Calendar
Kubrick Masterpieces
May 03 - Jun 14, 2011
From Killer's Kiss to Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick made something provocatively and controversially new out of every film project he touched. We'll start with Kubrick's genre-defining caper film The Killingand his powerful anti-war film Paths of Glory, identifying certain continuing themes, techniques, and image patterns.
Beijing Taxi
Director In Attendance!
Seattle Premiere!
Jun 11 - Jun 16, 2011
(Miao Wang, 2010, China/USA, DigiBeta, 78 min)
In this new documentary, three Beijing taxi drivers—two male, one female—prepare for an explosion of international customers in the days leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Fifty-something Bai Jiwen came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and faces some harsh realities with hardened humor; Thirty-something Zhou Yi remains optimistically grounded in his traditional lifestyle; and thirty-something mother Wei Caixia is a financially minded go-getter driven on finding a more comfortable life. Beijing Taxi delivers on multiple levels, and its many charms are quiet and subtle, but not soon forgotten.
CFI: Shorts in Support of Iran
Jun 12, 2011
To honor the three-year anniversary of Iran's disputed 2009 elections, Cine Foundation International and Northwest Film Forum present a program of re-modernist and minimalist short films influenced by the Iranian New Wave protesting the recent arrests of filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. The program is a selection of protest shorts that the foundation has commissioned all across the globe, coming from countries such as Iran, Russia and the USA.
Shorts From the Flaherty Seminar
Jun 15, 2011
(Various directors, 1925-2008, Various countries, DVD, 87 min)
Named after Robert Flaherty (director of Nanook of the North), the Flaherty Seminar is an annual film event curated by one programmer around a single theme. Last year’s program, curated by Dennis Lim of the New York Times, focused on films about work. This shorts program, a selection from the original lineup, consists of six films dating from 1925–2008, whose focus on its laborers spans the globe from Austria to Thailand. Films include: Haiku (Michael Glawogger, Austria, 1987, 3 min); Cheese (Mika Rottenberg, USA, 2008, 16 min); Me Broni Ba (Akosua Adoma Owusu, USA/Ghana, 2008, 22 min); The Pottery Maker (Robert Flaherty, USA, 1925, 14 min); The Sixth Section (Alex Rivera, USA/Mexico, 2003, 26 min); The Way (Uruphong Raksasad, Thailand, 2006, 6 min).
Inter-Action
A collection of shorts by SEAT, Seattle Experimental Animation Team
Jun 16, 2011
Animator Tess Martin presents a collection of short animations that explore inter-actions - action between each frame of motion as well as between each subject on screen. Made individually by twelve members of SEAT (Seattle Experimental Animation Team) these thought-provoking films reflect on love, insanity, faith and murder.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Seattle Premiere!
Special Two-Week Engagement!
Jun 17 - Jun 30, 2011
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, Thailand, 35mm, 114 min)
Winner of the Palme d'Or (2010 Cannes Film Festival, jury headed by Tim Burton), Uncle Boonmee is a dreamy, gently reassuring tale told by a man at the end of his life as he contemplates reincarnation. A ghost story told with the calm and patience of a prosaic tale of country living, the film concerns the final days of Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), an aging farmer suffering from a kidney disease. The film moves at the tranquil pace of a lazy afternoon, and this quiet grace allows the frequently outrageous and bizarre elements of the story to blend seamlessly into reality, appearing as natural as the background hum of insects or the gentle murmur of the wind. Boonmee is the latest and most memorable of Apichatpong’s tender, poetic, supernatural and semi-autobiographical reveries.
“If you still believe in the cinema’s capacity to inspire magic and wonder, you need to see this” —Mike McCahill, METRO
!Women Art Revolution
Seattle Premiere!
Jun 17 - Jun 23, 2011
(Lynn Hershman-Leeson, 2010, USA, DigiBeta, 83 min)
In the 1960s, women artists formed the Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), a coalition to cope with exclusion from museum exhibitions, art journals, educational literature and historical documentation. The cost of this exclusion is still felt today. Deftly combining reportage and personal memoir, !Women Art Revolution is a seminal and groundbreaking documentary exploring the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in America. Director Lynn Hershman-Leeson was an active participant in this movement and has spent 42 years documenting it. Through intimate interviews, provocative art and rarely seen historical film and video footage, she illuminates what many historians feel is the most significant art movement of the late-twentieth century.
Steam of Life
Seattle Premiere!
Jun 24 - Jun 26, 2011
(Mika Hotakainen, Joonas Berghäll, 2010, Finland, DigiBeta, 81 min)
Saunas are part of the fabric of life in Finland, as integral to the Finnish landscape as crystal-clear lakes and snowy pine forests. If you can hot-box it, you can turn it into a sauna, and the saunas in this film are as diverse as trailers, phone booths, tents and underground mines. From the inner woods of Lapland to the urban landscapes of Helsinki we follow several men and their touching stories. This documentary about life and death, loss and happiness, reveals that it’s not alcohol exclusively that opens up the Finn’s minds and hearts. A functioning sauna and a handful birch brushwood is often more than enough.
“The best sauna movie anyone's ever likely to see!” —Variety
The Best and the Brightest
Jun 29, 2011
(Josh Shelov, USA, 2010, blu-ray, 90min)
A cast to die for, an unpredictable plot full of twists, and a nothing-held-back sense of silly, yet intelligent sense of humor -- these are just some of the things that make The Best and the Brightest live up to its name. Josh Shelov directs one of the edgiest comedies ever to touch on the rearing of children, featuring Neil Patrick Harris and Bonnie Somerville as a newly-transplanted New York yuppie couple trying in vain to enroll their little girl into an absurdly elitist private kindergarten.
Secret Country #1
Sponsored by Easy Street Records
Jun 30, 2011
David Keenan, fiddle player and guitarist extraordinaire, and Nova Devonie, Seattle's best accordionist, open up the series with the songs of Buck Owens, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. Tonight's film features Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride and too many other country stars to mention.
Uncle Kent
Seattle Premiere!
Jul 01 - Jul 03, 2011
(Joe Swanberg, 2011, USA, Blu-ray, 72 min)
Joe Swanberg made his first Sundance appearance with his most mature film, Uncle Kent, an achingly true-to-life modern comedy about aging, loneliness, desire and the awkward intimacies of online friendship. The film follows 40 year-old Kent (Kent Osborne) who is an unmarried children’s-show writer living alone with his cat in Los Angeles. When one of Kent’s online acquaintances, environmental journalist Kate (Jennifer Prediger), crashes at his house for the weekend, he finds himself attracted to her coquettish manner and frank emotional openness, but sexually frustrated by her fidelity to a distant boyfriend.
A Useful Life
Seattle Premiere!
Jul 01 - Jul 07, 2011
(Federico Veiroj, 2010, Uruguay, 35mm, 67 min)
This tale of the Montevideo cinematheque and its denizens is the latest reminder that venues like our own beloved Film Forum are an endangered species. Shot in beautiful black and white, Veiroj depicts the efforts of a small group of cinephiles struggling to keep open this increasingly antiquated venue. Starring real-life Uruguayan critic Jorge Jellinek, the film is practically a documentary of the effort curators go through to bring works such as this to art houses near you. Much of the story focuses on Jellinek's Jorge, an employee of the Cinemateca Uruguaya for 25 years.
3:10 to Yuma
Jul 06, 2011
(Delmer Daves, 1957, USA, 35mm, 92 min)
Join Northwest Film Forum in welcoming Peter Ford, son of the great hollywood actor Glenn Ford, who introduces a screening of a new 35mm print of his father's 1957 classic Western 3:10 To Yuma. Immediately afterword, there will be a sale and signing of Peter Ford's biography of his father Glenn Ford: A Life, in the lobby of the theater. The second of Delmer Daves' films with Glenn Ford, following the Othello-based Western Jubal (1956), 3:10 to Yuma is one of the great Westerns of all time. Ford plays the villain Ben Wade, a wanted outlaw who is captured has to be escorted through the wilderness by a small group of men. Wade tries to take small-time rancher Dan Evans (played by Van Heflin) into his confidence with a sweat-inducing cat-and-mouse game between captive and captor, interrupted with bursts of violence from both Ford's gang (commandeered by Richard Jaeckel) and the vacillating townsfolk.