The Grand Illusion

With their sophomore feature, Shatara Michelle Ford (TEST PATTERN) puts their singular stamp on the American road movie. After an unceremonious layoff, Z (Denée Benton, “The Gilded Age”) embarks on a trip across the Midwestern United States in search of a friend that has seemingly disappeared off the grid. Travelling with her two closest friends, these three queer black femmes find their priorities tested as shapeshifting threats in each city expose (inter)personal and ideological fractures.

Tender and expansive, DREAMS IN NIGHTMARES is an ode to chosen family and the radical act of claiming space to dream – and exist – beyond the systems of an increasingly fraught country.

Critic’s Pick! “A nifty new spin on the American road trip movie, one that functions both as an intimate exploration of identity and a rallying cry for a new kind of world.” Kate Erbland, IndieWire

“A special type of indie film teaches you how to see it as you watch it — not as an instructor might a student, but as an ally would a new acquaintance. Shatara Michelle Ford’s sophomore feature, Dreams in Nightmares, about a road trip, a friendship and a Black queer landscape anchored by care, has that quietly confident appeal, like being invited into something intimate, then let free when your curiosity is at its zenith.” Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

New 35mm print of one of the most disarmingly funny and cathartic entries in Tsai Ming-Liang’s filmography, co-presented with SIFF.

Set just prior to the start of the 21st century, this vaguely futuristic story follows two residents of a quickly crumbling building who refuse to leave their homes in spite of a virus that has forced the evacuation of the area.

As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him. Combining deadpan humor with an austere view of loneliness and a couple of unexpected musical numbers, Tsai Ming-Liang crafted one of the most original films of the 1990s.

In Mandarin with English subtitles.

“Impressive a quarter century ago, it seems even more so today.” J. Hoberman, The New York Times

“A broodingly apocalyptic and thoroughly original view.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle

“The Hole proves to be an eerily prophetic and timely movie, perhaps better now than it ever was.” Jeffrey Anderson, San Francisco Examiner

PULP: WHAT DO YOU DO FOR AN ENCORE? captures PULP during their 2025 tour, combining footage from their ingenious live show with four decades of never-before-seen archival material. Directed by longtime collaborator Garth Jennings and narrated by frontman Jarvis Cocker, the film traces the band’s circuitous journey from Sheffield outsiders to unlikely cultural icons.

Thirtieth encore screening! Autumn leaves and beavers please!

Our friends at Central Cinema are generously helping us keep the beavers gnawing away while we search for a new home. 60% of ticket sales go to our relocation fund!

In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.

“Starts strange, gets stranger, and yet remains resolutely adorable… embraces the defiant glee of art cinema and distills it into something so thoroughly pure and sincere that it is surely hard not to fall in love with it.” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alliance of Women Film Journalists

“It’s sure to develop a significant cult following with its unique mix of silent-era slapstick, animation elements, theme-park-style critter costumes, and general air of inspired absurdity.” Dennis Harvey, Variety

“Steroidally swollen with gags and smarts.” Guy Maddin

A rare double feature of pioneering media artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s 90-minute director’s cut of I.K.U. and its seldom-screened 2023 follow-up UKI, co-presented by SECS Fest! Known for her groundbreaking and transgressive works including the cyberfeminist classic Fresh Kill (newly added to the Criterion Collection), Cheang has long challenged boundaries of genre, identity, and technology.

First, in I.K.U. Shu Lea Cheang probes the commodification of pleasure—and explores the seamier implications of Blade Runner—in the tale of Reiko, a robot programmed to accumulate sexual experience for a corporation in New Tokyo. Reiko morphs through seven body types to experience a variety of couplings, then returns to the company to download her accumulated “orgasm data”—and to escape from their control.

Then, Cheang merges gaming software–generated animation with live action in UKI, which finds the now-defunct replicant Reiko abandoned in E-Trashville, a giant dumping ground for technological waste. Meanwhile, a besieged diner serves as a meeting place for humans infected with red blood cells re-engineered by GENOM Corp.—and for time-traversing hackers working to uncover the company’s schemes. A parable of resilience and rebirth, UKI demonstrates the continued vitality of Cheang’s forward-thinking, boundary-pushing vision.

In English and Japanese with English subtitles.

“I.K.U. is a phenomenon…. it crosses all categories — geographic, physical, conceptual — with a demented flourish. As much trans-genre as it is trans-gender, I.K.U. also wants to merge video and film into a fresh digital universe large-scale enough to overwhelm the viewer.” B. Ruby Rich, author of New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut

“UKI is not just allegory or parable, but a plea for action against biowarfare and those complicit.” Katherine Franco, Screen Slate

Note: There will be a 10 minute intermission in-between features. *No one under 18 admitted*

Long difficult to find, Tsui Hark's DON'T PLAY WITH FIRE (aka DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS OF THE FIRST KIND) is one of the most controversial and violent crime films from the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s. Now newly restored!

After a fatal hit-and-run, three high school friends flee the crime scene. They are witnessed by Pearl, a sadistic young girl who pursues the group and blackmails them into more crimes, with increasingly disastrous consequences.

In Cantonese with English subtitles.

Special live intro from local Hong Kong genre film connoisseur and one of the programmers of the Seattle Film Society, Patrick McFarland.

“No film captures [Tsui Hark’s] early renegade style better.” Stephanie Monohan, Screen Slate

“An unflinching, nihilistic examination of juvenile delinquency in an unstable political climate, [it] still holds up more than three decades on, both as a piece of entertainment and as a cautionary tale about the dangers of a disenfranchised young generation.” James Marsh, ScreenAnarchy

EGG is a searing Y2K-era cocktail of creature features, body horror, psychological thrillers and vaporwave aesthetics. This surreal effort by the highly prolific Yukihiko Tsutsumi (2LDK, FORBIDDEN SIREN) deconstructs sensitive themes such as women's traditional roles in society while also fully delivering on the promise of alien creepazoids.

Tsukiko lives a mundane existence revolving around her inscrutable tech office job. One day while on her way to work, she closes her eyes and a mysterious giant egg appears in what’d otherwise be the darkness of her eyelids. The egg soon hatches, unleashing with it memories of suppressed trauma as a hideous arthropod monster develops a tormented relationship with Tsukiko each time she dares to shut out the light.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

One of legendary filmmaker Hisayasu Satô’s most celebrated and visually stunning works, newly restored!

Housewife Kyoko (Kiyomi Ito) begins moonlighting at a mysterious sex club as a means of rebelling against her boring salaryman husband Akihito (Mineo Sugiura). The Bedroom isn’t like any normal sex club, though: the female hostesses all take the powerful sedative Halcion to sleep through their perverse encounters with the male clientele, waking up at the end of their shifts with no memory of what’s been done to them. But when Kyoko decides to explore her fetish for voyeurism by not taking the drug, the lines between fantasy and reality quickly become increasingly blurred—and dangerous.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

*No one under 18 admitted*

Annual William Kennedy Memorial Screening of the David Cronenberg classic!

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. As he struggles to unearth the origins of the program, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation. Starring James Woods and Debbie Harry, with groundbreaking special effects makeup by Rick Baker, VIDEODROME is one of David Cronenberg’s most original and provocative works, fusing social commentary with shocking elements of sex and violence.

Back in June 2021, Seattle lost one of its most dedicated cinephiles, William Kennedy. One of Bill’s final wishes was that people gather to watch VIDEODROME in his memory. A portion of the proceeds from this screening will be donated to Evergreen Playhouse in Centralia, where Bill performed in several productions prior to moving to Seattle.

“Videodrome has lost none of its power to disturb, none of its potency as a catalyst for meaningful introspection… It remains the rare breed of sociological provocation that might change minds. It’s a looking glass. It’s a masterpiece.” Walter Chaw, RogerEbert.com

Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur elevated the horror film to new heights of poetic abstraction with this entrancing journey into the realm between life and death.

When she takes a job caring for a comatose woman on a Caribbean island, a young nurse (Frances Dee) finds herself plunged into a mysterious world where the ghosts of slavery haunt the present and Vodou priests have the power to summon the living dead. Sugarcane swaying in a moonlit field, the hypnotic beat of ceremonial drums, the relentless pull toward death—the otherworldly atmosphere of this bold reimagining of Jane Eyre is as close as studio-era Hollywood ever came to pure dream-state surrealism.

“It transcends the conventions of the horror genre and remains one of Lewton-Tourneur’s most compelling studies in light and darkness.” Don Druker, Chicago Reader

“It is Tourneur’s caressingly evocative direction, superbly backed by Roy Hunt’s chiaroscuro images, that makes sheer magic of the film’s brooding journey into fear.” Tom Milne, Time Out

From the flickering screens of Hollywood horror to the haunted cane fields of colonial Haiti, BLACK ZOMBIE unearths the buried origins of the zombie, reclaiming it as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance.

Long before it became associated with flesh-eating ghouls, the zombie was a living metaphor for slavery: not a monster, but the ultimate victim of colonial power. A symbol of stolen agency was recast as an object of fear, while Black spiritual traditions were distorted, sensationalized, and erased.

Director Maya Annik Bedward traces the evolution of the zombie, reconsidering iconic films like I Walked with a Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie, and The Serpent and the Rainbow, alongside archival footage, vérité scenes, and interviews with cultural historians, artists, and genre legends including Yves-Grégory Francois, Mambo Labelle Déesse, Slash, Tom Savini, and Zandashé Brown. Part cultural reckoning, part horror remix, BLACK ZOMBIE exposes how a figure born from enslavement, spiritual belief, and resistance was transformed into one of pop culture’s most profitable monsters.

“An intellectual pleasure. Maya Annik Bedward artfully threads the needle between Caribbean spiritual practices and what we’ve seen on screen. A smart, nuanced love letter to Haiti, and a delight for cinephiles.” Caroline Colvin, Dread Central

“Black Zombie demands you reconsider both the horrors humans are capable of and the untold beauty of the living and the dead. It’s the rare documentary you want everyone you know to watch.” Jessi Cape, Austin Chronicle