Settling SIFF

Seattle International Film Festival split with Bellevue’s megabuck Lincoln Square Cinemas – but now SIFF’s in Kirkland, and the Eastside film fest is getting bigger.

Last year, the Seattle International Film Festival staged a seven-day invasion of Kirkland, with twenty-four screenings, including the first-ever outdoor show at Juanita Beach Park, the crowd-pleasing, Maxwell Smart-like French farce OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. This year, SIFF ups the ante with thirty-one screenings over eleven days.

But Kirkland was not SIFF’s first locale on the Eastside. In 2006, it spent eleven days at Bellevue’s Lincoln Square Cinemas, with forty screenings, and in 2007 it spent sixteen days there with sixty-eight screenings. Why did this marriage end? And what’s the significance of the switch from Bellevue to Kirkland?

Photograph by Andrew Waits for City Arts.

“It boiled down to a business decision,” says Lincoln Square director of sales and marketing Sean O’Leary. “It was donated space, and it was always taking place during peak movie times. It was frustrating. We stopped our arrangement with SIFF because of demand for our screens and our obligations to the movie studios. We’re always dealing with and pandering to them at the same time.”

No festival in North America is bigger than SIFF, but it exists in the art film and foreign film world. Lincoln Square plays in a bigger league. “Last summer during the heat wave, we were the number one box office in the country,” says O’Leary. “We were in the top ten in the country with Avatar, the highest-grossing film in history.” Lincoln Square is a national leader in presenting 3-D films, the exploding profit center of Hollywood. “Seven of our sixteen screens are 3-D capable, more than any other theatre in the country.”

So if O’Leary booked SIFF’s seven-million-dollar premiere, The Extra Man, instead of the quarter-billion-dollar Iron Man 2, he would have some explaining to do.

SIFF is a better match for Kirkland, where the arts scene doesn’t feature megabuck competition. “Galleries are closing everywhere you look, whether you’re in Seattle or the Eastside, and SIFF will undoubtedly be a welcome shot in the arm for Kirkland,” says Sandra Bigley of Kirkland Performance Center. “Cultural programs have universally taken a big hit, falling under the category of disposable income for people who may not have much.”

But she points out that hard times have had some inspiring effects, including SIFF’s Eastside renaissance. “Some pretty creative ideas come out of this situation. Where there are vacant storefronts, artist installations and creative pop-up businesses open up, like Rebecca DeVere’s temporary Art Shop.”

SIFF fits perfectly into Kirkland’s innovative cultural strategy. Like SIFF, Kirkland Performance Center cultivates ethnic and other subculture audiences with popular shows, including Rudresh Mahanthappa, Delhi 2 Dublin, mandolin master U. Shrinivas. When new-music giant Philip Glass came to the area to perform this year, he bypassed Seattle and went to KPC. Art film doesn’t get much more esoteric than Glass films like Powaqqatsi, but fans flocked to see it in Kirkland in March. “Our turnout was great [considering] we flew under the radar, barely publicized: 246 attendees. I think this offers further evidence of a sizeable, educated film-interested population on the Eastside.” So, of course, does SIFF’s expanding Kirkland festival.

Bigley is sick of “stereotypes about an Eastside tendency toward mainstream offerings. Plenty of people perceive the Eastside as a cultural wasteland.” She and O’Leary note that the multinational workforce attracted by firms like Microsoft, Nintendo and Bungie have shattered that mainstream stereotype. “Slumdog Millionaire played for months and months and months,” says O’Leary. “The [Eastside] cinema experience is not just for the blockbuster.”

SIFF is shifting its strategy from the monthlong May-to-June festival to a year-round programming slate based at Seattle Center. If it also added an Eastside SIFF fest of some kind at some other time of the year than the start of the blockbuster season, O’Leary would not rule out SIFF’s return to Lincoln Square’s massive multiplex. “We would always entertain those opportunities,” says O’Leary. “What SIFF does is fantastic.” •