Seattle 08. Preview.

The 2008 Seattle International Film Festival opens on Thursday, May 22 with Battle in Seattle, a fictional portrait of the 1999 anti-globalization protests that met the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, directed by Stuart Townsend and starring Charlize Theron (who is expected to attend with Townsend) and Woody Harrelson, and ends 3½ weeks later on Sunday, June 15. The complete schedule won't be released until May 8, but we do have a preview of coming attractions.

Closing night film will be the Sundance-premiered Bottle Shock, the story of the California wine industry's rise to international renown in the 70s, starring Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman. In a shift from tradition, the closing night gala will be on Saturday, June 14, with a full day of screenings to follow on Sunday. Perhaps it's to help prevent those Monday morning hangovers from the closing night party.

For the first time I can remember, the film count has actually been pared back from the previous year, from 287 features and documentaries in 2007 to just under 250 this year. SIFF still holds claim to the title of biggest film festival in the US, both in numbers and in length (25 days of screenings, not counting weeks of advance press screenings). There's a trade-off for such reach, of course, the most obvious being that SIFF does not attract a lot of high profile premieres. One exception this year: SIFF co-founder turned director Dan Ireland will premiere his film Jolene at the festival. Other world premieres include Julia Sweeney's performance film Letting Go of God, the documentaries In Search of Kennedy from Chuck Workman and Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Tennis Shoes (sure to be a sell-out in such a loyal public radio city), the British thriller The Disappeared (in the Midnight Adrenaline line-up), and a number of American films, many with a Northwest connection.

The "Emerging Masters" series continues with four new directors chosen to be honored with screenings and (hopefully) personal appearances. The most exciting choices are Abdel Kechiche, who took home four Cesar Awards this year for The Secret of the Grain, and Fatih Akin, with his new film The Edge of Heaven. I know them from their previous features. Both Kechiche's Games of Love and Chance and Akin's Head-On find their respective stories in the complicated social identities of their contemporary multi-cultural worlds. The other celebrated directors are Jeremy Podeswa (The Five Senses and Fugitive Pieces) from Canada and David Mackenzie (Young Adam and Mister Foe) from Great Britain.

The rich selection of archival presentations includes a newly-restored print of Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp, the first three-strip Technicolor feature (we're promised to be the first venue to even run the print) and a Library of Congress print of Josef von Sternberg's The Saga of Anatahan. SIFF teams up with the Seattle Symphony for four full performances of Alexander Nevsky at Benaroya Hall, accompanied by Prokofiev's original score, and with the Burke Museum and the Seattle Theatre Group for a showing of Edward S Curtis's pioneering 1914 ethnographic short feature In The Land of Headhunters at The Moore as part of the theater's centenary celebration.

The usual sidebars are back: Face The Music (music documentaries), Planet Cinema (environmentally conscious films, mostly non-fiction), FutureWave (alternative cinema, shown in collaboration with the Northest Film Forum), Midnight Adrenaline, the New Director's Showcase and New American Cinema competition categories (each down to eight films), a line-up of documentaries in competition and many more not in competition, and of course the general line-up of Contemporary World Cinema.

At the risk of this coming off as a laundry list, here are a few highlights from the line-up:

• The Great Buck Howard, with John Malkovich and Colin Hanks, plays as the mid-fest Centerpiece Gala.

• Tom Kalin's Savage Grace, with Julianne Moore.

• Tarsem Singh's The Fall.

• Alan Ball's Towelhead and - no relation - Jay and Mark Duplass's Baghead.

• Monique van de Ven (star of many early Paul Verhoeven films) turns director with Summer Love, which sees its North American premiere.

• As does Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms: Hanami.

• Hong Kong's unbelievably prolific Johnnie To is represented by three films - Mad Detective, Sparrow and his section of the anthology film Triangle, made with Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark - while the equally prolific Miike Takashi is represented by Sukiyaki Western Django.

  There are new films from China's Jia Zhangke (Still Life), France's Robert Guediguian (Lady Jane), Italy's Ferzan Ozpetek (Saturn in Opposition), Japan's Yoji Yamada (Love and Honor, the third film in his samurai trilogy), Sweden's deadpan maverick Roy Andersson (You, The Living), and the Czech Republic's Jan Sverak (Empties) and Jan Hrebejk (Teddy Bear).

On the aging master front are Andrzej Wajda (Katyn), Claude Chabrol (The Girl Cut in Two), Ermanno Olmi (One Hundred Nails) and Manoel de Oliveira (Christopher  Columbus, the Enigma).

And one new talent to keep an eye out for is Brilliante Mendoza, who has two films in the festival: Slingshot (which jolted me right out of my seat when I saw it in Vancouver) and Foster Child.

  The complete schedule will be available in print and on the SIFF website on May 8. The box office will open on that day for SIFF members, and on May 11 for the general public.

Posted by dwhudson at May 1, 2008 4:57 AM