Local Sightings 2025 – Local Haunts: Closing Night Shorts
Sat Sep 27:
In-person tickets >
$15 General Admission
$10 Student/Child/Senior
$7 Member
$100 General Admission
$70 Student/Child/Senior
$45 Member
Full Festival Passes and Individual Tickets are available!
Visiting Artist
** Friday at the Grand Illusion cast and crew; Every Sunday Night subject Ken Peterson; Hunt’s Trading Post director Vee Hua; and A Public Space directors Davon Ramos and Paloma Ramos in attendance!
Hunt’s Trading Post will host a pop-up trading post in the lobby of Northwest Film Forum, selling authentic Native American jewelry, herbs, and more from the Southwest Four Corners area. Proceeds will be split among the trading post owner and the project’s filmmakers. **
Click for Accessibility Info
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
The majority of seats in our main cinema are 21″ wide from armrest to armrest; some seats are 19″ wide. We are working on creating the option of removable armrests!
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Patron Services Manager at rajah@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
⚠️ COVID-19 Policies ⚠️
As of August 2024, NWFF has adjusted its mask policy from universally required to strongly encouraged at the majority of screenings. Occasional exceptions will be noted on each event’s page.
Disposable masks are available at the door for those who need them.
Read more about NWFF’s policies responding to the present pandemic here.
About
(51 min TRT)
Join us for a series of short films about beloved Pacific Northwest gathering spaces. In an age of commercialization and gentrification, in which every week seems to bring a new headline about the closing of a beloved bar or theater, these local filmmakers celebrate our vital third places.
We open with four soulful, poignant shorts that take the viewer on a tour of a movie theater in the U District, an unconventional church choir right here in Capitol Hill, one of the last authentic indigenous trading posts, and a home base for grassroots collectives organizing for liberation.
Our program closes with A Public Space, an aptly named doc about how a reservoir in Eugene, Oregon became an unlikely community hub for Eugene’s many subcultures, from skaters to tai chi students. A Public Space begins from a place of curiosity, seeking to understand how Eugene residents of all ages have imbued meaning into a place that seems, at first blush, mere infrastructure. By the end, it has bloomed into a celebratory love letter to a vanishing local haunt.
These are the places that make us.
Header photo credit: A Public Space, dir. Davon Ramos & Paloma Ramos
BUY TICKETS HERE
FAQ: What's the festival format this year?
- This year’s festival will be in-person only! For the past several years, we have been proud to offer the festival as a hybrid virtual-and-in-person experience, but due to staff capacity, we cannot do this for the 2025 fest.
FAQ: How do I watch in-person?
- Purchase your ticket through Brown Paper Tickets; come to the show!
- You can also purchase a ticket on the day of the screening at Northwest Film Forum’s box office (1515 12th Ave, Seattle).
- Pass-holders, we will be able to look you up using the name you purchased under.
Films in this program:
Friday at The Grand Illusion
(Serena Hommes, Seattle, WA, 2025, 4 min, in English) U.S. premiere!
Two women deliver a religious service outside the historic Grand Illusion movie theater on its last day of operation at that location.
Every Sunday Night
(Justin MacFayden, Seattle, WA, 2025, 8 min, in English) World premiere!
The Compline Choir at St. Mark’s took off in the 1960’s with the local hippies in Capital Hill, and has continued every Sunday night. As Compline includes no traditional service or sermon, people of all religious backgrounds bring sleeping bags and blankets and lay on the floor of the cathedral to listen.
Hunt's Trading Post
(Vee Hua, Seattle, WA, 2025, 10 min, in English) Seattle premiere!
Operated by a Navajo Nation citizen, Hunt’s Trading Post serves the Native community in a white town.
Dreaming
(Clyde Petersen, WA, 2025, 5 min) World premiere!
A hand-drawn animated music video that dreams of liberation for Planet Earth and all her creatures. Music by Canyon Songs, and animation by Clyde Petersen.
A Public Space
(Davon Ramos & Paloma Ramos, Eugene, OR, 2024, 24 min, in English) Seattle premiere!
The concrete slab atop of the College Hill Reservoir in Eugene, Oregon, has been a community recreational space for generations. It is beloved for its accessibility, open views and lack of a defined use; what someone could do there was only constrained by their imagination. It was an equalizer and encouraged people from all walks of life to mix amongst each other. In a country where public spaces are dwindling–privatized, commercialized, and fenced off–the College Hill Reservoir stood as a rare exception. Ahead of the reservoir’s demolition, A Public Space offers a stirring eulogy for a beloved local haunt.
Festival Directory
Presented by Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, the 28th Annual Local Sightings Film Festival is a showcase of creative communities from throughout the Pacific Northwest. The 2025 program, which runs from September 19–28, features a competitive selection of curated short film programs and feature films, inviting regional artists to experiment, break, and remake popular conceptions around filmmaking and film exhibition.
Local Sightings champions emerging and established talent, supports the regional film industry, and promotes diverse media as a critical tool for public engagement.