When orphaned Māori woman Mary (Ariāna Osborne) travels to Victorian England in the 1800s to uncover the identities of the parents she never knew, she instead unearths heinous secrets with far-reaching implications for her family tree. Mārama, the New Zealand gothic horror film from director Taratoa Stappard, folds cultural appropriation and colonial violence into a...
The Ascent, directed by Francis Cronin, Edward Drake, and Scott Veltri, is a climbing documentary–true crime hybrid following bilateral amputee Mandy Horvath’s attempt to quite literally crawl up Mt. Kilimanjaro using only her hands and a whole lot of gumption. It’s a captivating stranger-than-fiction account that resists easy categorization, the film ably exploring Mandy’s difficult...
The Friend’s House is Here, written, directed, and produced by Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei, is a slice-of-life Iranian drama following two close friends navigating Tehran’s underground art world, where they risk staging performances featuring women without hijabs or dancing ever-so-slightly provocatively on social media, in defiance of state censorship. The film is an intimate,...
SIFF 2026 rolls into Seattle next month with its usual sprawling, borderline-unruly lineup — hundreds of films from dozens of countries crammed into twenty-five days of screenings. It remains, by attendance, the largest film festival in the United States, and one of the last festivals in the country that still programs with the kind of...