SIFF #1: Thelma(Josh Margolin, 2024), Terrestrial Verses (Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami, 2023)
There’s something uniquely exciting about seeing films at a festival. For me, even though I watch a lot of movies in my daily life, it’s rare to see so many in proximity all in the theater. Somewhere between the exhaustion, the anticipation, and the repetition, festival screenings create interesting links between films, opening them up in interesting ways.
This is my first year really attending SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival (I only went to one screening last year), which began last Thursday (5/9) and continues through next Sunday (5/19), at which point a limited selection of films will be available for virtual screenings. The festival plays in theaters all throughout the city, so I’ll be scrambling up and down I-5 for the next week or so, but I couldn’t be more excited to check out some of this year’s selection.
First, a quick word on the opening night film. It’s a bit of a joke that at a lot of the major film festivals, the opening night films are never very good. Thelma, which premiered earlier this year at Sundance, continues that historic trend for Seattle. The premise is like a Pixar short bloated to feature length. A grandma (June Squibb) is scammed out of a large sum of money, and embarks on an action-adventure to get it back. It’s a film that chooses obvious sentimentality at every turn, to the point of self-parody. Abysmally edited, ugly and televisual, it’s mostly kept afloat by June Squibb’s endearing, relatively understated performance. The highlight of my screening occurred during the Q and A, when Beth Barrett asked the 94 year old Squibb what’s next for her career, to which she responded “PORN!”.
On a better note, I would recommend Terrestrial Verses. From Iranian directors Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatam, the film constitutes a series of vignettes, each of which depicts an argument between an Iranian citizen and an institutional authority. They all consist of one static shot, trained on the understandably frustrated citizens, leaving the authority figure just offscreen.
With its exacting separation of on and offscreen space, and interest in the mundane effects of oppression, Terrestrial Verses recalls Kiarostami’s Homework. While Kiarostami’s documentary uses homework to sneakily expose the psychological effects of propaganda, Terrestrial Verses is much more direct in its criticism of power. The film’s vitriol is directed at the way deeply ingrained religious and cultural tenets are vindictively manipulated against Iranian citizens. The hypocrisy is called out not just through each situation’s blatant injustice, but also by the ordering of the vignettes. In one, a rideshare driver has her car towed because a street camera caught a photo of a long-haired driver with no hijab (her long-haired brother). After pointing out that even if she weren’t wearing a hijab, her car counts as her private space, the lady behind the counter says that if the space has windows, she needs to be wearing a hijab. In the subsequent segment, a predatory employer tells the woman interviewing for him to take off her hijab to secure the position.
Terrestrial Verses is intentionally exhausting, and confrontational in nearly every frame. The film is largely successful, in large part due to the directors’ ability to create dynamic compositions that modulate with the film’s drama. I found myself off-put by the film’s staginess (it’s is weirdly aware of its Western audience), but I still appreciated its directorial confidence and thematic insight.