Film Review: The 40th Seattle Film Festival — American Indie Excellence

Unlike Sundance, where “independent” has been stretched to allow for expensive non-studio movies with slumming Hollywood stars, the films we saw at Seattle were mostly low budget, populated with actors who were generally unknown, and made by up-and-coming directors.

A scene from "Red Knot"

A scene from “Red Knot,” winner of a FIPRESCI Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle Film Festival.

By Gerald Peary

I have a limited read on the 40th Seattle Film Festival, the largest in America, where, this late May and early June, over 400 movies were shown in a three-week period. The Fest looked great, with fiction and documentary films exhibited from all around the world. But all I saw there were American independent features. That’s because I was part of a three-member international jury (also, an Argentinian and a Brit living in Edinburgh) representing FIPRESCI, the global association of film critics; and our mandate was to give a prize to the best of twelve indies from the US of A.

Unlike Sundance, where “independent” has been stretched to allow for expensive non-studio movies with slumming Hollywood stars, the films we watched at Seattle were mostly low budget, populated with actors who were generally unknown, and made by up-and-coming directors. Fine with our jury. Our favorite, Red Knot, was by a first-time filmmaker, Scott Cohen, previously a New York-based art photographer. Cohen did corral actors with reputable credits for his leads: Juno ’s enthralling Olivia Thirlby and Mad Men ’s conniving Vincent Karthiesen, playing estranged newlyweds on a death-trip voyage to Antarctica. Red Knot, in its world premiere, was a Seattle discovery. Our jury, so impressed by its formal beauty and its knowing recreation of silent-film expressionism and romanticism, awarded it our FIPRESCI prize. If Sunrise’s director, F.W. Murnau, were around, this is the thoroughly Germanic sound film he might have made.

A second American indie we admired, Medeas, was also European in its aesthetic—beautifully framed, elongated shots, terse dialogue, atmosphere over plot, simmering, unstated tensions. “I tried to film thoughts,” said the filmmaker, Andrea Pallaoro, speaking at his screening. Medeas is set on a California ranch in the 1980s, where an Anglo cowpoke (Brian O’Byrne) lives with his hearing-impaired Latino wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and a flock of kids. While he works, she shacks up, on occasion, with a gas-station attendant. Quietly, with restraint. Medeas feels like Terence Malick directing a potboiler from James M. Cain.

Pallaoro is an Italian living in LA. The editor, Arndt Peemoeller, is a German who went to BU, where he was my TA and worked on a film I directed. Small world! Medeas, as the title indicates, is a variant on the Euripides tragedy, Medea’s matricide turned here to fratricide, as a jealous, angry father takes the worst kind of revenge on his philandering spouse.

Medas

A scene from “Medeas” — Feels as if Terence Malick directed a film based on a potboiler.

Our jury was far less enamored of the one “name” drama we had in our competition, Alex of Venice, directed by and starring Hollywood actor, Chris Messina. Venice is the California one, and this is a California-seasoned “seeker” romance. Messina’s character, George, has lost himself as a stay-home dad, so he decides to take to the road and, lo, find himself. His good-cause attorney wife, Alex (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), suddenly abandoned, also becomes a “seeker.” She hooks up for a time with an African-American yuppie realtor, before locating again her eco-value true self. More problems: there’s a sensitive kid between George and Alex, shattered by the impending divorce. Lastly, attention must be paid to Alex’s on-the-edge-of Alzheimer’s actor dad (Don Johnson). Will he remember the lines he has to speak in a theatrical production of The Cherry Orchard?

Spoiler alert: he does! He does! The ex-Miami Vice maven shuffles through as old Firs, Chekhov’s doddering manservant.


Gerald Peary is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of 9 books on cinema, writer-director of the documentary For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess.

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