Local Sightings Festival opens Friday
Local Sightings is the annual festival of local film now in its 12th year at NWFF.
This NW film showcase features prizes, parties, and all sorts of cool special events, plus, of course, films from Northwest filmmakers. This year’s festival includes a great variety of short and feature length fiction and documentary films and a special presentation of a historical Seattle film.
The complete schedule is online at NWFF’s Local Sightings site but here are a few of your available choices: Opening night film The Mountain, The River, and the Road by Seattle’s Michael Harring tells the story of Jeff whose journey to Austin begins with his parents kicking him out of the house. His friend Tom, who has his own issues, goes along. The trip doesn’t work out quite the way they planned it and next thing you know Jeff’s in Kernville, California, idly hanging out at a motel where he meets a woman with a chainsaw.
On Saturday, Seattle’s Jennifer Maas presents a work in progress – Wheedles Grove. Contrary to what far too many seem to believe, Seattle’s music scene didn’t start in the 1980s–it’s much older than that, dating back to long before even our oldest living citizen was even born. Along the way there have been some interesting developments of ‘scene’, like back in the late 1960s when Seattle’s thriving soul scene was just inches away from bursting on the national scene with groups like Black on White Affair, The Soul Swingers and Cold, Bold & Together. Timing is everything, though, and it wasn’t great for these bands which fell back into obscurity until the early 2000s when local collector DJ Mr. Supreme approached the label Light in the Attic about releasing a compilation album.
American Collectors plays on Monday, a documentary that examines the relationships between people and the objects they collect. I have friends who are collectors–you may know some, or you may be one–and even so I’ve never entirely figured out what makes a person want to own a whole bunch of, say, KISS memorabilia or salt shakers or stuffed tarantulas or whatever it is that people collect (matchbooks, old stereo equipment, etc.) American Collectors can’t hope to provide the full answer, probably because there really isn’t a simple cut-and-dried explanation. It does, however, quite effectively tell a fascinating tale of some of the people who like to collect, what they like to collect, and even a bit of why they like to collect. It’s not just about having the things, it turns out.
Sabrina Lee from Montana considers rural American hip hop in Where You From? a movie about the hip hop scene miles and miles from its urban roots. What’s hip hop sound like when it comes from Bozeman or Livington, Montana, or Fortuna, California, instead of big cities like NYC, Chicago, LA, or even Seattle? Lee answers that question by presenting three young men for whom music is a salvation and a driving force in small towns that offer just as many mean streets as the big city.
Other events include the lively opening night party on Friday, a free program of animated works by the students of Lukas Allenbaugh’s Clay Animation Network classes on Saturday, a conversation on Sunday with Seattle historian Paul Dorpat about Seattle in 1969, a Sunday evening program (also free) of locally produced music videos, a variety of shorts programs and much more.
Check the schedule for full details.