The allure of film festivals comes from many places — attending a movie’s world premiere, finding a great unknown film unexpectedly or just catching up with the critically acclaimed films from previous festivals.
The third is what my week at the Seattle International Film Festival entails, as I see Beasts of the Southern Wild and V/H/S. Beasts won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for its New Orleans-set story of magical realism. The horror anthology V/H/S caused a moviegoer to faint and require EMT assistance during its Sundance screening — arguably the horror movie’s equivalent of winning a Grand Jury Prize.
I move from the Egyptian Theatre to the SIFF Cinema Uptown, a theater close to the Space Needle, to catch these two buzzed-about films. (Apparently, I missed Star Trek star Chris Pine the second day, who was there to promote his new Hollywood weepie People Like Us.) Thankfully, both films lived up to expectations — albeit in very different ways.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2012.