Ke ‘s films carry weight in crafting narratives that look at recent changes in rural Chinese culture and contemporary Beijing’s symbolic emergence in the “new” China. And both films offer stylish distinctions: Platform’s earth-bound dustiness suggests the passage of time at the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; The World pierces through the colorful scrim of globalization and technology, conveying an immediacy with interpersonal communications, but questions their authenticity and enduring value. The other filmmakers in this competition include Argentine filmmaker Pedro Trapero (Crane World and Rolling Family – both of which screen June 11at SIFF) and Susan Bier (Brothers and Open Heart) from Denmark.

Not in competition in the Emerging Masters program is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s lyrical and haunting film Tropical Malady, which won last year’s Jury Prize at Cannes – a first for Thai cinema. Weerasethakul’s new film -- which I’ve seen at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival and this past weekend at the Harvard Exit -- weaves together obsession and folkloric narrative with some of the most alluring photography set in suburban and rural Bangkok and in Thailand’s humid and lush jungle. Tropical Malady joins two narratives with the broad theme of obsession in the form of seduction, inspired by Thai author Noi Intanon’s stories. The film begins with a quote from Intanon: “All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check.”

Opening in the jungle as a small group of soldiers mechanically yet pleasantly photograph themselves around a dead man lying in the brush, Weerasethakul establishes a tone carried throughout the film. The scene’s unanswered questions mediated against Intanon’s quotation give way to Bangkok’s bustling backstreets, where Tropical Malady unfolds the dance of desire between Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) a young soldier and his affection for Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), an ice factory worker and young military veteran. Their budding friendship and quiet attraction gently develops over driving lessons, a visit to a fabled cave with a Buddhist altar, and motorcycle rides in the sunny countryside. Both Keng and Tong share flirtatious times together at a seafood karaoke restaurant and at a cinema, but when Keng attempts to draw Tong in to an intimate moment on a back road later one evening, Tong disappears with a warm smile into the darkness.

Tropical Malady merges the film’s first half into the second half in a small country house. Tong wakes up in a bedroom and vanishes in the sunny morning; in a transitional scene, Keng wakes up in the same place to study an old photo of Tong pictured with a navy buddy. Here, the film becomes fixed with a compelling and silent character study in the humid jungle. In contrast to the film’s breezy first half, the film evokes a quiet seriousness, drawing the viewer in to a soldier’s hunt for a shaman who has taken the guise of a tiger. The tiger leaves clues for the soldier (Banlop Lomnoi) -– a man’s footprint becomes a paw in the rain-soaked mud –- and the narrative features inter-titles describing how the tiger preys on villagers in the jungle after dark. The predator-prey tension exposes the man’s inner conflict about how to approach fate. A chirpy baboon communicates to the soldier about handling the dilemma with the tiger: either “free him from this world or let him devour you to enter his world.” In the taut silence in Thailand’s back country, the soldier confronts a difficult choice.

Obsession is often a manifestation of desire, but sometimes it is rooted in fear and anxiety. In Tropical Malady, obsession and desire, at times, evokes subtle ambiguity for the viewer, but what is clear is Keng’s passion and the soldier’s sweat-browed hunt. Two other films from this past weekend, Uno and Dias de Santiago, present stark portraits of its central characters in distinctive and stylized works. The existential choices posed for the characters in Uno and Dias de Santiago erupt with confrontation and fear; desire is absent except for the will to struggle and survive against adversity.

In Aksel Hennie’s film Uno -- named after the card game, David (played by Hennie) is a young weight-trainer at a small Oslo gym that enters a web of hostility from fair-weather friends who exercise at the club. The film’s trajectory spikes after David blows the whistle on the gym owner’s son Lars (Martin Skaug) who is seen illegally selling steroids to gym patrons. After a police bust at the gym, David betrays the gym owner and Lars when they are rounded up and sent into the police station jail by identifying Lars to police. David’s motivation to betray Lars is costly choice: either sit in jail for Lars’ actions, or leave to attend his father’s bedside at a hospital where he is dying from cancer.

Uno is an adrenalin-rushed film that gradually tightens with tension as David’s story unfolds. Family and friendship loyalties are tested and sometimes pitted against each for David, and at its center are his failing efforts to placate his interpersonal ties which threaten to crush him. Shot with handheld DV in a rainswept monochromatic blue-black-and-slate gray palette pierced with amber and hunter green, Uno has a sharp-edged visual style that glistens with its nocturnal atmosphere. The only thing distracting from this accomplished work is the EMO-imbued shoe-gazer guitar folk songs on the soundtrack. The film would have more muscle if the musical selections were stripped from the production unnecessarily commenting on David’s inner turmoil, and to give it a leaner “Dogma” film quality.


Similarly, Dias de Santiago from Peruvian filmmaker Josué Mendez depicts a former navy veteran suffering from a moral crisis about how to reenter society and find an established path towards work and education. Former military friends seek to pressure him to participate in a bank heist for a fast track to riches, but Santiago (Pietro Sibille) – in an effort to keep anger and frustration at bay – avoids the pitfall of entering into their scheme and sticks to his own path. At school, girls flirt with him after class, particularly when they find out he runs his own taxi service. Three young girls try to seduce him into afternoons of fun hanging out a disco, while he neglects his dysfunctional family and a seldom-seen girlfriend at their modest apartment. Santiago’s internal pressures can no longer be contained after discovering news of his former friends’ bank robbery on the news, bringing the stress of their collective experience in the jungle and his own familial troubles to an eruptive release by film’s end. Photographed alternately in grainy black and white and washed-out color, Mendez crafts an engaging portrait of a young man’s private struggle to break with the demons haunting his moods in Lima’s harshly sunlit streets.

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.

Silver Lining at Pacific Northwest Ballet
June 4th
Through June 11th

After twenty-eight years at the helm of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Artistic Directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell chose to conclude their final season with Silver Lining, a full-length program of Stowell’s choreography set to the music of American composer Jerome Kern.

It was an emotional farewell. The couple used this exuberant full-length work to say goodbye to a city that saw them transform its very modest ballet company into one of the world’s greatest. For subscribers who have had to endure Stowell’s frequently spotty choreography over the last two-and-a-half decades, it was reminder of the artist’s considerable strengths. In Kern’s emotionally complex melodies, with their sophisticated blend of humor and melancholy, Stowell found the best possible showcase for his dance sensibilities.

Soprano Valerie Piacenti and baritone Erich Parce provided a dramatic focus on stage, both mooring the dancers and setting them free to embody the tensions within Kern’s songs.

Silver Lining, which debuted in 1998, is a big dance production that nicely incorporated the entire company. Each principle and soloist was granted their own extended crowd-pleasing moment. Conscious of the significance of their good-byes, they all met the unique challenge of the evening with surprising results.

Patricia Barker, long-recognized as the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s greatest dancer, proved wonderfully dramatic in The Wishing Well and I’ll be Hard to Handle, taking on an almost cinematic grandeur. The oft-wooden Jeffery Stanton -- her partner throughout the evening, as he has been over the last few years -- seemed to come alive under the influence of Kern’s music, unrecognizable to those accustomed to watching him struggle with the dramatic requirements of his leading roles.

Observing their Astaire/Rogers antics in the white-tie-and-tails A Fine Romance, I saw the clarity and charisma so frequently lacking in Stowell’s work. Listening to Piacenti sing the lyrics of a couple in a strained marriage, I wondered if Stowell was gently making fun of himself, acknowledging the remoteness that too often emanated from the stage and the tepid audience response that followed.

The finest moment of the evening – and likely one of the most memorable of Stowell’s career -- was the pairing of Louise Nadeau and retired principle (now guest-artist) Paul Gibson in a trio of songs; Why Was I Born, Jennie Lee, and the sweeping, melancholic Some Girl Is On My Mind. Stowell has never been so successful fusing disparate emotions together in one place; the transitions from urban spectacle to witty social observation to private romantic longing were flawless and the piece deeply effecting.

As the curtain went down on the entire cast dancing away under the heavy orange stage lights, I wondered why Stowell so seldom produced anything of this caliber. He was always more at home dramatizing the passion and pathos of American life through jazzy show tunes, with their overt flamboyance, goofiness, and nostalgia than he was comfortable exploring the human condition through, say, Baroque or Classical music.

Perhaps he should have long ago contented himself with being a Jerome Robbins instead of aspiring, now and again, to be George Balanchine. By concluding his career in Seattle with this thoroughly enjoyable production of Silver Lining, he gave us an opportunity to remember him for what he always did best.

Helen Evans Lecture at the Seattle Art Museum
May 26th

Dr. Helen Evans, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Curator of Medieval Art, came to the Seattle Art Museum last Thursday to give a lecture entitled “Constantinople: The Other End of the Silk Road.” Evans is best known for curating two ground-breaking exhibitions at the Met; “Glory of Byzantium: Arts and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261” (1997) and last year’s “Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)" These exhibitions were so significant that Americans were forced to rethink basic precepts about art history, most of which they had probably been carrying around with them since freshmen year.

Looking at the Madonna and child in a late Byzantine icon, for example, we may find ourselves surprised by the figurative realism, which resembles that of Fra Angelico and other Italian Renaissance painters. It appears that a forgotten Eastern bloodline continued to flow unbroken from the classical, pre-Christian world to the Early Modern.

Who knew? The Byzantine Empire may have ceased to be a world power after the Fourth Crusade (1204), but recognition of its role in the development of Modern Europe was dealt a crushing blow six centuries later when Edward Gibbon dismissed it – in its post-division incarnation – as a “degeneracy.” Today Byzantium is largely forgotten in the West; the metaphorical subject of a poem by William Butler Yeats.

While most acknowledge the Byzantine Empire’s influence upon the Ottoman and Russian Empires that replaced it, the relationship with Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and even China was, prior to Evans’ exhibitions, unknown to most Americans.

In her talk, Evans focused on the formal artistic transactions that resulted from commerce along the Silk Route. The Classical-Byzantine-Renaissance vector is just one of many she revealed in her slide-show. Beginning with a copy of a Byzantine coin stamped in China, she concluded with an illuminated manuscript from the Caucasus which combined the genre’s medieval European formatting with elements of Chinese painting. In between these two objects she presented the audience with a dazzling array of knock-offs, appropriations, and recyclings that made one consider a cultural interconnectedness that predates the celebrated ages of mercantilism, exploration or even the Crusades.

While such an exploration of Byzantium might enlighten us about our past, it may be more important for what it tells us about the present. Our new high-tech global economy has turned the entire world into a modern day Silk Road, with today’s media and retail manifesting these same sorts of displacements and hybridization. Looking at the slides, I thought of Taiwanese families living in French Quarter-themed subdivisions in eastern San Bernardino County and Microsoft developers from North India salsa dancing at a Chinese Restaurant on Lake Union. Like it or not, we are living in a neo-Byzantine world.

As someone of Greek ancestry who was baptized in the Orthodox Church, I have long held a strange allegiance to this now-vanished empire. My religious and cultural ties are not to aging, white-robed pontiffs in Rome or sea-sick, round-hatted Puritans at Plymouth Rock: I am connected instead to the stern-faced saints and emperors who stare out from the gold and blue mosaics of Hagia Sophia and San Vitale.

As Helen Evans demonstrated in this talk, the rest of you are too.

SIFF ROUND-UP:
All the world’s a stage
Seattle International Film Festival May 19 - June 12

Globalization and the consequences of economic isolationism are explored in a few films from this past weekend at SIFF. Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke dramatizes the introduction of globalization in Chinese society in two films paired at the Harvard Exit in Platform and The World, and Dutch documentarian Pieter Fleury exposes the economic and cultural confinement of urban North Koreans in North Korea: A Day in the Life.

Jia Zhangke’s earlier films, with the exception of his recent film The World, were produced independently without government approval, and regarded as part of the emerging Chinese film “underground” in the Nineties. Platform (2000), his second film after Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) (1997), focuses on a traveling Communist Party performance troupe in rural China’s Shanxi Province, where Jia Zhangke is from, and their ambition to stage theater and dance productions in small towns and villages. Set in the mid-1970s during the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and spanning through the period of reforms in the 1980s, Platform, in its depiction of change and encroaching globalization on rural Chinese life, is neither nostalgic nor optimistic about its characters and the changes they experience.

The film’s title is an extended metaphor for the troupe’s passage in time and cultural transition, and by association, references one character’s dream of a train, something he’s never seen before. Their performances, however, take them around the country to remote villages and allow the characters to “see the world.” Platform gradually depicts the performance troupe abandoning Communist Party entertainment – seen as stock variety performances exalting the countryside – in favor of boombox techno and glam, a Western import introduced in the form of a Taiwanese pop cassette recording. In their newer guise, the troupe takes on a new name as the All-Star Rock and Breakdance Band and improvises performance routines with freer Westernized flair. Jia Zhangke evokes the troupe’s tumultuous changes, and how the superficiality of consumer culture -- including fashion, pop music, and smoking – fails to transport them substantially. Rather, it is the artificiality of consumer products that threaten to secure their interpersonal relationships and individual integrity. By film’s end, many of the characters return to Fenyang, the small dust-bowl town where they’re from, and leave behind their dreams on stage for the banality of village life. In the film’s final scenes, is it the shrill pitch from a tea kettle or the train whistle blowing?

Jia Zhangke returns to form in The World, his first “established” government-approved film. The World is shot on location at Beijing’s World Park – a modest hybrid of Las Vegas-style performance revues and world landmarks (Paris Hotel’s Eiffel Tower, Luxor’s pyramids, New York, New York’s Manhattan skyline, et al) and Disney’s Epcot Center.

Pulsing with Taiwanese pop star Lim Giong’s techno soundtrack, The World, like Platform, positions its characters with a faux facsimile of the world stage on the edges of Beijing, but this time the platform is the world, not in it. Tao, played by Zhao Tao, is a cultural cross-dressing dancer and performer– appearing in exotic costumes ranging from colorful Orientalist harem dress to formal geisha kimonos, and whose relationship with a park security guard (Chen Taishen) gradually deteriorates. Their melodramatic story unfolds, revealing his affair with a designer and her lonely friendship with a Russian female coworker (Alla Chtcherbakova), and juxtaposes their internal range against the park’s colorful but one-note buoyant façade. Jia Zhangke’s The World, with its bright bubble tea spectrum and hallucinatory landscape, exposes the friction of young rural Chinese drawn to the city for its wealth and modernity, but fraught with its false allure.

In stark contrast to China’s hyper-Westernization depicted in Jia Zhangke’s fictional narrative The World, Kim Jong-Il’s impenetrably-closed People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea is the subject of Pieter Fleury’s documentary North Korea: A Day in the Life. The Dutch filmmaker was permitted by North Korean authorities to document one family’s workday routine, and is a curious glimpse at their world in urban Pyongyang, the nation’s monochromatic capitol. Without narration, Fleury unfolds their story in their cramped apartment, as family members prepare to eat breakfast before commuting to work and school. Grandfather carefully dusts silver-framed images of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il Sung that hang in their living room, their illustrated faces beaming in front of bright red backgrounds. Little granddaughter gets ready with Hello Kitty backpack tightly strapped to her small frame.

Mom takes her daughter to a school where she will learn about the Great Leader’s childhood and his snow boots. After, Mom enters the cavernous subway filled with the scratchy strains of the Republic’s national anthem blaring from a loudspeaker at the foot of an escalator crowded with sullen commuters. Outside the state textile factory where she works, the entry’s steps are flanked with her coworkers preparing to exercise, symbolically genuflect before their beloved Kim Jong Il, and contribute the effort in the battle against the “American dogs” and imperialism. Visually, their routine suggests a performance – not only for the film’s audience, but for passers-by as well.

At Mom’s son’s computer class, students learn both computer science and English language. The instructor loses her class, however, when none of the students can accurately describe what the Internet is. Back at the textile factory, an electrical failure – from over-consumption of limited resources – brings the factory workers to a halt. A management conference is summarily arranged and participating employees express apologies for communication and management errors to prevent such problems. The women, who are under pressure to finish sewing the day’s 150-coat quota, sing revolutionary songs and exercise to pass time before their pressured to resume when electrical generators restore power.

The film ends with a close-up of Kim Jong-Il smiling in military dress behind his trademark sunglasses, and zooms into a televised image of young patriots in uniform jumping ecstatically. The film’s final image is of a woman in the crowd whose open-mouthed expression is frozen with what looks to be either the face of fear and terror or submission to the glory of the state.


Late last week, Radio Takeover was screened preceding Punk: Attitude at the Broadway Performance Hall revealing a David-and-Goliath story between grassroots media and federal regulations. Radio Takeover, a short film by Seattle natives Mike Seeley and Serena Down, documents the struggling micro-radio station SFLR 93.7 FM – San Francisco Liberation Radio – that broadcasted live radio from a small FM band signal that reached a local San Francisco community without an FCC license. The short conveys the DIY ethic with emergent American micro-radio, a trend towards localized community broadcasting in a corporate-dominated medium.

SFLR started broadcasting live radio with an interest to reach audiences and produce programming from segments of the Bay Area population that are not represented on commercial radio. Gay teen and homeless news radio programs have been part of SFLR’s independent news programming, and have gained participation from volunteers who support their broadcasts.

After nearly a decade of broadcasting, the FCC cracked down on SFLR in October 2003, and removed their radio equipment and computers in an effort to shut down the station. SFLR’s legal counsel and station owners sought FCC licensing through the proper channels, but the station was denied license approval – twice. Despite this, SFLR continues to broadcast radio on the Internet, but Internet broadcasts marginalize some of their listening demographic, such as the homeless. Attorneys representing the station have been challenging the constitutionality of the FCC’s equipment seizure against the station.

Seeley and Down’s film Radio Takeover exposes a compelling story, little-known outside of the Bay Area, with a look at SFLR’s efforts to not only survive FCC’s equipment raid, but to continue broadcasting an esteemed community service.

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.