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The 2026 SIFF Preview

Published by Dennis Hartley on May 2, 2026

The 52nd annual Seattle International Film Festival opens May 7th and runs through May 17th. This year’s SIFF features a total of 203 shorts, documentaries, and narrative films in 71 languages.

SIFF has certainly grown exponentially since its first incarnation in 1976 (in case the math is making you crazy, festival organizers “skipped” the 13th event; you know how superstitious show people get about Scottish kings and such). Compare the numbers: In 1976, the Festival boasted a whopping 19 films from 9 countries, with one lone venue. Then again, there were only 13 people on the staff in 1976.

Regardless of how large or small the staff, the one constant over the decades has been the quality of the curation. Long before “sharing files” (or even making mix tapes) was a thing, SIFF’s annual lineup reflected that sense of joy in turning friends on to something new and exciting; instilling the sense there was a tangible film lover’s community (others who enjoyed being alone together, out there in the dark).

The first SIFF event I ever attended was a screening of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, in 1993. Linklater was there for a Q&A session afterwards. That was the first time I’d ever had a chance to ask the director of a film a question right after the credits rolled (I wasn’t writing about film yet-just a movie geek). I can’t remember what I asked (some dopey query about the 70s soundtrack), but I thought that was so fucking cool (I’d recently moved to Seattle after living in a cultural vacuum for a decade-what can I say?). Another memorable event I attended that year was a tribute to John Schlesinger (with the director on hand).

This will be the 34th SIFF I’ve attended (in one guise or the other). As (an alleged) film critic, I have been covering SIFF for Hullabaloo now for 20 years (since 2007), but as always, the looming question is – where to begin? The trick to navigating festivals is developing a 6th sense for films in your wheelhouse (I embrace my OCD and channel it like a cinematic dowser).

Let’s dive in!

This year’s Opening Night Gala selection is I Love Boosters (USA). Writer-director Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) incorporates themes of social justice into a modern-day Robin Hood story that concerns “a crew of professional shoplifters [who] take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven”.

Speaking of heists…let’s go do some crimes: Murder in the Building (France) is a comedy mystery about “a crime writer and his film professor partner [who] become caught up in a real-life mystery of their own when they witness a crime in the apartment across the courtyard of their Paris apartment building.” Also from France…Case 137, a police procedural drama that follows a female internal affairs officer as she investigates the unprovoked fatal police shooting of a young protester at a Paris demonstration (sounds depressingly familiar).

I’m particularly intrigued to see Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Superhero (USA). The documentary recounts the story of Benjamin Fodor, a self-proclaimed crime-fighter who garnered local media attention when he donned a bullet-proof superhero-style costume and roamed the streets of Seattle in the 2010s “to deescalate dangerous situations and keep the peace until the police could arrive.” The SPD were not fans, labeling him a vigilante.

Another documentary that examines a “hero or criminal?” conundrum is Beat the Lotto (Ireland). Director Ross Whitaker goes back to the early 1990s to tell the story of “mathematician and avid stamp-collector” Stefan Klincewicz, who calculated a meticulously engineered method to beat the odds and (aspirationally) win Ireland’s National Lottery, involving a “syndicate” of participants who spent countless hours marking lotto cards.

Politics, politics…The documentary The Seoul Guardians (South Korea) delves into more recent history, recalling the astonishing events that unfolded after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December 2024 (spoiler alert: Democracy won!). In J.M. Harper’s documentary Soul Patrol (USA), members of the Vietnam War’s first all-Black special operations team reunite to illuminate “a chapter of American military history that has long gone unacknowledged.”

In the documentary Birds of War (UK), “Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and Syrian activist and cameraman Abd Alkader Habak share their extraordinary love story, told through 13 years of personal archives spanning revolutions, war, and exile”. Life under fascism: Juan Pablo Sallato’s The Red Hangar (Chile) is a political thriller set In the aftermath of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, and Amrum (Germany) is a coming-of-age drama set in a politically-divided German farming town on a North Sea island in the waning days of World War II.

SIFF’s special revival presentations are always a treat. This year, it’s Prisoners of the Earth (Argentina, 1939) Mario Soffici’s “gut-punching work of social realism”, in which “a group of desperate men are conscripted to labor on a treacherous plantation—a situation that boils over in an explosive act of rebellion”. Sadly, the exploitation of low-wage workers remains an evergreen theme.

More drama: Burn (Japan) centers on a runaway teen who flees her abusive parents and “lands in Tokyo’s Kabukicho district, where a loose-knit group of street kids offers her a fragile sense of belonging—one built on survival, impulse, and unspoken wounds”. In Three of a Kind (Denmark), “a mother and daughter’s cozy Christmas is upended when their estranged grandmother shows up at their cabin”. And no SIFF would be complete without at least one “oil and water” road movie…Crystal Cross is the story of “a quirky Christian singer and a suicidal loner [who] road trip across America, forging an unlikely bond”.

I’m always partial to films about the music biz: Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s documentary Broken English (UK) profiles icon Marianne Faithfull. The Best Summer (USA) is “a found footage documentary from a concert tour in 1995 featuring live performances, candid interviews, and a behind-the-scenes view of what it’s like to be on tour with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps, and Bikini Kill”. Cool! Edie Arnold is a Loser (USA) is billed as “an infectiously charming coming-of-age flick about a self-proclaimed loser starting a punk band at her Catholic high school”. And Power Ballad (Ireland) stars Paul Rudd as “a past-his-prime wedding singer” who befriends “a fading boy-band star” (Nick Jonas) who “turns one of [Rudd’s] songs into a hit, reigniting his career”.

I haven’t forgotten about the midnight crowd: Mārama (New Zealand), Taratoa Stappard’s feature debut, is “an anti-colonial horror story confronting oppression while honoring the strength and resilience of Māori women”. Tacoma-based filmmaker Zach Weintraub’s Assets and Liabilities (USA) concerns “a burnt-out suburban dad who is taken on a wild supernatural odyssey when he meets a skater kid at the park who reminds him of his younger, more idealistic self”. Lady (UK) is billed as an “absurdly hilarious mockumentary”, in which “a young filmmaker agrees to film the behind-the-scenes vanity project of the obnoxiously entitled Lady Isabella, only for something unseen and quite strange to happen”. And Another World (Hong Kong) is “a harrowing, arrestingly rendered epic of revenge and redemption that announces director Tommy Kai Chung Ng as a massive new voice in the world of animation”.

Midnight movie adjacent: The documentary Boorman and the Devil (USA) is David Kittredge’s examination (autopsy?) of what went horribly wrong with the production of Exorcist II: The Heretic, and how it nearly sunk director John Boorman’s otherwise stellar career (Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, et.al.) I mean, what possessed him to…oh never mind.

This year’s Closing Night Gala selection is The Invite (USA). Starring Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, Olivia Wilde’s film is about a couple with a rocky marriage who “invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbors for a dinner party”, during the course of which (wait for it)” the night spirals into unexpected places.”. Wilde is scheduled to attend.

Obviously, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this year’s lineup. I’ll be plowing through the catalog and sharing reviews with you beginning next Saturday. In the meantime, visit the SIFF site for full details on the films, event screenings, special guests, and more.

(You can explore 20 years of my SIFF reviews here)

— Dennis Hartley


The Reform Agenda

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

I happened to watch that show the other night and that particular idea seems like a good one.

The fact is that the system has been in need of some fundamental reforms for quite some time. But Trump’s obvious corruption and stupidity has just brought it into stark relief. There never was a golden age but to the extent this country ever even functioned, that time is past. Total reform is the only way.

I have no idea if there’s a chance of it without some kind of catastrophe to spur it on. Scandal certainly isn’t going to do it. We’re awash in it and people are so confused and overwhelmed that they just accept it as a natural part of our political culture. But the way things are going, there’s a good chance that catastrophe is on the horizon (or maybe the country will have a mass epiphany, who knows?) so it’s possible that we’ll see the opening. Let’s hope we walk through it.

Here’s the whole segment:

The Family Business

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

Isaac Paul of Tangle has done us all a favor by creating a highly detailed compendium of the Trump family’s corruption during this second term. If you read it all in one place its truly, overwhelmingly shocking. It’s a great contribution to our understanding of what’s going on and well worth reading and bookmarking. I’m sure he’ll have to add to it on a nearly daily basis.

He runs down the unbelievable crypto schemes and looks closely at how the family is selling out foreign policy in return for billions. But they aren’t leave even a penny on the sidewalk. Here’s just a small excerpt of some of the other grifts they’ve got going:

A lot of what I’ve written so far has involved the Trump administration simultaneously dictating foreign policy while also taking funds, in some form, from foreign governments, leaders, or wealthy foreign actors. Yet plenty of this is happening domestically, too.

For instance: The Trump Organization launched Trump Mobile, a branded phone that costs $499 and an additional $47.45/month for the “47” plan. The Trump organization does not manufacture the phone or provide cell service (the phone itself has yet to be released, and the network will be operated by Liberty Mobile Wireless). Instead, Trump licenses his name to the deal and then promotes it using the presidential brand while he is in office — all at a cool profit. 

Wherever you look, there’s another potential profit. Last spring, the Trump family opened an exclusive club in Washington called “Executive Branch” that charges $500,000 per membership. The parent company of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, even launched as a publicly traded organization with his initials, DJT, as its ticker; Trump himself holds a huge stake in the company and the stock’s value has fluctuated based solely on Trump’s political fortunes. Shoot, the president’s son, Eric Trump, went on Fox News and graciously received congratulations about his own company receiving a $24 million Pentagon contract.

Just yesterday, while I was finishing up this story, The Financial Times reported that the Trump sons had taken a stake in the Kazakh mining company that just won a $1.6 billion contract from the Trump administration. Then, hours later, a Bloomberg story landed in my inbox about the U.S. Air Force agreeing to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from a company backed by President Trump’s sons. During a talk I did with college students at St. Olaf College in Minnesota this morning, one of the students asked me about the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. investing in and advising the gambling and prediction market companies Kalshi and Polymarket. I didn’t even know about it. I’d just spent the past week writing and researching claims of corruption against the Trump family, and I’m still discovering glaring new examples every day.

There’s a lot more. As Trump himself would say, “nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

The Big Lie

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

You know they’re going to run with this one:

It’s right up there with the 2020 election lie for sheer audacity. But you can bet that at least 30% of the people will believe it.

Trumpeyland

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

He’s turning Washington into an amusement park

President Trump’s vision for his National Garden of American Heroes is growing larger and most likely more expensive than his initial estimates, with the latest plans calling for reflecting pools, dining facilities and an amphitheater alongside 250 life-size statues of notable Americans.

The plans have expanded to the point that they could require significant redevelopment of West Potomac Park, an area of mostly sports fields near the National Mall, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The statues alone could cost more than the $40 million approved for the project by Congress, according to the Trump administration’s estimate.

Based on the latest renderings, the Garden of Heroes could rank among the more expensive and time-consuming projects Mr. Trump has undertaken as he works to remake the nation’s capital in his own style.

Construction has yet to begin, raising questions about whether Mr. Trump will run out of time — and money — to deliver on his ambitions before the end of his second term. If Mr. Trump were to solicit donor funds, as he has done with his ballroom project, it could renew ethical concerns about attempts to court favor with the White House.

The latest drawings depict a “Heroes Walk,” connecting themed areas dedicated to categories of American figures, including politicians, soldiers, scientists, activists, artists and athletes. The set of honorees is eclectic: George Washington, Ronald Reagan and Amelia Earhart are on a list circulated by the administration, along with Elvis Presley, Kobe Bryant, Alfred Hitchcock, Dr. Seuss and others.

Accompanying the statues would be formal gardens, reflecting pools and plazas arranged in a style reminiscent of classical European planning traditions, according to renderings reviewed by The Times. The Trump administration has yet to settle on a final plan or submit it to any oversight board.

One of the most prominent features in the plans would be a large amphitheater carved into the landscape at the water’s edge, suggesting the space is intended to function both as a performance venue and as a ceremonial gathering place.

The plans also include cafes and open recreational spaces.

Trump personally chose the statues:

Paul M. Farber, the director of Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art, history and design studio based in Philadelphia, noted that the description of the historical figures being honored portrays a sanitized version of American history.

Mr. Trump’s executive order detailed most of the figures to be featured with statues, and a White House task force overseeing festivities for the country’s 250th anniversary also published a list, with biographies of those selected.

The description of Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, praises the civil rights leader for having a “can-do” spirit, but makes no direct mention of the racism that he fought.

“To not name the injustice that made people ‘significant Americans’ is a sanitizing of the history,” Mr. Farber said. “Whether it’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Frederick Douglass, when you look at the fine print, you understand the Faustian bargain here, which is representation at the cost of real history.”

Under the “journalists” category, there are two honorees: Edward R. Murrow of CBS, and Alex Trebek, who hosted the game show “Jeopardy!”

I really hope he ,makes the statues animatronic. That would be so much more fun. And I sure hope he includes a massive oversized statue of himself like he has as his golf club. It’s only right.

If only Trump had a horse he could put into the Senate. I guess Lindsey Graham will just have to suffice,

Just Say No, Part 77

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

This is low, even for them:

Test strips used to determine if illicit drugs contain deadly contaminants including fentanyl will no longer be covered by federal funding, reversing a position the Trump administration held as recently as July and leaving public health organizations worried that the U.S. will lose the progress it has made combatting fatal overdoses. 

In a letter reviewed by CBS News, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that agency funding cannot be used to purchase test strips used to check drugs for dangerous adulterants like fentanyl, xylazine and medetomidine.

Test strips cost about $1 each and can be used to check drugs — from powders to pills to party drugs — for contamination. They are a “critical, life-saving tool” that can prevent fatal overdoses, said Maritza Perez Medina, director of federal policy at the Drug Policy Alliance. Medina said the sudden change in policy has left advocates scrambling. 

“People are just astonished,” Medina said. “There has been a lot of confusion about where this came from.”

The “Dear Colleague” letter references an executive order signed by President Trump in July 2025 that declares SAMHSA funding cannot be used for programs that “only facilitate illegal drug use.” A Health and Human Services spokesperson said that the letter clarifies guidance for SAMHSA grantees and furthers the agency’s clear shift away from harm reduction and “practices that facilitate illicit drug use and are incompatible with federal laws.” 

These strips have saved many lives. But the Trump administration, which just loosened laws on certain psychedelic drugs, says they are “drug paraphernalia which 45 states and Washington, D.C define otherwise. Virtually no one but right wing extremists think it’s better for people to die from fentanyl laced drugs than to provide these tests.

It’s also about the indiscriminate budget cuts the Trump administration continues to make even as they explode federal spending to finance their police state and war machine. It’s just perverse.

Genius

Published by digby on May 2, 2026

Just a few highlights of the president’s into madness. For the record.

Just A Mopping-up Operation

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 2, 2026

The “dead letter” VRA and the elimination of dignity

Vann R. Newkirk II writes a “Requiem” for the Voting Rights Act in The Atlantic (gift link):

The best things shine bright, but never long. So it was for the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that protected Black suffrage by neutralizing voter suppression in southern states, and became the foundation for equal ballot access for all Americans. Of the 250 years since the country’s founding, less than a quarter unfolded under the aegis of universal suffrage. Color television, credit cards, and Barbie dolls arrived earlier than the VRA and will survive longer. The reign of Queen Elizabeth II lasted a decade longer than the guarantor of democracy in America.

The ruling SCOTUS handed down its Callais decision this week “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.

“Like previous VRA-related decisions, Callais was “narrow,” in that it did not strike down the law itself, Newkirk writes. “But although the edifice built at great expense—by Fannie Lou Hamer, by John Lewis, by the bloodied limbs of Mississippi sharecroppers and Alabama marchers—has not been entirely bulldozed, only the facade remains.”

The rest of the essay you can read at the link. Newkirk reflects on the law’s impacts over the last 60 years, Republican efforts to subvert or neuter it, and how through legal “engineering, Roberts, Alito, and their allies have created a trap for voting-rights cases” that renders them dead on arrival.

The final two paragraphs carry meaning Newkirk may not have considered:

But representation in Congress was never the ultimate goal of the VRA, nor will that be the primary problem the country faces after its fall. The point of the Voting Rights Act, as stated by Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who signed it into law, was to force the opponents of liberty to “open the gates to opportunity” to all Americans. Voting rights were, to him, a matter of the “dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” and the law itself was meant to be a proactive guarantor of that destiny. Without it, no American should consider their dignity to be secure.

This is something that Black voting-rights advocates, from Frederick Douglass to Kwame Ture, long understood; that no person’s rights could really be inalienable if any person’s rights were trampled. The Voting Rights Act was the true instantiation of the Declaration of Independence. For centuries, Black people fought for the ballot, not just to have a say in their government, but to demonstrate their own value, both to themselves and to others. And, for a while, they succeeded.

No offense meant to Newkirk, but what Americans and the world witnessed after Donald Trump and his merry band of brigands reoccupied the White House in January 2025 was the actual closing of the gates Johnson forced open. Not just Black people, but all nonwhite people, all undocumented residents, and all non-MAGA Americans began seeing their dignity stripped as soon as Trump 2.0 launched its ICE assault on city after city beginning in January 2025.

An America exclusively of, by, and for white, Christians was Stephen Miller’s obsession, Russell Vought’s Project 2025 blueprint, and a post-Constitutional Republican Party’s means to rule indefinitely over what they once smugly declared a republic, not a democracy. Trump simply wants subjects, and his name and his mug plastered everywhere. Trump 2.0 gave ICE agents carte blanche permission to ignore the Constitution and to brutalize and jail citizen and noncitizen alike. They signaled to Trump’s enemies/subjects via shock-and-awe that “no American should consider their dignity to be secure.”

The conservative Court majority rendering the Voting Rights Act a dead letter this week is just a mopping-up operation.

He Brought Prices Way Down!

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 2, 2026

And “terminated” the war he launched

https://gasprices.aaa.com/

An unnamed pollster told Joe Gallina that Donald Trump’s speech to The Villages in Florida on Friday marks the end for Trump. Trump mocked affordability as “one good line of bullshit.”

See for yourselves:

“It’s over,” the pollster texted.

No, it won’t be that speech.* But it could be pain at the pump. Trump and his sycophants seem to think they can Jedi mind-trick Americans into believing that these aren’t the gas prices they’re paying at the pump.

Average gas prices here have risen 20 cents over the last week. Nationally, the spike is much higher.

Over half of Republicans blame Trump for higher gas prices. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Trump’s Iran war is not worth the costs he expects them to bear on his say so.

CNN’s Harry Enten is back with polling:

War is ‘terminated’, saith Trump

Trump’s 60 days are up, explains The Washington Post:

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires presidents to remove U.S. forces from any conflict that Congress has not authorized within 60 days of the White House notifying Congress of hostilities — a deadline that Trump hit on Friday.

Trump wrote in his letter to lawmakers Friday that the conflict has been effectively over since the United States and Iran agreed last month to a ceasefire.

“There has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026,” Trump wrote in the letter, obtained by The Washington Post. “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) of New York for once said what you are thinking.

“President Trump declaring the war with Iran ‘terminated’ doesn’t reflect the reality that tens of thousands of U.S. service members in the region are still in harm’s way, that the Administration continually threatens to escalate hostilities or that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and prices are skyrocketing at home,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “President Trump entered this war without a strategy and without legal authorization and today’s announcement doesn’t change either fact.”

Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues. How many Americans will buy his “terminated” claim and claims that the prices of gas and groceries have come down?

Americans can be pretty stupid sometimes — they elected Trump twice — but they’re not that stupid. H. L. Mencken famously wrote in 1926, “No one in this world … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” What’s usually lost is Mencken’s next line: “Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

An awful lot of Republicans in Congress are about to see that proposition tested.

* And I hate when Democrats use the word “affordability.” It’s an abstraction, cold and bloodless.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on May 1, 2026

The research behind this is wild. A baby owl can sit and starve to death right next to a pile of food. Put a stuffed owl next to it, like in the video, and suddenly it’ll eat.

An Austrian zoologist, Konrad Lorenz, won the 1973 Nobel Prize for figuring out why. He showed that young birds aren’t born knowing who their mom is. In the first few days of life, their brain takes a kind of mental photograph. Whatever they see moving around gets locked in as “parent.” After that, only that figure can switch on their feeding instinct. He called it imprinting.

Owls have it worse than most birds. They’re born blind, naked, and totally helpless. A baby barn owl needs feeding every two to three hours for weeks. It can’t even keep itself warm until its feathers come in. And right around the time its eyes finally open, between days 15 and 20, its brain locks onto whoever’s been taking care of it. Miss that window with the wrong face nearby, and the owl is wired wrong for life.

Even the begging is automatic. In the 1950s, a Dutch scientist named Niko Tinbergen ran experiments with baby seagulls. He found the chicks were pecking at a specific shape. A long thin thing with a colored spot was enough to trigger the full begging routine, even when it was just a painted wooden stick. Take the stick away and the whole sequence shuts down. The chick can be staring straight at food, but if there’s no parent-shaped trigger, its body doesn’t know how to swallow.

There’s a tiny patch in the bird brain that runs this whole show. It’s the same part that learns and stores faces. Researchers at Cambridge and labs in Japan have mapped it down to the chemistry. They’ve even found a hormone that, if you inject it in the right spot, can re-open the imprinting window after it closes.

That dummy owl in the video carries 40 years of conservation work behind it. In 1982 there were only 22 California condors left in the entire world. The San Diego Zoo started feeding hatchlings with hand puppets shaped like adult condors, hiding the human handler behind a curtain. The condor population is now 607. The Bronx Zoo did the same thing last spring with a baby king vulture.

The Barn Owl Trust in the UK feeds orphaned owls through owl puppets while wearing camouflage hoods, because an owl raised by humans can never be released back into the wild. It’ll fly toward people, beg from them, and starve. The dummy is the only signal the chick’s brain still accepts as “mom.” Evolution carved a very specific lock into its brain, and only the right shape fits.

Who knew?

Speaking of baby birds, California’s beloved bald eagle pair, Jackie and Shadow have some new eaglets that we’re all avidly watching grow up. Some third graders named them Sandy and Luna.

Here’s the live cam if you are looking for a way to decompress. It’s lovely.