adventures of a tired coder

Memorial Day weekend at SIFF is always ShortsFest weekend! I always like the idea of ShortsFest, but it can be hard to give up so many prime feature film slots to make time for it. That, and each program only runs once. Well, for SIFF@Home, I didn't program in any conflicts, so no problem!

I watched 40 short films in these ShortsFest programs. Putting together the programs in such a short period of time required quick and shallow research. I sourced my shorts mostly from Tribeca, SxSW, and Criterion. Because I was watching most of these from free sources, I was able to send out my shorts programs to a few friends who watched as well. Just no Criterion for them. Which is too bad, because I felt like the quality of the films I saw through Criterion was higher on average than the other sources, and they tended to be longer and more film-like. Tribeca and SxSW shorts tended to be more "modern" and "punchy."

The films I picked were quickly sorted based on a scan of the description in these programs:

• Opening Night
• Just Your Imagination
• Around the World
• Midnight Madness
• Is it Love?
• Closing Night

This movie was kinda crazy and it felt like I had people hysterically shouting in my ear in Chinese for two hours. It grew on me by the end, though, and it hit some nice notes emotionally, especially some of the scenes between the two men. I learned some new Chinese phrases, "little three" for "mistress" and "little king" for "male lover." Haha.. Also, the color palette of this movie struck me as particularly lovely. It was bold and felt like it had a lot of deep red and turquoise tones.

SIFF@Home Day 3

About a worthy effort to restore the many broken musical instruments so Philadelphia schoolchildren would have proper instruments to play on. Lots of talking heads, even if they were put in television screens. It felt like more of a great news story than a film.

The dancing was full of joy and the movie was strongest when it was letting the dancing speak for itself. It got more tiresome when it kept trying to push swing dance as the antidote for all of the world's problems. People spoke passionately about how the swing community was always there for you and it was like family, and yet the film points out that swing no longer has much of a presence in Harlem, where it all began. But the point of the film was to be uplifting, so it makes sense that it didn't go further into that. I did learn a little about the history of swing and some of the surprising locations where its revival has been popular (South Korea, Sweden).

I took a break to watch a program from the Northwest Film Forum's Children's Film Festival and I wasn't very engaged today. I think the films in this program were more truly children's programming.


Not much to this short, but it was cute. And particularly poignant since we're all feeling sad about not being in the theaters right now, so it's nice to imagine that there are happy cinema staff dancing away in the closed theaters until we can return.


Yes, finally, the right sort of festival film for me! Two former lovers reunite by chance in their old town and talk for a long time. It hit all the right emotional notes for me. It's a little bit awkward, sometimes funny, often nostalgic, a little bit painful, and very genuine. Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson have great chemistry here, and Sarah Paulson's smile just shines. Loved this. I was actually scheduled to watch it next month, but the movie I had scheduled wasn't on Netflix anymore, and this one was a similar time and genre. It's not SIFF without some sort of tech issue? 😂


Okay, apparently I've watched this film at actual SIFF before. I remembered that it was at SIFF, but I did not remember watching it. I didn't even remember while watching the film! It wasn't until I went to rate it on Letterboxd that I realized. Guess it didn't make much of an impression, and I liked it less the first time, too. I may have just been too movied out at the time to appreciate the chickens. This is a pretty silly movie, but the chickens are great.

SIFF@Home Day 4

Started the morning with one final children's festival program, "The Cat's Meow," which was the original motivation to get the pass. It did not disappoint! So many great cat films. And it was like watching weekend morning cartoons.

I had 4 film slots programmed for today but ended up watching only 2. I needed a lighter day after yesterday, and I also had a 2 hour yin yoga class in the late afternoon. It ended up being a foreign romantic comedy day, which was perfectly fine with me. No bloodbaths!


Two attractive Korean youngsters meet by chance and continue to find and lose each other over the years. On paper, it sounds great. In practice, it was pretty unengaging and overly long. The two don't really have that much chemistry, and I'm too old to have patience for attractive people who act pointlessly mopey. It probably would have been better if it focused mainly on one of the characters and gave more insight into the character's mind and personal journey.

SIFF always starts with Opening Night on a Thursday, where lots of mostly well-dressed people go see a semi-mainstream movie at (recently) McCaw Hall and then spill into a party afterwards to eat and drink and dance. I am not one of those people. I have never seen an Opening Night film, and I have only shown up for the evening when volunteering. As much as I wanted to simulate the experience by dressing up in black and standing for 3 hours, I decided instead to start my SIFF@Home experience on Friday.

SIFF@Home Day 2

Now for Friday... what a big day. Probably the most I've packed in since the quarantine started. It's in no way sustainable, but because it's a nice change of pace, I'm totally energized. It started out with a 6:30am session of Wild Writing with Lauren Fleshman because Oiselle was having a number of fun Zoom sessions today. I also attended an arm/core workout with Kara Goucher (did the arms, stopped the core after the first set of side planks), a fashion show with the Oiselle store ladies, and a sneak peek & story time with Sally. There was also a bit of yin yoga in between and a bike ride across the 520 bridge because it's Bike Month. All of this was made possible by my employer, who kindly gave us today off as a mental health day.


In the afternoon, the watching started. Before getting to my SIFF@Home programming, I watched an hour of the Northwest Film Forum's Children's Film Festival. This is the third program I've watched from it this year, and I've found most of it to be charming and refreshing. After a few years in a row of watching Oscar-nominated short programs, I've gotten used to shorts being about dark and serious topics, and this is a fantastic antidote for that.

I was starting my first movie when my upstairs neighbor started hammering things. I could hear it even through noise cancelling headphones, so I tried moving outside on my laptop, but the viewing experience on that screen was particularly subpar for what I was watching, so I went back inside. He eventually stopped. I miss the theater.


Not my typical genre, but what better time than SIFF to see this sort of thing? Honestly, I'm a little sad that I watched this at home in a non-dark room with sunlight spoiling the scenes at some points. It's an aesthetically gorgeous film, with the color so desaturated that it feels like its title. Moody mountain backdrops, layers and layers of translucent cloth and calligraphy banners, stylized battles... it was all a feast for the eyes. I also liked the setup, with a kingdom hurting to reclaim a beloved city and a royal court filled with mystery and unknown loyalties. I was even willing to overlook the ridiculous fighting techniques and accept that it was worth it for the looks. But the balance tipped to being too over the top, and by the end, I didn't really care what happened and just wanted it to all be over.


I've always been excited when I find out that a SIFF film I'm going to see has a short film before it (mixed with some anxiety about whether or not I'm going to make it to my next film on time because I didn't factor that into the runtime), but it seems like it hasn't happened much in the last few years. So I'm changing that with SIFF@Home and programming short films before any film with a short enough runtime! This one made me laugh but also had some serious stuff in it too. It's about a woman with one arm who doesn't appreciate how people treat her differently because of it.


I gave Deerskin the same rating as Shadow, but my reaction to these two movies was actually very different. I felt like Shadow fit the mold of the beautiful Chinese martial arts period piece, but Deerskin was... I don't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't what I was expecting. There's certainly more to think about, and I do want there to be some depths to mine under the absurdity, but I'm not sure how much there actually is. A very different Jean Dujardin than in The Artist, for sure. I am a huge Adèle Haenel fan, and she's nice to see here, but her character didn't really give her space to shine.