Capitol Hill Community Post | Full lineup announced for the 28th annual Seattle Queer Film Festival

Glitter and Doom

From Three Dollar Bill Cinema

Three Dollar Bill Cinema is proud to announce the full lineup of film screenings and special events for the 28th Seattle Queer Film Festival (SQFF), taking place October 12-22 at venues on Capitol Hill and in Columbia City. The festival will be followed by a week of select films streaming online from October 22-29. The diverse slate of queer cinema hails from across the globe and includes narrative features, documentaries, and short films totaling 53 programs comprised of 119 films.

In-person screenings take place at SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Northwest Film Forum, Broadway Performance Hall, Ark Lodge Cinema, and Queer/Bar, and virtual screenings are available in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. Tickets go on sale September 15, 2023. Passes are on sale now.

The 2023 festival theme is “Queer Joy Is Cinematic.” Festival screenings and events will explore what ‘queer joy’ means to members of the LGBTQ+ community. Continue reading

Ten years after taking over Capitol Hill’s Egyptian Theatre, 49th Seattle International Film Festival kicks off with announcement SIFF is reopening the Cinerama

(Image: SIFF)

As its venues including Capitol Hill’s Egyptian Theatre begin hosting the 2023 Seattle International Film Festival, cinema nonprofit SIFF has announced it is adding the city’s grandest silver screen to its family.

“We’ve acquired the Seattle Cinerama Theater from the estate of Paul G. Allen and will be reopening later this year,” the organization announced before Thursday’s opening night of the 49th edition of the festival. “This acquisition adds to our current venue offerings: SIFF Film Center, SIFF Cinema Uptown, and SIFF Cinema Egyptian. We look forward to stewarding this historic venue for magical moviegoing experiences well into the future—with all of you.” Continue reading

From its new Capitol Hill home, Three Dollar Bill Cinema readies for the 18th year of TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival with screenings beyond the neighborhood

A scene from Anhell69

As it prepares for the 18th year of the TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival, Capitol Hill film nonprofit Three Dollar Bill Cinema has also made a change of address.

The organization has a new Capitol Hill home, moving its offices into the newly formed E Pine complex of Gay City. LGBTQ health and community facility Gay City moved into its new Capitol Hill space last summer on E Pine and took on a new mission as “Seattle’s LGBTQ+ Center.”

Next week, Three Dollar will host the 18th TRANSlations to kick off Seattle’s month of peak film festival activity including the return of the SIFF: Seattle International Film Festival starting May 11th.

TRANSlations gets the festival ball rolling starting Thursday, May 4th with screenings and events both online and in-person. For Capitol Hill film lovers, the 2023 festival will be an excuse for a field trip out of the neighborhood. Continue reading

CHS /film-on-the-hill/ | Will The Nightmare Emporium Film Festival return from the dead on Capitol Hill?

/film-on-the-hill/ is a new monthly or so Capitol Hill film column. Have ideas for future editions? Let us know in the comments.

By Kyler Knight

The Make Believe Seattle: A Genre Film Festival just finished its run on Capitol Hill. While the festival is a testament to the city’s pandemic recovery return to an exciting indie film exhibition scene. There will be room for more like The Nightmare Emporium, a collection of horror anthology short films which ran around Halloween for three years in Seattle’s Central District and Capitol Hill. From 2017 to 2019 the festival gave local filmmakers the chance to watch their short films on the big screen with an audience of like-minded horror fanatics and lovers of indie cinema.

How do these kinds of projects experience a resurrection — and come back from the dead?

While participating filmmakers were more or less given free reign to make their short films however they liked, there was one condition in order to tie all the wildly disparate narratives together: each short film had to utilize a specific prop like a baseball, a knife, or a pair of handcuffs. But these weren’t just random props per se. Narratively speaking, these were artifacts hand-picked from a decades-old collection of strange relics by the Nightmare Emporium’s host, a sinister Shopkeeper played by Mark Waldstein. Between each short film the Shopkeeper would set the stage by dusting off one of his oddities and presenting it to the viewer like the Creepshow Creep or the Crypt Keeper in Tales From The Crypt.

Speaking to Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, the festival’s founder Danny Cork said the idea for The Nightmare Emporium snowballed from what was originally a personal project. Continue reading

New Make Believe Seattle film festival will bring ‘the mysterious and fantastical’ to Capitol Hill screens

Aliens Abducted My Parents

The long-running SIFF Seattle International Film Festival will return in May with screenings across the city including on Capitol HIll. In the meantime, a brand new film festival will debut this week in the neighborhood.

With screenings at SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Northwest Film Forum, West Hall at Century Ballroom, and Queer/Bar, The Make Believe Seattle Film Festival is a very Capitol Hill event.

“Genre film festivals thrive in highlighting the truly indescribable – telling stories that refuse to be contained within typical cinematic categories like comedy or drama, but that exist in the murky boundaries in-between,” Make Believe Seattle film programmer Kasi Gaarenstroom says about the new festival. “These stories push narratives and beliefs and are a catharsis to many that may not see themselves in mainstream media.” Continue reading

Casting call: Seattle seeks first members for new Film Commission to bring more movie and TV projects to city

I’ve never seen Sleepless in Seattle

Last year, the Seattle City Council created a new commission hoped to help attract new film, television, commercial, and streaming projects in the city.

Now the Seattle Film Commission is looking for its first members:

The Seattle Film Commission will be a diverse, 11-member group of film industry professionals representing 11 film-related disciplines. Continue reading

Filmmaker in search of distribution for CHOP documentary series

With reporting by Hannah Saunders

A film that documents the rise of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and the fall of CHOP is in search of a distribution deal.

Filmmaker Jefferson Martin Elliott showed his documentary Our Block as part of the recent Local Sightings Film Festival at the Northwest Film Forum — the 12th Ave theater and education complex that shares the block with the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct headquarters that was a core part of the 2020 Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests that the three-part series documents.

“The way I got involved was I just wanted to be involved with the march. I saw what was happening, I had the time available, I just wanted to be there,” said Elliott, who lived in the University District at the time.

As an independent filmmaker, Elliott says he always carries his camera, and he began documenting the events as they unfolded. After several days of attending the Black Lives Matter marches, protesters would reach out to have their voices heard, which led to interviews.

The 55-minute documentary captures one version of the story of that summer — a story that almost wasn’t told. Continue reading

Seattle Film Commission’s goal: more Love is Blind, 10 Things I Hate about You, and Singles in the city

Gasp! Clooney shot his UW-set Boys in the Boat in the UK… not Seattle

This spring brought cameras to Capitol Hill as a new season of the Love is Blind reality show filmed episodes in the neighborhood.

More drama could be coming.

Seattle is set to create a new commission to help attract new film, television, commercial, and streaming projects in the city.

The Seattle City Council this week signed off on a plan championed by citywide representative Sara Nelson to create a new 11-member Seattle Film Commission charged with helping make the city a more attractive setting for diverse and equity-focused productions: Continue reading

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Local Sightings Film Festival at Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum

Doc Our Block follows the rise of CHAZ, the fall of CHOP, and the impact on Seattle

This year the annual PNW focused Local Sightings Film Festival will not only celebrate work and artists from across the region from September 16-25, but also a quarter century of local film. Presented by Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum, this year’s festival will feature 82 works, including narrative films, documentaries, experimental films, animation, web series, and music videos.

“It’s really a brilliant sort of broad and delicious sampling of all of the different things that folks working [and] living in the region are getting up to,” said Rana San, artistic director of NWFF.

Local Sightings Film Festival 2022
Hybrid — Online and in person at 1515 12th Ave’s NWFF
Sept. 16-25, 2022
Presented by Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, the 25th Annual Local Sightings Film Festival is a virtual-and-in-person showcase of creative communities from throughout the Pacific Northwest. The 2022 program, which runs from September 16–25, features a competitive selection of curated short film programs and feature films, inviting regional artists to experiment, break, and remake popular conceptions around filmmaking and film exhibition. Local Sightings champions emerging and established talent, supports the regional film industry, and promotes diverse media as a critical tool for public engagement.

As 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the festival, it also makes one year since NWFF has been open to the public following pandemic-related closures. To show its commitment to accessibility, NWFF will host the festival in a hybrid format, although a couple of films will only be showcased in person, such as the 55-minute documentary Our Block which follows the rise of CHAZ, the fall of CHOP, and the impact on Seattle.

Submissions generally consist of films that are made within the last 18 months, according to San, who said how each year’s themes may look different based on what filmmakers are focusing on.

“We go into programming with a completely open mind and we let the submissions from each year inform and dictate what is programmed and what themes emerge,” said San. “The filmmakers are the ones who are telling the stories–they’re the ones who’re identifying what is most important in this moment.” Continue reading

Why everybody should be part of the 2022 TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival

A scene from Pronouns in Bio screening at this year’s festival

StormMiguel Florez

The TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival which starts this week centered around in-person screenings at Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum, organizers have set out to create a festival for everyone and an event to help connect the trans community across the neighborhood, the city, and around the world. Taking place May 5th through 8th, the 2022 Seattle Trans Film Festival offers events and films that showcase transgender films by and for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people.

TRANSlations lead programmer and filmmaker StormMiguel Florez said the whole point is to explore trans film, of course, but also for people outside the community to come along.

“We don’t have a lot of spaces where we get to celebrate ourselves this way and see ourselves this way and it is a festival that is welcoming to everyone, but it is our space to see and be seen and connect. Just to have that kind of reflection that we so rarely get,” Florez said. Continue reading