Most of the films that played SIFF 2008 didn’t have distribution yet, but a some of them did. If you missed them during the festival, or just want to see them again, you’ll get a shot at a few this weekend. Plus, still more films!

• One of my favorite films of this year’s festival was Mongol, a gorgeously filmed historical drama based on the early life of the man who became Genghis Khan, leader of the world’s biggest empire. Epic battles and political infighting blend almost seamlessly with smaller, more intimate moments between the man who will be emperor and the love of his life, all set against a dazzling backgroup of richly detailed ancient cities and the harsh beauty of the steppes. At the Egyptian.
• Also at the Egyptian: this weekend’s Midnight Movie selection is The Crow.
• Savage Grace, at the Harvard Exit, is another SIFF selection. This one stars the incomparable Julianne Moore in the ooky based on real life story of the spectacularly dysfunctional Baekeland family.
• Metro Cinemas has The Children of Huang Shi another film based on actual historical events. (And another SIFF selection.) In this case an English journalist and an American nurse join with a Chinese partisan group leader to rescue 60 orphaned children imperiled in war-torn 1930s China.
• SIFF selection Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a documentary that takes a sharp look at the effect of performance enhancing drugs on our already intensely competitive culture on both a general and a very personal level. At the Varsity.
• Also at the Varsity: The Animation Show, a collection of independent animation from all over the world, collected by expert curator Mike Judge. Not appropriate for children.
• The Grand Illusion continues their “Best of the Rest” series celebrating five years of late night films with a late night showing of Joysticks, an 80s teen sex comedy centered on an overbearing father’s war against the kids at his local video arcade.
• If you’ve only ever seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo on a TV screen, rush down to the Grand Illusion for a 50th anniversary screening of this classic noir. Arguably Hitchcock’s greatest film, definitely one of his best, Vertigo is a complex thriller that’s worth viewing anywhere you see it, but there’s something particularly satisfying about watching it in a darkened theater with an audience perched on the edges of their seats in suspense. James Stewart and Kim Novak put up masterful performances and the excellent cinematography of Vertigo is what made me fall in love with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge years before I first got the chance to see it in person.
• Northwest Film Forum hosts a benefit for Mercy Corps’ relief efforts in China for the victims of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, with a showing of Made in China, a 2007 SIFF selection and director John Heide’s documentary inspired by his father’s boyhood as a young American in pre-World War II China that focuses on a community of other Americans with similar childhoods. Friday, June 20.
• Also at NWFF: Passing Poston, a moving documentary that examines the lives of four Japanese American former internees at the Poston Relocation Center begins Friday, June 20. The directors will be in attendance on Friday night; Friday and Saturday feature appearance by Ruth Okimoto, one of the film’s subjects, and Saturday after 4 pm there’s a panel discussion with local Japanese Americans to talk about this sad and shameful chapter in American history.
• Rabbit in the Moon, which begins Saturday, June 21, at NWFF is a documentary by sisters Emiko Omori and Chizuko Omari on their own family’s experience at an internment camp, the mysterious silence surrounding the death of their mother there, and the lingering anxieties and social issues that continue to haunt their community even now.