Seattle International Film Festival 2010 : 05/31-06/06 Week Round-Up

This week’s recommended picks! Go to the website for the Seattle International Film Festival for more details.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

Four Portlanders with different — yet very Portland, Oregon-esque — lives spend their days trying to find meaningful human connections. The sell here is the acting debut of The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.

SHOWTIMES
Mon, May 31 @ 9:00pm (Pacific Place)
Tue, Jun 1 @ 4:00pm (Pacific Place)

Garbo: The Spy

Certainly there is no shortage of stuff we don’t know, and Garbo: The Spy is a reminder that we really don’t know anything. An account about a Spanish double agent during WWII who manipulated just about everyone, Garbo compiles archival footage, interviews, and music to show us the life of Catalan Juan Pujol, who ultimately retired by faking his own death.

SHOWTIMES
Tue, June 1 @ 5:00pm (Everett Performing Arts Center)
Thu, June 3 @ 7:00pm (Pacific Place)
Sat, June 5 @ 11:00am (Pacific Place)

Waste Land

Chosen as best documentary by audiences at Sundance and Berlin International Film Festival, Waste Land follows New York artist Vik Muniz as he heads to Brazil to take on a project in the world’s largest landfill. He creates portraits of local garbage pickers using recycled materials and uses time lapses to document the transformation of the portraits.

SHOWTIMES
Tue, June 1 @ 7:00pm (Pacific Place)
Wed, June 2 @ 9:30pm (Pacific Place)

Gordos

Five overweight individuals struggle with images of self in this black comedy, and it doesn’t help that their skinny therapist feels more and more revulsion towards larger individuals as time goes on — especially for his pregnant wife.

SHOWTIMES
Wed, June 2 @ 9:30pm (Egyptian Theatre)
Fri, June 4 @ 11:00am (Pacific Place)
Mon, June 7 @ 9:20pm (Uptown Cinemas)

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

Apparently, in Japan, beetles are a respectable creature that are collected and sometimes even sold in vending machines. In this experimental documentary, Jessica Oreck explores this fascination and abstractly draws parallels between the lives of the Japanese and beetles.

SHOWTIMES
May 31 @ 1:30pm (Pacific Place)
Wed, June 2 @ 9:15pm (Harvard Exit)

Disco And Atomic War

resented in a combination of Estonian, Finnish, Russian, and English, Disco And Atomic War reveals the strained relationship between Finland and Russia during the Soviet era, as residents of Tallinn, Estonia did everything they could to rig their television sets to watch illegal Finnish television and get a handle on “dangerous” Western culture.

SHOWTIMES
Thu, June 3 @ 7:00pm (SIFF Cinema)
Mon, Jun 7 @ 9:30pm (Egyptian Theatre)
Wed, June 9 @ 7:00pm (Kirkland Performance Center)

Father And Guns

The highest-grossing French language film in Canada, Father And Guns (De pére en flic) is an outrageous buddy picture between father and son cops, Jacques and Mark Laroche (French-Canadian comedians Michel Côté and Louis-José Houde).

SHOWTIMES
Thu, June 3 @ 9:15pm (Uptown Cinemas)
Sat, June 5 @ 9:00pm (Uptown Cinemas)
Fri, June 11 @ 4:30pm (Kirkland Performance Center)

Ride, Rise, Roar

David Bryne’s collaboration with Brian Eno was a musical dream come true for many individuals, and this concert film documents a 2009 tour where the two decided to collaborate again for the first time in 30 years.

SHOWTIMES
Thu, June 3 @ 9:15pm (Everett Performing Arts Center)

Brotherhood

Brotherhood explores how homosexuality changes when placed under the weight of society. Lars and Jimmy meet when training together in a neo-Nazi group and soon find themselves feeling deeply passionate about one another. The atmosphere of intolerance forces them to keep their relationship under wraps.

SHOWTIMES
Mon, May 31 @ 9:00pm (SIFF Cinema)
Fri, June 4 @ 9:30pm (Uptown Cinemas)
Wed, June 7 @ 4:30pm (Egyptian Theatre)

Fight Club

This film needs no introduction. A part of SIFF’s Tribute To Edward Norton, Fight Club will be airing at the Egyptian as a midnight screening this year. You don’t want to miss it.

SHOWTIMES
Fri, June 4 @ Midnight (Egyptian Theatre)

Hidden Diary

An estranged mother-daughter relationship leads Audrey to her grandparents’ old home, where she discovers an old diary that recalls her grandmother’s life in the 1950s. The result gives Audrey new insight on her own relationships with the female figures in her life.

SHOWTIMES
Sat, June 5 @ 11:00am (Egyptian Theatre)
Thu, June 3 @ 4:00pm (Neptune Theatre)

Cell 211

New prison guard Juan Oliver falls unconscious after a minor accident, and after fellow guards place him in a cell to recover, inmates escape and seize control of the prison. When he comes to, he decides not to give himself away and fakes being a prison inmate through all the turmoil.

SHOWTIMES
Sat, June 5 @ 7:00pm (Neptune Theatre)
Mon, June 7 @ 4:00pm (Neptune Theatre)

The Two Horses Of Genghis Khan

The Two Horses Of Genghis Khan (Chingisiyn Hoyor Zagal) is a documentary film about a Mongolian vocalist, Urna Chahar-Tugchi, who is from a family livestock farmers from Inner Mongolia. She promises to repair her grandmother’s violin and find the song inscribed on the violin’s neck — one which originated in the Middle Ages and is utilizes a specific singing technique which makes it possible to sing on horseback for hours.

SHOWTIMES
Thu, June 3 @ 5:00pm (Everett Performing Arts Center)
Sun, June 6 @ 4:00pm (Uptown Cinemas)
Tue, June 8 @ 9:15pm (Egyptian Theatre)