SIFF 2024 celebrates 50 years of Seattle’s homegrown film festival

Quick: Picture a film festival. What do you see? Is it flashbulbs and red carpets? Movie stars and schmoozy producers? Perhaps metric tons of loaner diamonds (Cannes) or down coats that cost more than a used car (Sundance)? Sure. But for anyone who just loves sitting in the dark of a theater, none of that really matters. For us, film festivals are a place of celebration and discovery, where you are both completely alone and part of the powerful, popcorn-fueled human collective that is an audience.

For nearly five decades, the Seattle International Film Festival has been bringing that passion for film to screens around our city. On May 9, the 50^th annual SIFF kicks off at the Paramount Theatre with Josh Margolin’s “Thelma,” which premiered at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, starring Oscar nominee June Squibb as a nonagenarian on the hunt for revenge after getting scammed.

SIFF’s 50^th annual festival may have a smaller calendar footprint than in years past — a slim 11 days, compared to its traditional, pre-pandemic heft of 25 — but its mission to serve filmmakers and film lovers remains unchanged, and arguably, its impact on the independent film scene has only grown.

As the scales of art and commerce seem evermore out of balance in a film ecosystem battling the whims of streaming services, consolidating studios and intellectual property reboots, audience-focused film festivals like SIFF serve a vital role: They give emerging and international filmmakers a platform, provide local audiences access to independent films they might not otherwise be able to see on the big screen (or potentially at all), and get (or keep) audiences in the habit of seeking out cinematic experiences that they cannot have at home on the couch.

“We are strongly leaning into that idea of community that you can only get when you go to the cinema,” said SIFF Artistic Director Beth Barrett. “Being in that space gives people the permission to turn off their phones and let themselves just be with the movie.”

In the beginning

These problems never would have occurred to the founders of the first-ever international film festival, launched in Venice, Italy in 1932 as a celebration of the relatively new art form of cinema alongside prestigious visual art fair the Venice Biennale. After briefly derailing thanks to fascism (Mussolini and Hitler meddled in the festival in the late 1930s, for propaganda reasons), Venice’s festival went dark during the war years and returned in 1946. That same year marked the postwar rebirth of the Cannes Film Festival, after an initial, ill-fated 1939 launch. Then the first film festival boom, including Berlin in 1951, began in earnest.

In North America, events like the San Francisco International Film Festival (established in 1957) kicked off soon after, laying the groundwork for the next festival boom of the ’70s, when the growing independent film movement sought spaces to thrive outside the rigid studio system.

SIFF was part of this boom, founded in 1976 by Dan Ireland and Darryl Macdonald, two young Canadians then living in Seattle, who had worked at movie theaters in their hometown of Vancouver, B.C. That same year, the Festival of Festivals (later renamed Toronto International Film Festival) launched in Canada, and two years later, the Utah/US Film Festival (officially re-christened Sundance Film Festival in 1991) debuted in August 1978.

SIFF began with a bang. Ireland and Macdonald had fixed up the languishing Moore Theatre, then known as the Moore Egyptian Theatre, and that’s where they screened 19 first-run movies from May 14-31, 1976, for a total of 13,000 attendees, according to SIFF archives. 

(In case the math here is confounding you, SIFF’s founders decided to skip unlucky number 13 out of superstition, which is how we get to the 50th festival in 2024.)

Seattle arts PR pro Gary Tucker, who described himself as Ireland and Macdonald’s “lucky third wheel,” in a 2021 tribute video to Macdonald who passed away in August 2020, remembers those early days as unpredictable, passionate and volatile (in a fun way). He joined the team behind SIFF — then a for-profit entity called Stage Fright, Inc. — as an assistant to Ireland and Macdonald (“both born showmen”) in the early ‘80s: “one of the craziest, most fun and unusual jobs I ever had.”

“We were booking for the Egyptian [Theatre] throughout the year, and then ramping up for the film festival,” Tucker said. “The dream was always that the festival would make enough money every year that we could, you know, maybe paint the walls, clean the carpet, things like that.”

From the get-go, SIFF screened a mix of popular and art films (sometimes known as “specialized films,” to avoid the snoozeville connotation of “art film”). During the fest’s first decade or so, it presented world premieres such as “Alien” and “Poltergeist” and American premieres including George Miller’s “Mad Max” sequel “The Road Warrior.”

“I get goose bumps right now thinking about that screening,” Tucker said. “With the audience losing their minds over this movie, the ovation and the screaming and cheering that went on when George Miller came out at the end and they’re standing on their seats, applauding. That’s why you do a film festival.”

By some measures, Tucker said, putting together a film festival in those days was much harder, done via landline telephone, snail mail and physical film reel — a very different task than arranging digital screeners via email. But in some ways, it was easier. Back then, he said, getting a decision-maker on the phone wasn’t always that hard, and all you had to do was get one producer to say yes and you had the film. (And if you didn’t have the rights to a film and you showed it anyway, in secret, who was going to find out?) “We weren’t as subject to the whims of distribution rights for those films, because [the industry] was so much looser,” said Tucker. And what else — should we have an award? Sure, let’s have an award! Tucker recalls the “Golden Space Needle” being tossed out as a bit of a joke award name, and the SIFF team charged ahead before they’d even cleared it with the trademark powers-that-be at the Needle (luckily, they were fine with it).

“The Festival was always intended more for the Seattle audience than for the industry,” Tucker said. “And that’s one of the things that made it special.”

An audience festival

Those wild early days, marked by passion, experimentation and, critically, lack of regulation, are long gone. Today, SIFF is a major nonprofit (as of 1990) with donors, sponsors and a board of directors, a year-round operation with a total operating budget of $12.8 million, multiple major theater spaces and, during the festival, a staff of 110 employees.

“When I started there was like one other person working year-round in the office,” said Carl Spence, who served as SIFF’s artistic director from 2006 to 2016. “I started on a three-month contract [in 1994], and then I stayed for 23 years.” 

During Spence’s tenure, SIFF founded its Film Center on Lower Queen Anne and took over both the Uptown and Egyptian theaters. Just last year, under Barrett’s leadership, it took over the former Cinerama. 

But as SIFF has grown over the years, both literally and figuratively, why hasn’t it taken on the industry prominence of Toronto and Sundance, both of which it predates? Well, like all creative endeavors that grow to commercial scales, elite film festivals are now highly regulated, so higher-profile films and festivals must both be strategic about what they screen and when.

FIAPF (the International Federation of Film Producers Associations), is the governing body of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, said Tricia Jenkins, a professor of film, TV and digital media at Texas Christian University and the editor of the 2018 anthology, “International Film Festivals: Contemporary Cultures and History Beyond Venice and Cannes.”

“There are only 14 Category A festivals in the world right now because each one of these festivals generally requires that a film that shows there (esp. in competition) is a worldwide premiere (in other words, it can’t have been screened anywhere in the world or online before the festival),” she wrote in an email. “Obviously, there are a finite number of quality films that are produced globally each year and so there can only be a limited number of prestigious festivals that can require world premieres and still deliver quality content.”

That’s one reason that major world premieres on the scale of “Alien” and “Braveheart,” both of which first bowed at SIFF, are difficult to secure today, as films vie for space at a “major” festival such as Toronto, Sundance, Cannes, Berlin and Venice. These are “market festivals,” said Barrett, “where people go to sell their films,” and so can feel much more about the industry than the audience.

SIFF remains, as it has always been, an audience festival, Spence said, designed to delight by embracing both popular and art films, for lack of more nuanced terms. (Even so, he added, the world premiere of “The Notebook,” which opened the 2004 festival, got some serious pushback for being too mainstream.) So, SIFF is not a major marketplace. For one thing, the timing is off (it conflicts with Cannes), and for another, the fest’s epic, three-week duration prevented a critical mass of industry folks from all being here at the same time, which dilutes the rubbing-elbows element of the festival.

Still, this year, SIFF will screen 261 total films, including shorts and features, 62% of which are films from first- and second-time filmmakers, and 59% of which are films currently without U.S. distribution. With a projected audience of more than 100,000 (up from 90,000 total virtual and in-person attendees last year), that’s a lot of eyeballs on a lot of interesting films that might not otherwise get traction. “A festival creates excitement in a way that just going to an everyday movie doesn’t,” Spence said.

For Doug Ing, who first attended SIFF as a college student in 1985 and has only missed one festival since 1995 (he’s pretty sure), the festival’s diversity of programming is what first drew him in. Before streaming services existed, he said, he would be strategic about seeing all the films from far-flung locales like Mongolia and Kazakhstan which seemed unlikely to ever get released in America. “It was kind of joyful, knowing that you were watching things that you would never ever see again, not even on video or DVD,” he said.  

“I like that you get lost in the story because a lot of these foreign films, you don’t recognize the actors,” he said. “You’re not seeing Tom Cruise or Dwayne Johnson, you’re seeing people that seem to be ordinary people in these movies, and I always say, ‘Wow, what an incredible way of watching life unfold before you.’”

But it’s also the people that keep him coming back to SIFF year after year, Ing said. “I’d miss the popcorn,” he joked, “but as I get older, it’s mostly about friends.” Spending nearly a month together every year, he said, sharing space and watching films, has led to a lot of friendships with fellow dedicated SIFF-goers. That’s the community Barrett talks about, that you can only get when you go to the cinema in person, and the community that SIFF is cultivating.

‘A transformational factor’

SIFF, and other local film festivals, also play another important role.

“Most people can’t afford to visit Cannes or Venice,” Jenkins wrote. “In fact, the Cannes FF is not even open to the public through ticket sales. As a result, local film festivals become important distribution networks, especially for world cinema, independent cinema and short film and documentary filmmakers. These festivals help curate quality films that are likely never going to play in your local AMC or Cinemark movie theaters. The festivals help these filmmakers find an audience and help the audience find films that are not in the mainstream but wonderful all the same.”

As distribution gets harder to come by, those smaller festivals become more important to the careers of emerging filmmakers, who are themselves critical to keeping the cinematic art form vibrant and relevant.   

“Seven of my films have played at SIFF over the years, and each one of those screenings has given me a gift that is increasingly rare for filmmakers in the streaming age: the opportunity to sit in a packed theater and listen to the laughs, gasps and rapt silence as a room full of people give themselves over to a story you have told,” said local filmmaker Megan Griffiths (“Year of the Fox,” “I’ll Show You Mine”). “I am a strong believer that film has the ability to expand our collective empathy, so with each passing year I’m increasingly grateful for SIFF’s enduring power to bring people together and celebrate that communal cinematic experience.”

Sudeshna Sen, whose short film “Mendhi” premiered at SIFF in 2018, and whose first feature film “ANU” premiered at SIFF in 2023, shares that sentiment. “SIFF has been a transformational factor in my filmmaking career,” she said. “I have made friends and honed my craft here. Through their curation, intellectual vitality and discerning film community, SIFF has helped me find my voice and my audience.”

For smaller films “that are never going to find a distributor or a theatrical run, because they’re just too small, or they don’t have a name attached to them,” Barrett said, “audience festivals like SIFF, which are the majority of film festivals, working in collaboration with arthouse theaters, are actually acting in some ways as a de facto distribution model.

“Festivals are still where you’re going to find the truly independent work,” Barrett said. “Everyone is trying to get a studio to buy them or get a distributor, to try to make [their] money back and keep the process going. But the glory of the festival is that you get to discover those films before they go into the system.”