Opening Night for SIFF, but they aren’t too busy to screw us!

Tonight is the Opening Night of the Seattle International Film Festival.  Can you smell the excitement in the air?  SIFF’s opening night film is called Battle in Seattle.  It is a Hollywood dramatization of one of the most talked about events in Seattle’s recent history, shot in Vancouver, with mostly Canadian crews, and a cast of high-dollar celebrities who may have experienced those events from shorts clips on their TV news, written and directed by a guy from Ireland (Stuart Townsend) who read a few articles about the event and made a couple trips to Seattle during the creative process.  The cost of attending this single film ranges from $50-$200.

Surely there must be a lot of prep work involved in making sure that all of you get your $200 worth at that after party which will no doubt be packed full of people hoping to get their picture taken with Woody Harrelson or catch a glimpse of Cherlize Theron .  But they still manage to find time to try to mess with us.  How?  By choosing today to force local filmmaker Bao Tran to remove his incredible short film Bookie from the STIFF 2008 program.  Bao’s crime?  Bookie was actually scheduled to “World Premier” one day after his STIFF Screening  at the Jewel Box.  Here is the email that I sent to Beth Barrett and Stan Shields (The siffers making the stink):

We are of course disappointed that we aren't going to be able to screen Bookie at the scheduled time since we all thought it was a great little film, but we don't want to show films against the will of the filmmaker, so we will of course comply with your wishes.  As I mentioned in a previous email, this does create a logistical problem since our programs are currently being printed and there is no possible way that we can change them at this late date.  Which means that there is a great possibility that audience will show up expecting to see Bookie and be disappointed that the film had been pulled from the lineup.  We should be able to pull the film down from our website within the next few days and offer refunds to people who have purchased tickets to the screening though.

Hopefully SIFF will reconsider this.  At the very least, it would be great to have Beth or Stan explain why the Seattle International Film Festival is exerting pressure on Bao to pull his film from our little festival's program though since we ARE only talking about a very small screening at the Jewel Box one day in advance of his big SIFF screening and we haven't advertised Bookie as a "World Premier" or anything.  Part of the decision to move STIFF to the end of SIFF instead of the beginning was to give SIFF ample opportunity to screen the small subset of films that may end up in both programs that they were worried about being the "World Premiere" for, instead of forcing filmmakers to make a decision about which film festival they wanted to screen their film in.  I can understand why SIFF might want to crack down on this archaic premier requirement for big cash-cow features with celebrities that may attend, but we are talking about a really good local short here and a filmmaker that can only benefit by having his film play in both festivals.  We don't fault Bao for the decision he has made.  SIFF is the 800 pound film festival gorilla in town and he is obviosly going to get the most good from complying with their wishes (and it is always nice to see SIFF shine their light on a good local film).  It just doesn't make sense to me why SIFF would choose to penalize this filmmaker and potential audiences, especially when there has been precedent set in the past with local filmmakers screening their films at STIFF before their big SIFF "World Premiers" and it was never an issue with SIFF forcing them to pull their films or with our little film festival trumpeting the fact that we were scooping the giant film festival in town by a day or two.  This  really seems to be a situation where someone may be trying to enforce the letter of the law when they should care more about the spirit of the law.

My email was of course ignored.  We may actually be able to fix the program in time and of course will refund anybody’s money who doesn’t want to see whatever film replaces Bookie.  But do you want to know the kicker to this whole thing?  Bookie already had its “World Premier” last September!  I already lived through the actual WTO Riots, so tonight I plan to head to the theater to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  If you are at the SIFF Opening Night party, please have fun.  If you see Carl Spence there, please kick him in the balls for me.