Photo: Zeitgeist Films

Visiting town for SIFF this summer, Trouble the Water directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal told me about their experiences filming their Sundance-prize winning documentary. (See review here.) When we spoke, the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina still lay ahead, and the presidential candidates weren't yet determined. The two Brooklyn-based filmmakers, a married couple, previously worked with Michael Moore on Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. For an edited audio recording of our June 13 conversation, click below.

At the 10 o'clock press conference following the SIFF-opening Battle in Seattle, sitting next to his bored-yet-glamorous girlfriend, Charlize Theron, director Stuart Townsend told us exhausted reporters that he was self-distributing the film. Uh-oh, I thought to myself, that's usually the kiss of death--a short prelude before dusty DVD shelves. (Let's see, do we file under C for the Canadian financing and country of origin....?)

"We're self-distributing," Townsend had previously told the packed house at McCaw Hall, which greeted the film with an overeffusive standing ovation. (Politeness has its limits, people.) "We took our film back. It's now in our hands. We're about as indie as it gets."

More cheers followed. Oh we love "indie" in Seattle, ever that buzzword, just as we claim to hate globalization but line up at Starbucks while wearing our made-in-China trail running shoes from Nike and recycled fleece sweaters from Patagonia. (The same outfit we wore back in '99 for the WTO protests, come to think of it.)

Townsend couldn't have picked a more favorable audience for his film, which was shrewdly invited to begin the fest by SIFF artistic director Carl Spence. Give the people the self-congratulatory lefty pabulum they want, after all; McCaw Hall is pretty big, and we need to fill seats. Is that indie thinking or sound business thinking? I'm not sure which.

But back to Battle, its prospects in theaters this fall, and other final impressions from SIFF '08 after the jump...

Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms - Hanami

SIFF concluded yesterday with its usual slew of awards. The gentle, sentimental, and accessible usually dominates the popular voting (i.e. those little cards you tear up after each show), usually with a dollop of international good feeling (we love subtitles here in Seattle), and this year was no exception. Culled from some 70,000 ballots, the Golden Space Needle went to the German Cherry Blossoms - Hanami, which our Frank Paiva saw and loved in his short review.

More awards and thoughts after the jump, plus the alternative honors voted by the generally more discerning full-series (aka the "Fool Serious") pass holders....

Another Holocaust movie? Director Jeremy Podeswa, visiting town this weekend for SIFF, wasn’t having any of that labeling for Fugitive Pieces. Honored this year as one of the fest’s “Emerging Masters” (with his prior The Five Senses also being screened), he’s hoping his new film makes its way out of New York and L.A. arthouses this summer to reach Seattle. (And if the reviews, including our SIFF take from Jonathan Kauffman, haven’t been kind, there’s always DVD.)

Gay, Canadian, and Jewish, Podeswa told me he wasn’t eager to interpolate his own family’s Holocaust experience into this adaptation of Anne Michaels’ acclaimed 1996 novel….

Lakshmi and Me
If you and I were liberal, educated, middle-class urbanites living in Mumbai, we’d have domestic servants, just like filmmaker Nishtha Jain. The poor are so poor, and so plentiful, that basically anyone in the social strata above can afford someone to cook and clean for them. So, like any good liberal with a guilty conscience, Jain made a documentary about her part-time maid, Lakshmi, who’s apparently from a much lower caste. (Is she a Dalit, or untouchable? A Tamil? Jain doesn’t explain these things for non-Indian viewers.) But Jain is curious, a self-professed feminist--like the other educated women who employ Lakshmi--who follows the young woman through her arduous day and back home to a slum. There, her father is passed out drunk on the floor. Diseases like tuberculosis and chicken pox are common. At a labor rally for domestic workers, Lakshmi is asked about politics. “We’re illiterate,” she replies, “so we don’t know.” When Jain tries to seat her maid among friends for lunch, Lakshmi protests, “I’m like this one black person amongst them.” As Jain discovers, and without any kind of forced resolution, she and her servant are both bound into a system that no documentary could possibly change. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit: 4 p.m. (Also: 11 a.m. Sun., June 15.)

Alan Ball won an Academy Award for writing American Beauty. After that he devised a long-running HBO show you may have heard of: Six Feet Under. In his first effort as film director, he’s adapted Alicia Erian’s 2005 novel Towelhead, about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl coming of age in Houston, Texas, just as the first Persian Gulf War is about to erupt. (Remember that one? Back during the Bush I era? How long ago it seems.)

Ball will introduce and conduct a Q&A for the Egyptian screening of Towelhead at 6:30 p.m. Sat., June 14. (The movie repeats at the same SIFF venue at 1:30 p.m. Sun., June 15. And it’s presently scheduled to open in Seattle on September 12.)

We sat down to chat about the film earlier today. I’ll hold most of my notes until the fall, along with a review of the somewhat disturbing, sexually candid film, but here are some early comments from the writer-director.

Lady Jane
Look for this one on DVD. The last film by Robert Guédiguian to play Seattle, The Town Is Quiet (back in 2002), was not exactly a crowd pleaser. Thursday night at the Uptown, there wasn’t much of a SIFF throng for his new crime tale, set as usual in Marseille, and again starring his wife, Ariane Ascarde, and his other longtime actor-friends. Only in France--and this is praise--could you hang a movie around three ex-cons in their 50s who reunite the old gang when one of its members (Ascarde) has her 12-year-old son kidnapped and ransomed. Time has not been kind to the mob: Muriel does best as proprietor of a boutique; François runs a boatyard, has a wife and two kids; and René pimps in a strip club. Flashbacks gradually reveal their old crimes, conducted wearing grotesque rubber masks. Thinking back, says François (who still believes he’s in love with Muriel), “We were gods, remember?” Guédiguian uses a heavy-handed kind of naturalism to convey his tales, which always feel rooted in the sociology (and often poverty) of his home city. His biggest hit in the U.S., 1997’s Marius and Jeannette, was a fairly straightforward love story. Set to an American R&B score, violence, jealousy, and fatalism are more the themes of both Lady Jane and The Town Is Quiet. Marseille seems dominated by a southern Mediterranean code of revenge. At the film’s opening, Muriel has attained chic bourgeois respectability and single motherhood. By the end, her criminal past has caught up to her, shaken her hard, and emptied out any remaining notions of hubris or youth. Don’t expect an American remake; it’ll never happen. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

Em
You know, I liked this movie the first time, when it was called Betty Blue. And there have been many other films and novels, all invariably told from the male perspective, about the fateful Romance With the Crazy Girl. This usually leads to the sensitive, grieving hero's writing his film or novel, called How I Got Over My Romance With the Crazy Girl Who Inspired Me to Become an Artist. Here, writer-director Tony Barbieri--whose The Magic of Marciano played SIFF '00--thankfully has more restraint and good taste than that. Those qualities cannot disguise a fundamental lack of story, however. The crazy girl (a fairly brave Stef Willen) can fall back on crazy--look out, she's crazy, there's no telling what she might do! The sensitive guy (Nathan Wetherington) can only look on in slack-jawed amazement. She's an artist, and he's...a paralegal? Like their relationship, the film has no balance. We just follow her mood swings, while he politely sweeps up the rubble she leaves behind. The love story that stays with you, really, is that between Barbieri and his hometown of San Francisco. Shot on HD video by Keith Dunkerley, Em looks great--the sun-washed rooms, the pulsing crowds of Chinatown, the orangey emulsion of the skyline at sunset--and its framing deserves some script pages to furnish those sparse, artful compositions. Hardly prolific since his 1998 Sundance debut One (which also played Seattle), Barbieri trusts the power of space and silence to communicate drama between his dopamine-deprived characters. Next time, let's try a little adrenaline. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit: 6:30 p.m. Sat. June 14; 1:30 p.m. Sun. June 15.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Michael Chabon’s 1988 breakthrough novel attracted many fans among the young, sensitive, Foucault-reading, Germs-listening set who were dissatisfied with that decade’s superficial labeling and narrow notions of identity. Pittsburgh circa 1983 now looks like a far simpler, more mutable time for innocent, preppie, post-collegiate Art (Jon Foster), the weak, motherless son of a strong Jewish gangster (Nick Nolte, in need of way more scenes). Art feels doomed to be a stockbroker, so the sudden invitation of friendship from two smart, sexual, volatile barflies (Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard) is doubly liberating. He’s taken for a wild ride during what he considers his last summer before assuming the mask of adulthood. The story of an unformed young man’s self-discovery is an alluring trap for any young-ish male director, and Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) steps in waist deep. On the page, Chabon’s notions that there’s really only one kind of love and that we falsely give it different names--cue up your Smiths LPs and heat the kettle for some chamomile tea--are more convincing. But Thurber (as screenwriter) has condensed the novel into a bullet-point outline narrated by a bore. Even more than Charles Ryder or Nick Carraway, Art Bechstein has no qualities, no ambitions, no character other than his chrysalis state of yearning toward…something that cannot be named, but which is entirely predictable in this tame ménage. Only Sarsgaard has any life to him; and the movie only gives him one scene with Nolte, then—here’s your spoiler—closes the door so we can’t see the fireworks. (R) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. Fri., June 13. Uptown: 2 p.m. Sun. June 15.

Sonetàula
This is a long, slow, difficult Italian movie set entirely on the island of Sardinia. Which, I believe, has its own native language that is spoken in the film. Much of the action concerns sheep, and sheep rustling. World War II comes and goes to little notice; it matters less than the sheep. It’s hard to tell which characters are related to whom. When electricity arrives after the war, residents burst into a spontaneous, spiral dance around the town square—and that embedded pagan custom seems more significant than the novelty of alternating current. In a solemn, deliberate story (based on a 1960 novel), Sonetàula shows us an implacable, impoverished island culture of filial duty, long-simmering grudges, delayed revenge, and the sexual attraction between first cousins. (This last point is key: Brigand hero Sonetàula--played by the remarkable Francesco Falchetto from ages 13-28--covets a girl, the luminous Manuella Martelli, you might otherwise think is his sister.) So, that’s about a dozen issues that make Salvatore Mereu’s movie sound awful, but it’s possibly the strongest title I’ve seen at the fest. And I definitely intend to watch the entire 157 minutes again. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Uptown: 9:30 p.m. (Also: 4:30 p.m. Sun., June 15.)