A few things I know about festivals
About Elly, Critical Zone, Babes, and I Saw the TV Glow
The day after our dog died in May 2009, John was opening mail at the kitchen counter. “Hey, do you want this?” he asked. One of his company’s clients was a Seattle International Film Festival sponsor, and they’d sent him a free Platinum Pass, guaranteeing the holder admission to any or all of the 250+ films on the schedule.
We’d lived in Seattle for three years, but I’d never really considered going to SIFF. My only film-festival experience, a trip to Sundance for a previous employer, had involved too much chaos and line-standing and too few actual movies, and for no good reason I’d decided all festivals must be like that. But now I had a dead dog, and even standing in line sounded like a healthier distraction than moping around the house.
I looked at the online schedule. It was day two of the festival, and the next screening I could realistically make it to was an Iranian film called About Elly that the program described as an Antonioni-esque mystery. I like Antonioni more as a concept than as an actual filmmaker, and the few Iranian films I’d seen were too folklorish for my taste; I felt pandered to, a white woman invited to discover the simple rural people and their camels.
But hey, it was still a movie. I drove downtown, flashed my pass, and spent the next two hours enthralled by an Iran I’d never seen before, one where women wore jeans and drove station wagons and handed babies to their husbands to hold. Friends rented beach houses together and hung out in mixed groups. Gender politics still played a driving role in the central mystery, but subtly. It was a movie, not a lesson in cultural relativism, and it felt entirely new. (And within a few years, director Asghar Farhadi would be on the world stage for films like A Separation and The Past.)
Whenever I wasn’t working over those next three weeks, I was bouncing all over Seattle catching SIFF screenings. When I got tired of bouncing, I’d just see whatever was showing next at my current location. I didn’t love everything I saw, not by a long shot. But I loved every minute of watching.
I’ve attended almost every SIFF since, including the 2024 one that kicked off just a few days ago. Here are a few things I’ve learned in those years about how to shape a festival and let it shape me:
It pays to be limber. SIFF, like most festivals, offers both passes and ticket packages. Passes cost more1, but they give also you the freedom to follow your whims. The year I attended Sundance, the Audience Award went to a musical about a down-and-out trans glam-rocker from Germany. It didn’t sound appealing, so I’d skipped the regular screening. But my pass meant I had nothing to lose by checking out the awards screening—nothing except some sleep, that is, because the awards screening was at 8 a.m. I trudged in half-comatose the next morning, and within ten minutes that bewigged, overpainted warrior-fuckup-heroine Hedwig had won my heart forever.
Likewise, I would never have decided in advance to see the extremely granola-sounding Estonian documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, about women discussing their bodies, motherhood, sex, and rape in, well, an Estonian smoke sauna. But at last year’s SIFF it happened to land in a time slot between two movies I actually wanted to see, and the theater was air-conditioned, so I thought yeah okay, I’ll sit through this thing—a thing that turned out to be not the least bit granola, but painterly and abstract and so moving that it was in my top 15 for the year.
Don’t expect every movie to be great. Yes, a movie’s acceptance into a festival means someone loves it, but that someone might not be you. For every About Elly or Take This Waltz or Hedwig I’ve discovered at a festival, there have been two or three films that are, you know, fine. Like a lot of festivals, SIFF leans pretty hard into triumph-of-the-human-spirit narratives, especially if the human spirits reside in places or times where life is rougher than it is in the US or Western Europe. My assumption is that these are a festival’s bread and butter, a way to get mainstream audiences in the door. And many of them are well-made and affecting. But I’ll take a less technically competent film with the capacity to surprise me any day. In previous SIFFs, those included All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White, which gave me my first glimpse into Nigeria’s developing film culture; and This Closeness, a mumblecore dramedy that showcased a young director honing her voice on a tiny budget.
This year, my early not-great-but-still-kinda-great pick is Ali Ahmadzadeh’s Critical Zone, which I saw during SIFF’s pre-festival press screenings. (Purchasing a pass gets you access to these screenings, three per day for two weeks—it’s a huge perk that also makes your schedule for the festival proper less conflict-ridden.) It’s an episodic film that basically just follows a Tehran weed dealer on his nightly rounds, some of them quotidian and others surreal. At first it reminded me of Taxi Driver, if Travis Bickle was just a little weird vs a psychopath. But it becomes more melancholy and reflective as it goes along, and ultimately brought Paul Schrader’s gentle, elegiac drug-dealer drama Light Sleeper to mind.
It’s also a mess. Parts were clearly shot guerilla-style, maybe on an iPhone, while others are crammed with superfluous visual effects. The actors are all nonprofessionals. We learn almost nothing about the dealer himself; he’s a blank canvas for his customers, though I wondered at times if we were meant to view him as a hero, almost a holy figure doing his part to make life bearable for the elderly and teenagers and women and gay people of Tehran. (His visit to a nursing home has undertones of something sacred.) But for all those limitations, it’s alive and coursing with anger, with a few images I’ll never forget. It made my world a little bigger.
Don’t even expect all of them to be good. Sometimes you’ll just choose wrong, or you’ll choose well on paper but still be disappointed. Take Babes, for example. (No, really, take it.) Starring Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau and directed by Pamela Adlon, it’s a comedy about the impact of pregnancy and motherhood on two lifelong friends. Viewers from other festivals raved about it on Letterboxd. A critic described it as “Bridesmaids for pregnancy.” The trailer made me laugh. It sounded like a guaranteed three-star good time, at minimum.
God, I hated it. The fuck it’s Bridesmaids for pregnancy; it has none of that movie’s gonzo energy or realism-testing set pieces. It’s more like Walking and Talking minus any recognizable human behavior. Glazer plays the kind of aggressively movie-ish woman who can’t get a sentence out without a pun or funny accent or other bit of artifice. She makes the most distanced, air-quotes Natasha Lyonne character look natural. This chick can’t so much as buy a movie ticket or order food without forcing the service worker on the other end of the transaction to play straight man in the skit that is her life. As for the central friendship, we learn little except that the women are so close that they routinely send photos of their poops to each other to name.
I’m sorry: they do what? Who are these people? Do they have any personality traits beyond “weed” and “brunch?” Look, maybe it’s the generation gap and young millennial women will find all this poop-photographing and calling each other “bitch” fifteen times in a row with fifteen different accents and pronunciations highly relatable. I actually think this movie could end up making money, because it does dramatize and validate female experiences that are rarely shown onscreen, and apparently there are people who find it funny. But it was still the most annoying two hours of my recent life and clearly I’m still mad about it ten days later. 2
The festival halo is real. It’s the movie equivalent of beer goggles, where something automatically seems better because you’re seeing it early, or with a really excited crowd, or with cast and crew in attendance. All of the above was in effect for my viewing of Jane Schoenbrun’s very, very hyped I Saw the TV Glow. By the time I arrived from my previous screening six miles north, found parking, and literally jogged to the theater, seating was limited to the first two rows. I was at least a decade older than most of the exuberantly gay and/or ambiguously gendered people all around me, many dressed or made up for a night on the town, who cheered as soon as the house lights dimmed. This was an event.
Schoenbrun’s first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, has a passionate cult following. I thought it was, you know, a more than respectable debut; e.g., I didn’t love it, or even really get it. And the premise of this one—two misfit 90s teens become dangerously obsessed with a Buffy-esque teen TV show called The Pink Opaque and begin to lose their grip on reality when it’s abruptly cancelled—didn’t exactly thrill me. (For some reason it made me think of Mazes and Monsters, a corny 80s TV movie wherein college student Tom Hanks ends up in a mental institution after playing too much D&D. I guess that movie has been in a lockbox in my mind for 35 years, just waiting to be recalled in 2024.) So it’s fair to say my expectations were muted.
Reader, I Saw the TV Glow blew my mind. It is eerie and heartbreaking, full of dread and equally full of love and empathy (and some gentle humor, too). I found myself smiling at the screen even in the darkest moments3 because it was such a thrill to see a filmmaker step fully into their own highly distinct vision and voice. It’s also gorgeous to look at and listen to, suffused in staticky neon pinks and languorous synth-pop reminiscent of Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks. Schoenbrun, who is non-binary, has described as an allegory about the time before gender transition, but if you’ve ever kept any liberating knowledge secret from yourself to avoid upheaval, you will see yourself here. I loved it with all my heart. I think we’ll still be talking about it twenty years from now, and that in the meantime it will change or even save a lot of lives.
Uh, what was I was saying about a festival halo? Look, this time I don’t expect the aura to fade. Unlike, say, Cha Cha Real Smooth (an innocuous 2022 dramedy which I left expecting to be HUGE), I Saw the TV Glow one is the real deal. But I also can’t deny that the circumstances in which I saw the film made a difference. After the screening, a beaming Jane Schoenbrun returned to the stage for Q&A. “This is my first time in Seattle,” they said. “We were walking around the neighborhood just now and wow, there are so many trans people here!” The audience whooped in affirmation and pride. Schoenbrun took a beat. “Of course, then I was like why aren’t they all at my movie?”
“They’re coming to tomorrow’s screening,” someone called from the balcony.
The Q&A gave me an excuse to look around at the audience. There are a couple of movie bloggers I’ve been reading for nearly twenty years who have somehow slid from crankiness to full-on aggression where trans people are concerned. You know how it goes: one minute you’re just annoyed at being asked to remember a new pronoun, and the next you’re sure the Democrats are grooming children to request drive-through castration by the age of ten, to further the Woke Agenda, whose end goal is genderless totalitarianism for purposes of…I don’t know, actually. Profit?
It has been strange—repellent— to see the two once-familiar voices sucked so deep into conspiracyland. It’s also led me to sometimes think of trans people as a set-upon bloc, a population who Just Want to Live Their Lives in Peace. Which is true, but also kind of reductive and even dehumanizing. Looking around the theater brought me back to Earth, where I ostensibly belong. There was so much joy in the room, and laughter, and appreciation. These people didn’t give a fuck what some spiraling, once-relevant bloggers thought of them. It was a beautiful Friday night—an aurora borealis night, the sky outside as 80s pink as the film we’d just seen—and they were watching one of their own assume a place on the world stage for making a movie so good that no one could deny it.
It had been a rough week for me, spent edging up to the possibility that I have been committing consent violations against myself. Tricking myself into saying yes to things that truly don’t serve me, just to pass as the woman I’d like to be, or maybe the woman most convenient for others in my life. Thinking the bar for this is fine should be “It will not directly kill me” vs. “yes, this actually is fine.” The movie itself was both a comfort and a warning. But it was being in that room full of other people who likely have their own stories of passing and tricking themselves and holding their tongues too much that really started to heal me. I felt safe, just an ordinary person among other ordinary people who know that the pursuit of happiness can be risky. That it takes muscle, and grit, and a willingness to be inconvenient. That feeling is the halo I wore home that night. I hope I can keep it for a bit.
Though keep an eye out for SIFF’s early-bird sales, which can save you a whopping fifty percent.
Credit where it’s due: the Lucas Brothers scene excerpted in the trailer is genuinely very funny, and Stephan James is hotttttttt. Also, a litmus test: the part in the trailer where Glazer and Buteau say “bitch” at each other four times using different inflections and pronunciations? In the film, that goes on for about another EIGHT funny-voiced “bitches.” So if that’s up your alley, you are in luck, my friend.
About that: it’s being sold as a horror film, but don’t let aversion to the genre keep you away. Personally, I’d call it psychological drama with some creepy imagery, closer to the literary genre “slipstream” than true horror. Think David Lynch, not James Wan.