This paper marks the return of The Stranger’s SIFF Notes: a fully (perhaps manically?) exhaustive rundown of what’s taking place on the 2025 Seattle Worldwide Movie Pageant. We watched greater than 100 movies within the final month (which, if we’d watched all of them back-to-back, provides as much as a couple of week’s price of movie. YOU’RE WELCOME). And we dug a number of them! Even discovered a handful that you just completely shouldn’t miss.
In that week’s price of movie, we discovered that prime camp continues to be alive and properly, that hitting somebody within the face with a dildo continues to be humorous, that anti-capitalism nonetheless rocks, and that the people who find themselves sort to animals deserve the world.
The large, inventive endeavor of a movie competition feels particularly spectacular in 2025—when every little thing that makes it attainable is underneath assault. Stranger Workers Writers Vivian McCall and Nathalie Graham each dug into the ways in which the Trump administration is making it more and more troublesome to make and protect good artwork. Vivian visited the Shifting Picture Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS), the place they’re racing towards time to protect VHS and anything catalogued on magnetic tape, and Nathalie dug into the brand new fascist guidelines on the Nationwide Endowment of the Humanities (everybody loves artwork concerning the Founding Fathers, proper?).
And whereas we have been watching hours and hours of individuals’s precise artwork, the world was nonetheless turning—sadly. The week we completed making this challenge, Trump crossed over the 100-day mark of his second time period as president. In that point, he crossed a number of different strains too: He deported authorized US residents; he ignored orders from the Supreme Court docket; he had a decide arrested for (allegedly) obstructing ICE whereas attempting to arrest somebody in her courtroom; he tried to single-handedly limit voting entry; he defunded authorities businesses so severely that personal corporations (oligarchs) often is the solely manner we will entry important companies; he launched authorities experiences with the categorical objective of seeding disinformation ( you, HHS).
That’s an incomplete checklist, and it’ll certainly be much more incomplete by the point you’re studying this. Nevertheless it’s sufficient to say the subsequent, important sentence: We’ve got a dictator.
Stranger Senior Author Charles Mudede lays it out for us: “Tyrants come in several flavors,” he writes. “Within the case of the US, Trump is just a focus of what was already properly established on this society: the relentless repression of voting rights, institutional racism, systemic misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, science denial, and bogus financial reasoning.” Trump is manufactured from the stuff that made this nation, and it’s on us to reject him.
The final day we have been engaged on this challenge was Might Day. Simply exterior our workplace, a march stretched block after block by way of Capitol Hill—a coalition of progressives who, relatively than being exhausted by the Arms Off! protests, confirmed up once more. And I imagine we’ll maintain displaying up.
We’ll be again for the Queer Challenge in June, and I’m positive we’ll have a brand new, non-exhaustive checklist of nightmares, however we’ll even have spent an entire month displaying up: displaying up for good fucking artwork, displaying up for SIFF screenings, displaying up for protests. So till June, see you there.
Hannah Murphy Winter
Editor-in-Chief
Cowl Artwork by Jean Michel Tixier
