Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
I looked at a few films in advance of the Seattle International Film Festival's 52nd edition, which began last night, May 7, and runs until May 17. (At opening night last night, a rep from the mayor's office innocently did the math and figured the fest must've kicked off in 1974, not suspecting the founders had whimsically skipped edition no. 13.) A far cry from the old SIFF marathons, but perhaps a more concise version was called for. Herewith, some blurbs:
Hen. The Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi, whose work has frequently been startling, returns with something perilously close to a crowd-pleaser, a tale told entirely through the perspective of a chicken living on the property of a Greek family. The fact that something like human trafficking may be going on here gives the whimsical elements of the story a firm grounding in current reality, though, so it isn't entirely made of feathers. If it doesn't rise to the level of a movie like EO – chickens do not have the expressive range of donkeys, let's face it – the movie is certainly alive, minute for minute.
Cotton Queen. The great subject of African cinema, the pull between the modern and the ancient, finds beguiling new life in this Sudan-shot fable, the debut feature by director Suzannah Mirghani. On the one hand the film is about a young village woman and the decisions she faces about whether to stay or go, but on the other a sense of the colonial past and a slight case of magical realism are present, too. Somehow this movie is related to Sinners and its play of history and surrealism.
Case 137. Years ago the French filmmaker Dominik Moll impressed with his perverse little character studies With a Friend Like Harry and Lemming. I kind of miss that weirdie streak, but this movie joins 2022's The Night of the 12th as a haunting police procedural. It's about an internal affairs investigator (admirable Léa Drucker) holding the Paris cops to account for violence during the "yellow vest" protests of 2018. Lean, straightforward, a well-executed exercise, and not without its share of outrage.
Yo. Documentary portrait by Anna Fitch of her friendship with a much older woman (her nickname is "Yo"), whose life has been varied and headstrong, to say the least. When Fitch leads off an interview with the question, "How did your chicken phobia start?", you figure some interesting stories await. One might like to know more about Fitch's impulse to re-create the presence of her late friend in a dollhouse-like installation, complete with a wooden figurine of Yo herself; this gesture is at least as eccentric as some of Yo's past adventures.
Three Goodbyes. Alba Rohrwacher, from La Chimera, plays a woman in Rome who faces a series of extremely challenging twists of fate, all rendered in the calm style of Spanish director Isabel Coixet. Even if the film sometimes feels too polished and wise to raise the temperature, it is very pleasing to watch; its portrait of a private person choosing to face her challenges in a quiet way is touching, especially our era of public emoting (it has some echoes of Coixet's underrated film, My Life Without Me).
Prisoners of Earth. An archival showing of a 1939 melodrama from Argentina, an evocatively-shot story of workers shipped off to labor in brutal jungle conditions. The agitating spirit is sustained throughout, even as the film aspires to Hollywood gloss, and a couple of folk-music interludes are striking.
Silent Friend. An intriguing set-up here: three different stories, set in different time periods, all including an impressive gingko tree that sits on the campus of a German university. It's a lovely tree, although I sometimes found myself more interested in it than in the unevenly engaging characters in the stories. The most compelling section involves a young woman who becomes the first female science student at the college, and the tiresome sexism she endures. A modern piece benefits from having Tony Leung Chiu-wai starring as a Hong Kong researcher marooned in Hamburg during the pandemic.
Birds of War. Hard to deny the power of this documentary, in which war correspondents Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak report on their own unlikely relationship, which began when he (a native Syrian) was sending war footage to her (a Lebanese in London) for broadcast on the BBC. A romance sitting next to the world's terrible appetite for destruction is compelling; there are some mysteries here (what did he do after he escaped Syria?) that beg to be filled out.
Lady. A British mockumentary about a documentary crew shooting a profile of a daft heiress swanning about her many-roomed mansion. Given the skills of leading lady Sian Clifford, this should have been a wicked send-up of clueless aristocracy and the emptiness of a wannabe influencer, but the film makes the mistake of pulling in its talons and trying to make the characters three-dimensional.
Eight Bridges. I haven't seen this yet, but a new title by James Benning, a giant of experimental film, is worth highlighting. This one consists of eight fixed, separate shots of eight bridges, and the possibilities for either a trance state or heightened awareness seem likely.
Queen Kelly. I also haven't seen the newly reconstructed version of this ill-fated project, but it's high on my list of must-sees. It was undertaken in 1929 and never properly completed, thanks to the uneasy trio of strong-minded collaborators: director Erich von Stroheim, star Gloria Swanson, and producer Joseph Kennedy—the patriarch of the Kennedy family and also Swanson's lover. Weird tangle, but the film archivist Dennis Doros has patched together remaining materials for what promises to be a fascinating experience.
The Life We Leave. There is surely an intriguing movie to be made about the subject of human composting (a dignified process of returning human remains to the soil), and this study of a Seattle-based company is not that. What it is, instead, is a portrait of the founder of such a company, and the floundering he does in the process of devising a business plan that works for the rather delicate series of issues at stake.
Amrum. Life on a German island in 1945, seen through the eyes of a boy whose parents are true believers in the Nazi cause; the mother's at home, the father is away at work for the Fuhrer. The film is a little less pointed than you might expect from director Fatih Akin (Head-on), but the material is so haunting it needn't be ground-breaking. The screenplay was co-written by Hark Bohm, who based it on his own childhood memories. Along with being a filmmaker in his own right, Bohm was a member of the R.W. Fassbinder company of actors; he died in 2025.
May 8, 2026
