SIFF: An Award Winning Festival

For the third consecutive year, I attended the opening night of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). They hold the event at their very cool theatre at the Seattle Center. This year’s premiere film was “Battle in Seattle”, which was Stuart Townsend’s writing and directorial debut. It was based on the riots during the WTO summit in 1999. Townsend craftily used fictional characters and real events from the riots to weave a suspenseful story. He made a short speech and introduced the main cast, including Charlize Theron, before the show.

I was impressed with the number of films SIFF presented. This year there were 191 feature films, 57 documentary features and 170 short films from 69 countries. I was fortunate to see a few of them and added many titles to my DVD list.