The Best & Worst of the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival

My first major film festival was an extraordinary one; I managed to see 124 films in total, some great, some awful. Below are my picks of the five best films and a genuinely terrible one.

The Best

“The Coffin in the Mountain” (dir. Yukun Xin) – The plot is deceptively simple: after a body is found in a rural Chinese town, the local community is thrown into chaos as everybody’s secret desires and wrongdoings come bubbling to the surface. However, Xin chooses to employ a non-Western causality-based narrative structure (meaning that each individual action influences the next; contrast this to the Western three-act determinist structure in which actions are completed to reach a final goal or catharsis), which already distinguishes his film from 95% of the films in the festival. Guillermo del Toro once compared film styles to music, saying that most mainstream movies resemble punk rock with quick edits and fast action; if that is true, then “The Coffin in the Mountain” is cinema at its most symphonic.
When Can You See It? Unknown. It doesn’t have a distributor yet, but keep an eye on your local arthouse theater.

“Mistress America” (dir. Noah Baumbach) – Full review here. Baumbach has created the defining picture for millennials, a “His Girl Friday” for the 21^st century. Truly wonderful.
When Can You See It? Fox Searchlight will begin with a limited release on August 14^th, followed by a wider break in the weeks after.

“Three Windows and a Hanging” (dir. Isa Qosja) – Like “The Coffin in the Mountain”, this is another portrait of small town trauma and dysfunction, this time in Kosovo in the years following the Balkans War. It’s just as beautifully observed and perhaps even more powerful: there are certain shots scattered throughout the picture that are burned into my memory. It’s ostensibly an exploration of the effects of violence in a tight-knit community, but despite its limited setting “Three Windows” feels like an epic, brutal, moving, and absolutely vital.
When Can You See It? No distributor, so it’s anybody’s guess.

“Marshland” (dir. Alberto Rodriguez) – The European police drama has been very present this festival: the incredibly mediocre “Waterline” from Poland and “The Connection” from France both played multiple screenings. Spain’s entry into this subgenre is by far the best, though, eschewing most of the standard elements (dour orchestral music! unbelievable twists!) to create a nail-bitingly tense picture that feels relevant both as art and social commentary. The setting (post-Franco Spain) is perfect for this kind of policier; this is increasingly evident as the Rodriguez and his crew fastidiously integrate the real with the fictional and the past with the present.
When Can You See It? Warner Bros.’ international arm has the rights to this, so expect an announcement sooner rather than later.

“Blind” (dir. Eskil Vogt) – If you are one of those avid fans of Norwegian cinema (there are dozens

of us! Dozens!), then you will surely have heard Eskil Vogt’s name. He is the screenwriter behind three of the most acclaimed films out of the country in recent years (all from the same director, Joachim Trier, no relation to Lars von): “Reprise”, “Oslo, August 31^st”, and “Louder than Bombs”, which recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Here, however, Vogt is in the director’s chair, and the results are titanic. The intricate, complex tale of the malignant fantasies of a recently-blind author, “Blind” is the kind of picture for which the term “tour-de-force” was created. There is no accurate reference point, although one gets the feeling this is the movie “Stranger than Fiction” and “Adaptation” both wanted to be. More than anything, it must be seen to be believed. There is simply no other recent film that has reached these dizzying heights of wickedness and black humor.
When Can You See It? Once again, no US distributor is on board.

The Worst

“Beach Town” (dir. Erik Hammen) – Billed nauseatingly as a “rock-‘n-roll movie of the mind”, there was no other film that came close to the neuron-melting incompetence in the entire festival. Shot in grainy 16mm for no discernible reason, “Beach Town” most closely resembles a giant, bloated home movie that serves absolutely no artistic purpose whatsoever. Every frame of this godawful picture betrays a basic lack of technical acumen on the part of every single person involved. I imagine that somewhere along the way someone told Mr. Hammen to follow his dreams, but this was faulty advice. He would serve the world better as an accountant or a valet, anything but a filmmaker.