Meet our talented team of programmers – the people who work and watch movies all year long to curate the best films possible for the Seattle International Film Festival, celebrating its 49th year from May 11 to 21, 2023. Full program info siff.net/festival.
What are your 10 favorite films ever?
Like everyone else who tries to answer this question, I just can’t. However, since I program mostly films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, I can and would love to share a list of ten films from German-speaking countries. I have a secret project of undermining German (and not only German) nationalism and underlining the transnationality and collaboration inherent in all film. So hopefully you’ll find a few provocations on this list.
Mephisto: Hungarian director, international cast, Austrian star, dubbed INTO German–is this even a German picture? Discuss. What could be more appropriate in imagining the secret history of the cultural crimes of the Reich than this barbed, intercultural perspective?
Veronika Voss: Fassbinder is too much sometimes. Not here. I find this his most aesthetic and touching picture, tying together the psychical wounds of the holocaust with film culture and vanity and desire, with an indelible performance from Rosel Zech.
The Last City: Shot in English with an international cast of mostly non-actors and a bonkers, hilarious, intellectually dizzying script that defies summary. I once had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Emigholz, who’s most famous for his films examining architecture, and smile every time I think of this work.
The Nasty Girl: The best, most acid introduction I know to the pact of silence that undergirded the “economic miracle” of postwar West Germany.
The Third Man: Given that it was the first major picture made in Austria after the war and did much to revive the decimated and deeply compromised Austrian film industry, I think we can call this an Austrian film.
Pankow '95: Another Hungarian director in my alternate fantasy-canon. What happens when the East wins the Cold War and locks up mad musicologist Udo Kier in an evil asylum headed by the West German equivalent of Dick Clark? What if there’s an alt-rock '80s score from Tom Dokoupil of The Wirtschaftswunder?
Der Fall: I translated the subtitles for this standout 1972 Swiss noir for a partnership with San Francisco Film Society and I still think about snippets of the dialogue. Frueh manages to overlay the grit, desire, and disappointment of noir tropes over what is essentially a very well-run, prosperous, medium-size city (Zurich), where you could run into anybody at any time.
Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Wacko time-out-of-time exploration of the life and death (at the hands of her lover, the General and former Nazi Gert Bastian), set for no obvious in the sleek and sterile confines of Zurich International Airport.
Great Freedom: Great cinema is made now. Passionate, restrained, leaves a mark.
The Piano Teacher: Jaundiced, weird probe of the malady at the heart of high culture. I love that while it’s set in Vienna the dialogue is in French for no apparent reason other than that it’s what Isabelle Huppert speaks.
What is one of your favorite festival moments?
My first spring in Seattle (2018), I stole an evening away from my infant child to go see what I thought would be a deserted screening of an obscure new Austrian film—Mademoiselle Paradis, with the always excellent Devid Striesow—about a blind pianist and her physician in 18th century Vienna. But the screening was not deserted. There was a line down the block in front of the Uptown! Walking into the cinema with this mob of discerning filmgoers, I said to myself, you know what, Schwartz? I like this town. And I’m still here.
What is your guilty pleasure film?
You Don't Mess with the Zohan (Yes, I own the DVD and I made my brother watch it with me the night before my wedding)
What's one thing we should know about you that is NOT film related?
For nearly ten years I pursued simultaneous existences as a playwright and indie theatre artist (something like five of my plays were produced) and as a cultural attaché at a diplomatic representation in San Francisco. Ah, youth. I’m still very tired from that.
What do you consider your hometown?
San Francisco. I was born there and grew up across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, and when I came “home” as an energetic and idealistic young Master of Arts, it was to the SFC. It’s heartbreaking and absurdly expensive and there are a lot of bad things about it, but it’s just so beautiful and will always be home.
