Calendar
Rabbit in the Moon
Sponsored by KBCS 91.3 FM, Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project and the ACLU of Washington
Jun 21 - Jun 22, 2008
Emiko Omori, USA, 1999, 85 min
RABBIT IN THE MOON uncovers a buried history of internment camps built by the US government for Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West coast. This new history includes political tensions, social and generational division and the dialectic between resistance and collaboration. Emiko Omori and her older sister, Seattle filmmaker and film critic Chizuko Omori, use archival and recently recovered home movies to confront their own family secrets. They were children when they went to one of the internment camps. Their mother died only a year after the family's release, but silence has surrounded that event. They correspondingly confront the collective quiet among Japanese American about the social antagonisms and insecurities that were born in the camps and still haunt their community life 64 years later.
Passing Poston
Sponsored by KBCS 91.3 FM, Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project and the ACLU of Washington
Jun 20 - Jun 26, 2008
Joe Fox and James Nubile, USA, 2007, BETA-SP, 60 min
For the over 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly interned during World War II, the scars from this traumatic time have not fully healed. PASSING POSTON tells the moving and haunting story of four former internees of the Poston Relocation Center. Each person is shadowed by a tragic past, and each struggles in their own painful way to reconcile the trauma of their youth and find their rightful place in this country. In the wake of this painful past Ruth Okimoto returns to the desert of Arizona (on the grounds of the future Colorado River Indian Reservation), where she spent her childhood years behind barbed wire.
Information about the panelists
Ruth Okimoto and her family were sent to the Poston Relocation Center when she was six years old. At the time of relocation, Ruth's father was an established minister in a church in San Diego. Ruth currently lives with her husband, renowned glass artist Marvin Lipofsky in Berkeley, California. Ruth spends a lot of her time working on the Poston Restoration Committee, a joint effort by former internees of the Poston Relocation Center and The Colorado River Indian Tribes to preserve the few remaining buildings left of the internment camp.
Mary Matsuda Gruenewald is a Nisei, a person born of Japanese parents who arrived in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Her story, "Looking Like the Enemy," captures her discovery of the power of her family's unconditional love, her struggle to find her true voice as a person of color, and her search to make meaning of the trauma while reaffirming her belief in America. Her journey includes a triumphant trip to Washington D.C. and a meeting with the president exactly 60 years to the day after the evacuation from her home on May 16, 1942.
Stan Shikuma is a longtime activist in the Japanese American community, working with the International Examiner, Japanese American Citizens League, Seattle Kokon Taiko, Tule Lake Committee, Washington Coalition for Redress, and the Wing Luke Asian Museum. Stan is a Sansei (third generation Japanese American) whose parents were both removed to American concentration camps during WW II – his mother’s family to Tule Lake, CA and his father’s family to Poston, AZ. He is currently working on the 16th Tule Lake Pilgrimage, an educational and healing journey back to the site of the most infamous of the ten Camps.
Special Addition!
Monday's screenings will be preceded by
NEVER AGAIN - A Story of Yaeko Nakano
By Christopher Wood
Filmed and edited over the course of one weekend in March as part of the International Documentary Challenge 2008, this film tells the story of Yaeko Nakano and her struggles during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were relocated to internment camps across the country. Through her Buddhist faith, her music, and the love of her husband, Mrs. Nakano survived this dark period of American history and now vows that her country will persecute its people "never again."
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Sponsored by Izilla Toys and Family Frames
Jun 24 - Jun 25, 2008
Hayao Miyazaki, 1984, 35mm, 116 min
This is the masterpiece that gave birth to the famous Studio Ghibli. Set in the post-apocalyptic distant future, in the isolated mythical seaside kingdom of the Valley of the Wind, this film features Miyazaki touchstones such as flying imagery, strong female characters and stunning retooling of Japanese folklore. The story is unforgettable and inspiring: the brave and compassionate Princes Nausicaa must lead her people in an epic struggle to save the world, working against all odds to repair the rift between humanity and nature. This Disney version features voice actors Uma Thurman and Patrick Stewart.
Frownland
Jun 27 - Jul 03, 2008
Ronald Bronstein, USA, 2007, 35mm, 106 min
In an alternate universe, FROWNLAND might be Lodge Kerrigan’s NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE. A self-described "troll from under the bridge," the painfully awkward Keith Sontag spends his days selling coupons door-to-door and his evenings trapped in a squalid apartment situated in an outer ring of New York City. Finding even the most basic human communication a challenge, Sontag staggers through an uncaring city, attempting to aid a suicidal friend, evict an unctuous roommate and simply attain some measure of self-respect. With FROWNLAND, Bronstein has made a bold and bracing film that is both a savage black comedy and a ragged love letter to an earlier era of independent film. Both the film and its hero are raw, confrontational and unforgettable.
Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival and the Gotham Awards' "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" prize. Director Bronstein was nominated for the "Someone to Watch" Award at the upcoming 2008 Independent Spirit Awards.
"An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema...This is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce." -NY Times
"Amazingly accomplished first feature by Ronald Bronstein, made with a crew of four for seemingly little more than the cost of film stock, throbs with the energy and vision that independent filmmaking is all about." -New Yorker
"FROWNLAND announces that underground cinema is alive and well" -Village Voice
The Landlord
Jul 01 - Jul 02, 2008
Hal Ashby, USA, 1970, 35mm, 112 min
Tuesday 9:30pm screening introduced by Bobcat Goldthwait!
A devastating satire, THE LANDLORD is Ashby’s outrageous debut, a film that still feels daring, both stylistically and politically. Beau Bridges buys a row house in a New York City ghetto, planning to remodel the home once he has evicted its tenants - but finds all of his preconceptions tested once his and their lives are intertwined.
"THE LANDLORD remains one of the funniest social comedies of the period, as well as the most human." -J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
An Evening With Bobcat Goldthwait
Jul 01, 2008
If your most cherished dream is to meet your hero, Bobcat Goldthwait, your dream has come true!
Northwest Film Forum is having a Hal Ashby series this summer. Hal Ashby's films embody the massive confusion and cultural convulsions of the 1970s and among them are some of the best films of that decade.
Bobcat Goldthwait is also a fan of Hal Ashby and will be in Seattle, so what could be more perfect than hearing him introduce the film at Northwest Film Forum? Ashby’s The Landlord is an absurd and hilarious film starring Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Lou Gossett, and the inimitable Pearl Bailey.
In addition to hearing this inimitable introduction, the brain trust at Northwest Film Forum invites you to be part of a small group that has a private drink with Bobcat Goldthwait in an exclusive event at Grey Gallery on Tuesday, July 1 at 8pm. The group will then go to hear Bobcat introduce the 9:30 screening of Hal Ashby's The Landlord at Northwest Film Forum! In a rare turn of events, you will also get to sit in reserved seats.
Your ticket includes the reception at Grey Gallery and admission to the film at NWFF. Proceeds go to support the programs at Northwest Film Forum.
No tickets available at the door for Grey Gallery reception - please purchase in advance. Tickets for July 1 9:30pm screening of The Landlord only (introduced by Bobcat Goldthwait) are available online or day of show.
The Gits
Sponsored by Easy Street Records
Jul 04 - Jul 14, 2008
Kerri O'Kane, 2008, Digi-BETA, 80 min
In a pre-Nirvana Seattle, The Gits were the resident musical underdogs. With the unparalleled vocal power of front woman Mia Zapata they set the bar for indie rock in the Pacific Northwest. After inspiring such incendiary bands as Seven Year Bitch to pick up their instruments, they caught the ear of major record label execs who heard the muscular riffs and soulful hooks and realized what fans already knew – The Gits were anything but your typical street punk outfit. Because of this, the tragedy that struck in 1993 was that much harder to swallow.
With intimate live footage and interviews with the surviving members, director Kerri O’Kane explores the mystique and digs into the mystery of one of the rock world’s most enigmatic bands. One part The Filth and The Fury, one part CSI: Seattle, THE GITS is a rock doc as engaging and powerful as the music that inspired it.
PRODUCER JESSICA BENDER IN PERSON FOR Q&A ON THURSDAY!
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
Sponsored by Third Eye Cinema
Jul 07, 2008
John Gianvito, USA, 2007, Digi-BETA, 58 min
A calm, beautiful and wordless testament to fallen rebels and radicals in American history, from colonial times to the present. The film consists of elegantly composed images of gravesites and public shrines. A monument to monuments and a call to arms, PROFIT MOTIVE visits the resting places of such figures as Malcolm X, Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez and Eugene V. Debs. Winner, Best Experimental Film, 2007, National Society Film Critics.
Screens with
PERFECT FILM
(Ken Jacobs, USA, 1986, 16mm, 22 min)
An experimental work structured around outtakes from TV news footage after the assassination of Malcolm X.
Harold and Maude
Jul 08 - Jul 09, 2008
Hal Ashby, USA, 1971, 35mm, 91 min
Harold is 20 years old, rich, obsessed with death and reigned over by a dominant mother whom he tries in vain to prompt towards some show of emotion through his attempts at suicide. He has no interest in girls his age. Free-spirited Maude is 79, obsessed with crazy ideas and is glad to be in the world despite knowing that nothing and no one lasts forever. They both share a curious passion for visiting funerals for the therapeutic value, and it is at one such funeral that they first meet and forge a peculiar romantic relationship, united in their desire to rebel against conventional superstitions of youth, age, death and sex. Hal Ashby’s black comedy is a provocative and unsentimental love story that not only outraged conservative moviegoers at the beginning of the 1970s but rebellious youth as well. The film took on radical positions with humor and an original concept of the world, defying all norms and ideologies. That, coupled with a wall-to-wall Cat Stevens soundtrack, makes this cult classic a sublime experience.
The International Documentary Challenge Seattle Showcase
Jul 10, 2008
The International Documentary Challenge is a filmmaking competition where teams from around the world have just 5 days to make a short documentary film. This past March, 122 filmmakers from 16 countries participated, with the finalists premiering at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival in Toronto. They were assigned a documentary genre (character study, music, social issue, etc.) along with the theme of "Change." This showcase includes the Seattle-area produced films (two of which were winners) presented with several of the international standouts. The Doc Challenge is produced by Doug Whyte of KDHX Community Media and sponsored by Hot Docs, P.O.V., SILVERDOCS, The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the International Documentary Association, the 48 Hour Film Project and Film Action Oregon.
Two Seattle filmmaker were prizewinners at the Doc Challenge at Hot Docs! One of the films, ARS MAGNA (about an anagramist) won the POV Award and is getting a national broadcast on POV in July. Another film, CLICK WHOOSH (about the demise of the Polaroid camera) won Best Film.
Monsieur Verdoux
Jul 11 - Jul 17, 2008
Charles Chaplin, USA, 1947, 35mm, 123 min
Anyone who accuses Charlie Chaplin of too much sentimentality clearly hasn't seen MONSIEUR VERDOUX, arguably the crown jewel in the Chaplin canon. Years ahead of its time, this "comedy of murders" is Chaplin’s most audacious and atypical film and remains one of his most underappreciated. James Agee took three columns to write about it, even though it had already left theaters by the time the third column was published. Jonathan Rosenbaum named it "one of the greatest American films of all time" and railed when the AFI left it off their "Greatest Comedies" ballot. Luminaries such as critic Lotte Eisner and filmmakers Federico Fellini, Jacques Rivette and Luchino Visconti have named it one of the ten best films of all time. Orson Welles had wanted to write the script and direct Chaplin in the film, but Chaplin decided that it was too late for him to start acting for other directors. He did his own version, crediting Welles with the "story suggestion." Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a bigamist and serial killer who makes his living by marrying and murdering rich widows under assumed names. Chaplin softened the character and made him palatable to audiences by making him a lifelong bank worker who was laid off in middle age, too late to start over.
The Kids of Widney High
Jul 12, 2008
Live Performance!
The world-renowned Kids of Widney High are a group of young adults with developmental disabilities who write, record and perform their own unique brand of rock music. They have been compared to Daniel Johnston and Wesley Willis. For the first time in their illustrious underground career, the Kids are embarking on a full-fledged multimedia tour up the West Coast in which they will be showcasing their artistic endeavors, which include short films that evoke the "gaze" avant-garde aesthetic of Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith and Jonas Mekas. The Kids will be performing after the screening for all audience members who wish to stay and boogie.
The Last Detail
Jul 15 - Jul 16, 2008
Hal Ashby, USA, 1973, 35mm, 103 min
Screenwriter Robert Towne's adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan's novel accurately catches the flavor of peacetime military life. Randy Quaid is cast as a teenage misfit whose bungled swindle of charity money has landed him in prison. Jack Nicholson and Otis Young, awaiting new assignments at a military receiving station, draw escort duty. With several days of transit time allowed, Nicholson decides to set a leisurely pace. The essence of the story is the exchange of compassion between the guards and prisoner, and the latter's effect on his escorts.
“The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy.” -Vincent Canby, NY TIMES
Darryl Ponicsan, author of the novel THE LAST DETAIL, will introduce the 7:30pm screening on July 15th
About Darryl Ponicsan
Darryl Ponicsan is best known as the author of the 1971 novel The Last Detail, which was adapted into a 1973 movie starring Jack Nicholson; and for the 1973 novel and screenplay Cinderella Liberty, starring James Caan. He was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son ofFrank G., a merchant, and Anne Kuleck. He attended Muhlenberg College, (A.B., 1959) and Cornell University, (M.A., 1965). He was teacher of English at a high school in Owego, New York, 1959-62; a social worker for Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California in 1965, and teacher of English in California from 1966-69. Ponicsan also wrote the screenplays for the CBS movie A Girl Called Hatter Fox (1977), the movies Taps (1981), Vision Quest (1985), Nuts (1987), The Boost (1988), School Ties (1992), the HBO movie The Enemy Within (1992), and the CBS series The Mississippi (1983).
The Perfect Show: The Films of Karl Krogstad
Sponsored by Third Eye Cinema
Jul 17, 2008
"THE PERFECT SHOW is Karl Krogstad’s example of the most direct and unconventional expression possible — and it’s darned close to perfect! The program includes five new short films plus a lot of 'fillers.' The fillers aren’t really films, but the songs of birds. And when these birds sing you can almost smell the tail feathers. The show lasts about one hour and is like a feather that actually falls like a coin, to land on its edge. They are strange." –Karl Krogstad
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
Jul 18 - Jul 24, 2008
Scott Hicks, Australia, 2007, 35mm, 112 min
Philip Glass's achievements in music - film scores, operas, symphonies - make him one of the most important composers of our era, crossing divides between elitist concert halls and popular venues. His minimalist compositions are so iconic that he has been featured as a character on THE SIMPSONS. Director Scott Hicks (SHINE, SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS) gains access to confidants and situations that the average documentarian could never obtain. The film traces an eventful year in Glass' life, as he stages the opera WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, writes his eighth symphony, scores several films, travels the world and maintains a family with his fourth wife, Holly. Throughout the ups and downs, Glass maintains a Zen approach: "You don't like my music? Listen to something else."
A Slice of Blood and Honey: Experimental Cinema from Macedonia
Sponsored by CEC Artslink
Jul 18 - Jul 19, 2008
Against the struggles of economic hardship and bitter Balkan politics, Macedonia has a flourishing youth culture. NWFF Studio Director, Dave Hanagan, visited its capital, Skopje, this spring to meet filmmakers and bring back examples of their work as part of a CEC ArtsLink grant—supporting cultural exchanges between the US and Eastern Europe. Among these four programs are short films, video art and documentaries that provide a sometimes playful and sometimes jarring reality as it is seen by the eyes of Macedonia's young, contemporary artists. Macedonia is going through a unique period as it shrugs off the stifling socialist patriarchy to become a modern, cosmopolitan nation. Consciously and unconsciously, Macedonia’s emerging artists capture both the nation’s sense of curiosity and paranoia. Dave will be on-hand to present the films and discuss the significance of these artists and their emerging culture.
This program is supported by a grant from CEC ArtsLink.
Seattle Bike in
Sponsored by The Stranger, the Vera Project, and 2020 Cycles
Jul 20, 2008
Free! At Cal Anderson Park
Northwest Film forum teams up with Sustainable Capitol Hill to bring you this year's Seattle's Bike-In. Entering its third year of supporting alternative transportation in the city, this year's partnership includes an all day event called Imagine Capitol Hill, where Sustainable Capitol Hill and its partners provide information and entertainment about sustainable issues facing Capitol Hill residents. Imagine Capitol Hill takes place at the Broadway Farmers market and is followed by a bicycle parade to Cal Anderson Park for music and movies!
Abilene-Screenplay Competition Reading
Jul 21, 2008
Local talent reading a new work from Seattle screenwriter Michael Raymond
Directed by Virginia Bogert
A free-spirited and cynical young woman seeks redemption from a recent tragedy by confronting her three biggest fears - her new romantic interest, her mother, and herself.
Featuring Montana Von Fliss (Delaware, 35 Pitch), Shawn Telford (The Delivery, TTY, Gimme Music, Gimme Shelter), and other stellar local talent