Special Events and Series
We’re Moving!
Our lease was not renewed in 2025 and we have moved out of 1403 NE 50th. Plans are underway to relocate the cinema and we need your help to build an even grander Grand Illusion! For any questions about our pop-up showings below, please contact us rather than the screening venues.
Hong Kong Cinema Classics
Monthly screenings of essential movies from Hong Kong, many long unavailable and recently restored.
Now Playing
Serpent’s Path (New 4K Restoration) and Chime
- Tuesday, Apr 7, 2026, 7:00pm
- Thursday, Apr 16, 2026, 7:00pm
- Tuesday, Apr 28, 2026, 7:00pm
Screening location: SIFF Film Center – 167 Republican St, Seattle(located within the Seattle Center, just north of Climate Pledge Arena / east of KEXP and The Vera Project)
Two masterworks from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, released theatrically for the first time in the US!
Encore screening added, April 28th!
A masterclass in escalating dread and shocking violence, CHIME reaffirms Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of modern horror’s most innovative and unpredictable visionaries. During a class, culinary instructor Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) witnesses the suicide of a young student (Seiichi Kohinata), driven to insanity by what he claims is a chiming sound that controls his mind. Soon, Matsuoka begins hearing it, too, and descends into a mental abyss that warps his perception of reality and gives vent to his darkest impulses. Expertly blending psychological portraiture and hallucinatory mystery, Kurosawa offers a chilling depiction of madness that interrogates the very stability of our everyday existence, with the director’s patented creeping tracking shots and complex sound design fashioning an immersively terrifying and unnerving cinematic experience. CHIME will only be available in theaters and will never be released on streaming platforms.
SERPENT’S PATH (1998) is a dark gangland thriller with philosophical overtones. Obsessed with avenging his young daughter’s murder, yakuza subordinate Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa) recruits Nijima (Sho Aikawa), a brilliant yet strangely detached math teacher, to help carry out a scheme to kidnap and torture the man allegedly responsible. But the plan goes awry when their target, Otsuki (Yurei Yanagi), fingers another mobster as the mastermind behind Miyashita’s tragedy. As the two partners ascend the yakuza chain of command in search of the true culprit, Miyashita and Nijima follow the cold, calculating logic of revenge, descending into a moral abyss from which they may never surface. Featuring Kurosawa’s patented long takes and his claustrophobic arrangement of space, SERPENT’S PATH is one of the legendary director’s most chilling investigations into the endless cycle of violence and the evil that lodges in every heart. Kurosawa would go on to remake the story in 2024, but the original, now newly restored, remains as shocking and timeless as ever.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
“Chime is great not because it refuses interpretation or analysis, but because it welcomes it, secure in the knowledge—at once apt and hopelessly bleak—that coherence is of little consolation in a contingent universe.” Adam Nayman, Film Comment
“Serpent’s Path is as challenging and rewarding, not to mention gripping, as anything [Kurosawa] has made.” Tom Mes, Midnight Eye
Scarlet Warning 666 – New Restoration
- Monday, Apr 20, 2026, 7:15pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
A long-lost oddity of underground cinema and a notorious fixture in outsider film lore, SCARLET WARNING 666 was lovingly restored after decades of obscurity and is celebrated (and derided) as a bewildering example of independent psychedelia and eccentric ambition.
SCARLET WARNING 666 stars cult auteur Palmer Rockey in multiple roles — including twin brothers trapped in an unfathomable tale of Satanic skullduggery, bizarre occult rituals, and “demonic assassination” on a country estate. The film’s narrative logic dissolves into a collage of ritual scenes, disjointed character arcs, and surreal confrontations with the infernal, as the characters grapple with forces they barely comprehend in an increasingly chaotic rural nightmare. Palmer Rockey's vanity project defies conventional storytelling and embraces its own idiosyncratic creation mythology — alternately dismissed as “the worst movie ever made” and cherished as a cult curio.
Grindhouse Releasing has painstakingly restored SCARLET WARNING 666 from the original camera negative, going beyond the limits of sanity to preserve every agonizing frame of Palmer Rockey’s cinematic tribulation.
Select audience reactions/reviews from the January 2026 world premiere of the new restoration at the Texas Theatre in Dallas:
“A movie for those who always wondered what Ben from Blue Velvet got up to in his spare time. The work of a genuinely unwell mind, possibly the ultimate Dallas-shot trashterpiece. Soundtrack unironically slaps.”
“Kinda like if Neil Breen made A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. The psychosis oozes off the screen at every moment.”
“The product of a demented, disjointed psyche… This is TRULY one for the sickos. A masochist’s delight.”
Chess of the Wind
- Tuesday, Apr 21, 2026, 7:15pm
Screening location: SIFF Film Center – 167 Republican St, Seattle(located within the Seattle Center, just north of Climate Pledge Arena / east of KEXP and The Vera Project)
50th anniversary!
Screened publicly just once before it was banned and then lost for decades, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerged to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s pre-revolution New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, CHESS OF THE WIND unfolds in an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently-deceased matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely controlled mood piece that erupts in a stunningly subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.
In Farsi with English subtitles.
“Happenstance alone saved this movie from oblivion, and how lucky we are for it—a moody tale of ugly family and class dynamics, reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, complete with an utterly unexpected, numbing final shot.” David Mermelstein, Wall Street Journal
“…a stylistic tour de force… Visually, the film is a sumptuous feast from first frame till last.” Godfrey Cheshire, RogerEbert.com
“Eerily prescient to the country’s political moment immediately before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. A shining example of how familiar genres and tones can meld together to form something that feels brand new.” Glenn Heath Jr., The Film Stage
Coming Soon
Kontinental ’25
- Monday, Apr 27, 2026, 7:00pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
In his latest bold satire, Romanian auteur Radu Jude takes up the spiritual crisis of educated urbanites—notching down (slightly) the absurdity, while complicating his interrogation of globalized modern life.
Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is a bailiff in Cluj, the main city in Transylvania. One day she has to evict an indigent man (Gabriel Spahiu) from a cellar, an action with tragic consequences that triggers a moral crisis which Orsolya must weather as best she can.
Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 75th Berlinale. In Romanian, Hungarian, and German with English subtitles.
Stick around after the feature for a pre-recorded conversation between Radu Jude and Richard Linklater.
“A sharp, unforgiving satire about life, death, and the politics of learned hopelessness, among other weighty subjects… It’s a sneak attack of a movie, one that invites your laughter, even as it jabs you in the ribs.” Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“Radu Jude continues to find gold as he rummages through the trash of the modern condition.” Nicolas Rapold, Sight & Sound
“Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas… It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Hundreds of Beavers
- Thursday, Jan 29, 2026, 8:00pm
- Thursday, Feb 26, 2026, 8:00pm
- Thursday, Mar 26, 2026, 8:00pm
- Thursday, Apr 30, 2026, 8:00pm
Screening location: Central Cinema – 1411 21st Ave, Seattle
Twenty-sixth encore screening! These Beavers ain’t no April fools!
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
Yes
- Friday, May 1, 2026, 7:00pm
Screening location: SIFF Cinema Uptown – 511 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle
One of international cinema’s most fearless and provocative filmmakers, Nadav Lapid has long been an outspoken critic of his birth country’s government policies, channeling a lifetime of fury and frustration into vital films like SYNONYMS and AHED’S KNEE that brim with righteous anger, spite and shame. In YES, Lapid once again takes vigorous critical aim at the Israeli government with a new approach: submission.
In the days following October 7, Y., a jazz musician, and his wife Yasmin, a dancer, resolve to say yes to everything. Y. and Yasmin sell their bodies and souls to the highest bidder, surrendering themselves and their art to Israel’s social, political and military elite. Soon, Y. is entrusted with a mission of the utmost importance: to compose the music for a rousing, ruthless new national anthem. Feverishly whirling between moments of satire, sincerity and complete submission, YES is a visceral, blistering indictment of modern Israel, and an essential addition to post-October 7 cinema.
Named the third best movie of 2025 by Cahiers du Cinéma. In Hebrew, English, and Russian (with English subtitles).
Critic’s Pick! “[Lapid] almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in.” Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it’s both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic… it’s exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment.” Guy Lodge, Variety
“The best film of the year.” Radu Jude
Buffet Infinity
- Monday, May 4, 2026, 7:15pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
Echoing the Canadian comedy classic SCTV and picking from hundreds of hours of original, low-budget TV ads to tell the sinister tale of two restaurants battling it out in the fictional town of Westridge County. Ads for insurance, used car rivals, a local religious scholar, and a recording artist converge to tell the story of an expanding sinkhole, a cult, and an ever-growing restaurant that becomes unsettlingly sentient.
“This is some adventurous cinematic nonsense of the highest and finest order—if you’re a fan of anything Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s brains have secreted or the Comedy Central psychosis curios Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It from Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien, then Buffet Infinity’s got your number.” Jason Adams, Pajiba
“As someone who has been dying to see a Welcome to Nightvale film, Buffet Infinity is the closest thing I could ask for… [it’s] a full-course meal.” Brendan Jesus, Horror Press
Jeff Parker – ETA IVtet – Happy Today
- Tuesday, May 5, 2026, 7:30pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
The Grand Illusion, Goodbye Look, and International Anthem present a special screening of this album-length concert film that captures Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet at LA's Lodge Room. Their signature, minimalist, form-bending improvisations were captured live, shot by Charlie Weinmann and recorded/mixed by engineer Bryce Gonzales with a custom-made analog mixer and Nagra stereo tape recorder.
The band's first two critically-acclaimed records were recorded at now-shuttered Los Angeles micro-club ETA. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, ETA was where the band’s sound coalesced during a storied seven-year Monday night residency. With their new album, "Happy Today," (releasing on May 15) that sound, honed from an intimate setting, is scaled up for larger audience at Lodge Room. But the alchemical musical communication between guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson, remains intact and as hypnotic and deeply-tuned as ever.
Order the new Jeff Parker ETA IVtet album from International Anthem or grip it at your local record shop!
The Goodbye Look curates, presents, and produces live jazz shows in Seattle, WA.
City on Fire – New 4K Restoration
- Monday, May 18, 2026, 7:15pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
Ringo Lam's crime thriller classic, newly restored!
Chow Yun-Fat stars as a maverick undercover cop who infiltrates a gang of Hong Kong jewel thieves, but is wounded when the robbery turns into a massacre. Trapped in their hideout, the gang seek to unmask the traitor in their midst.
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.
“The quintessential undercover-cop/heist movie… a film full of brutal realism, and a career-high performance from star Chow Yun-Fat.” Kim Newman, Empire Magazine
Dead Lover (in Stink-O-Vision)
-1040x1541.jpg)
- Monday, Apr 13, 2026, 7:30pm
- Monday, May 25, 2026, 7:30pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
One more showing added, May 25th! Don't miss this indie scent-sation!
A lonely gravedigger who stinks of corpses (director/co-writer Grace Glowicki) finally meets her dream man, but their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love. Shot on dreamy 16mm with music by U.S. Girls.
Please note: Special event ticket pricing is in place for this screening in order to help cover the cost of the revolutionary Stink-O-Vision technology.
DEAD LOVER Stink-O-Vision screenings turn cinema into a full-body experience. Each audience member receives a Stink-O-Vision card created by scent artists, unleashing a carefully choreographed bouquet of aromas—funky, foul, seductive, and downright unholy—that sync with key moments in the film.
“…an already ingenious work elevated by [Glowicki’s] enlivening performance. From a sailor with a patois accent, to lesbian nuns, lasciviously versed postcards, and a jagged score, Dead Lover is a camp classic in the making.” Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
“With its blend of lurid camp and twisted romanticism, its embrace of gleefully lo-fi special effects and a twangy electro-retro score, Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a singular spin on the Frankenstein story, sets its sights firmly on cult status.” Wendy Ide, Screen International
Peking Opera Blues – New 4K Restoration
- Monday, Jun 15, 2026, 7:15pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
40th anniversary of Tsui Hark's fast-paced action comedy!
In the aftermath of China’s first democratic revolution, three high-spirited young women from different backgrounds cross paths on a quest for liberation. Together, their intertwined lives weave an epic tale of love, sacrifice and patriotism, as they embark on a daring journey in the midst of political chaos. Elegantly blending action, comedy and social satire into a bright and colorful production, PEKING OPERA BLUES boasts Tsui Hark’s energetic filmmaking style at the height of his powers, and remains an acclaimed classic of Hong Kong cinema.
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.
“Rarely has the ability of Hong Kong genre cinema to juggle wildly conflicting moods been more evident than in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues. The film doesn’t so much alternate between as simultaneously embody a screwball comedy, political thriller, buddy action flick, and a melodramatic tribute to rapidly forged yet unbreakable emotional bonds. That it not only hangs together but flows cogently and provides a stellar showcase for each of its lead actresses marks the film as one of Tsui’s finest achievements.” Jake Cole, Slant Magazine
Bullet in the Head – New 4K Restoration
- Monday, Jul 13, 2026, 7:00pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
John Woo’s Vietnam War-era saga of greed and betrayal, newly restored!
Three friends fleeing Hong Kong after a violent crime find themselves trapped in the chaos of the Vietnam War, where their loyalty and morality are tested beyond repair. What begins as a desperate bid for escape descends into a harrowing portrait of friendship under unimaginable pressure. As war strips away ideals and innocence, the bonds between the men fracture, leading to betrayals that cut deeper than any bullet.
Fueled by rage and grief Bullet in the Head trades balletic elegance for raw emotional devastation. This is heroic bloodshed turned inward, and a legendary filmmaker pushing himself into completely new territory.
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.
“As operatic as he is in crafting his set pieces, John Woo proves he is equally adept at making a Shakespearean tragedy from characters of great depth. Bullet in the Head is a reminder that John Woo is considered a master because of his expertise and supreme style. At the same time, some of his great works, like this one, also possess great substance.” Aneesh Raikundalia, High on Films