Now that I’ve slept for a week or so, it’s about time I wrote a post about my SIFF experience. (Link goes to the stable film program page for 2026, not the top level page which is subject to change.) I made a mistake by attending a midnight showing the first Friday of the festival, which left me pretty wrung out for the rest of the week. I feel better now, though.
No real regrets. I enjoyed Obsession a lot, although not as much as many, and I would not have bothered to see it during its wide release so I’m glad I saw it in a rabidly enthused theater. Also, part of the pleasure of a festival for me is the liminal state generated by seeing a wide variety of movies in a relatively short period of time.
All told I think it was an excellent festival. Yeah, it’s smaller than it has been in previous years. It’s not like you could ever see every single movie playing – I saw 32 features, which is one more than I saw last year, and there were something like 104 movies showing total. So what did the smaller festival actually mean for me? Mostly that I didn’t have to worry about trucking up to Shoreline or down to Columbia City for a more far-flung venue. This is a win.
SIFF continues to be an excellent source of documentaries for me. Bucks Harbor, The Ascent, and Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero were all pleasant surprises (and I liked the other docs I saw just fine even if I wasn’t as surprised by them).
I won’t bother listing everything I enjoyed – you can always read my Letterboxd siff 2026 tag for that. See also my ranked list. I am gonna flag a couple of really good surprises, though, so you can share in my sense of discovery. Again Again is flat out amazing – first time directorial effort, smart time travel movie, filmed locally (yay!), and I really dug the way Mia Moore used the time loop as a metaphor for being trans in a small town. Ouch. This was one of many movies which made me feel like trauma was the unofficial theme of the festival, or maybe that’s just how I choose films. Let’s not think too hard about that question.
Trial of Hein was also better than I expecting. I figured, eh, Euro arthouse movie about returning home, sure. I got a really neat exploration of the nature of memory and the way no two people think of the past in the same way. As I noted in my review, this movie is both austere and warm, which is a neat trick if you can manage it. Something about the way the director stylized the houses by removing the physical walls to manifest the way everyone knows everyone’s business worked very well for me. (Yes, one of these days I need to see Dogtown.) It also embodies the other unofficial theme of my SIFF choices: isolated communities.
This is how I wind up linking to every single review, because now I want to talk about everything that was just as good as I thought it’d be. I’ll limit myself to noting that, on the last Sunday of the festival, nine days in, I sat down for The Furious and it woke me the fuck up. I haven’t seen a Xie Miao movie since he was playing Jet Li’s kid. Not at all thoughtful; completely bone-crunching.
I may never make another SIFF and if I don’t I’ll be well content with the five I attended since dipping my toe in the water back in 2021. I will always wish I had gotten deeper into the local film scene during the first five years we lived in Seattle. I’ve kind of made up for it, though.