Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

I'd be surprised and maybe even a little disturbed if any of you remembered that I used to go to the Seattle International Film Festival every year with Ex. She & I would pore over the schedule a month or two in advance, and find out the intersection of the following sets:

• W - the set of movies I thought looked good.
• X - the set of movies she thought looked good.
• S - the set of movies we could get a sitter for.

Wayell, embarking on my gender switcheroo put the kibosh on SIFF for us, and I never bothered to find another movie date.

So, who wants to intersect with me go to some SIFF movies with me? It's way past time. If you have a set you want to see, send it hither.

I'm not getting a whole lot of SIFF action this year due to sitter unavailability, but I've at least made it to a couple so far.

No. 2 -- A Fijian grandmother in New Zealand decides to throw a traditional feast to name her successor as head of the family, but with all the strife her children and grandchildren engage in, will they pull it off? A better question is, since the script is so disjointed and the direction is so often downright annoying, will you care? I thought 96 minutes was too long for this. Nibs begs to differ, but she didn't think it was genius.

Kirikou and the Wild Beasts -- It's for kids: animated stories from west Africa complete with a beatiful sorceress and her killer statues ("fetishes" -- *snerk*), beasts fair and foul, and a small, inquisitive child who keeps his wits about him. I hope your kids can read subtitles, because we gave it three solid thumbs up. Groovy music by Youssou N'Dour.

The Art & Crimes of Ron English, a documentary about a guerrilla artist who hijacks billboards. Wonderful subject, poor execution. Overlong, repetitive, aimless, and a little too smug even for me. On the other hand, the short for this one, Wet Dreams and False Images, should be shown in every junior high school in the industrialized world. The filmmaker goes into a Brooklyn barbershop full of young men and lined with girlie pictures. She then interviews a couple of the guys who digitally retouched those photos, and shows the interviews on the barbershop's TV. Arriiiight.

North Korea: A Day in the Life -- North Korea's government allows a documentarian to follow a typical (?) North Korean family around for a day. I found myself questioning everything I saw and heard in this film except for what was in the background. Many of the people who spoke on camera were suspiciously photogenic, occasionally seemed rehearsed, and looked nervous as whores in church to have a foreigner pointing a camera at them. Militarist propaganda is as pervasive there as ads are here. Electrical plugs, however, are apparently absent. The North Korean state is an almost unbelievable mixture of creepy manipulation and incompetence.

With A Day in the Life was Seoul Train, a documentary about the people who try to smuggle some of the 300,000 North Korean refugees living just inside China to South Korea. Chinese policy is to repatriate the refugees whenever they catch them (China says they're merely economic migrants) where they are of course imprisoned, tortured, killed, or subjected to forced abortions. The filmmakers have a little blame to spare for the UN High Commission on Refugees, too. Potent stuff, not the least bit subtle like A Day in the Life, and well made.