It’s ironic the Seattle International Film Festival has never been headed up by a Seattleite. In fact, you might as well blame Canada, since it was two Canadians, Darryl MacDonald and Dan Ireland, who founded the festival in 1976. Ireland left in 1996, and MacDonald departed last October to take over the Palm Springs Film Festival. In keeping with the foreign-led tradition, SIFF’s newest director is a Brit, Helen Loveridge.
Though new as the director, Loveridge has actually been working for SIFF since 2002, as Managing Director. Her cinematic education began when she moved to London at age 21, and started taking full advantage of the films the city had to offer. “A friend and I would go out on a Saturday and we’d have a mini-film festival,” she recalls. “If you started at the Electric Cinema with its first screening at 1:30pm, you could do a couple there, a couple at the National Film Theatre, a couple at the Scala, a couple at Screen on the Green—you could do seven films in a day! It was very easy to see good repertory cinema in those days.” Two films in particular stood out for her: Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” (“Absolutely ravishing!”) and Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” which is still one of her top five movies.
Loveridge eventually became Assistant to the Program Director at the London Film Festival, later toiling in the hospitality department. She then moved into film sales, working in both England and abroad. It was in that capacity, in 1995 she first attended SIFF, at MacDonald’s invitation. “I instantly liked Seattle,” she admits. “And I really liked seeing how much the festival is a living, breathing part of the community. You go downtown, you walk around, you see the crowds outside the cinema and people engage you in conversations. It’s very interactive.” When she later learned of an opening on the SIFF staff, “I said to Darryl, ‘Give me a job,’ and amazingly enough he said, ‘Okay.’ It was still a film job, but not in sales—I was getting a bit disillusioned with sales by that point. And also, after 11, 12 years in Holland and Germany, I wanted to move back to a country where it was more or less my own language!”
Loveridge’s job as Managing Director mostly involved administrative work, though she was also involved in programming as well as writing descriptions in the SIFF guide. After MacDonald’s unexpected departure, she became SIFF Director and Executive Director of Cinema Seattle, the umbrella organization that oversees SIFF.
Given that the job involves attending film festivals around the world in search of programming ideas, I had to ask her how Seattle stood up. “It’s not so different [from] a number of large festivals which are just generally celebrations of that year’s cinema,” Loveridge confides. But there are other differences. SIFF does give out prizes, though not especially large ones. It’s also not a market-driven event where people try to make deals with studios. This lack of wheeling and dealing is partially because it comes right after the Cannes Film Festival.“ Everyone’s just exhausted after Cannes, trying to make sense of what happened there,” Loveridge says.
One SIFF element Loveridge especially enjoys is the frequent post-screening discussions, which feature the film’s director and/or talent. “Other festivals have press conferences which aren’t open to the public,” she explains. “One thing that bothers me is when I see press here saying, ‘Oh, this [SIFF] film will be released later, see it then.’ You can see it then, but the chances are, you might see it here with a guest and be able to take part in a discussion that will give the screening more resonance than it would if you just saw it in a commercial cinema.”
Then of course, there’s the festival’s size. At nearly a month long and with over 300 films, it’s one of largest and longest running festivals in the world. “I love it!” exclaims Loveridge with a smile. (This is not an unexpected statement from a woman who saw 49 out of a mini-fest of 60 French films in London in January 1983.) “People keep talking about reducing the length of the festival, but personally, it’s hard to work on something all year ‘round that’s over in the blink of an eye. It can seem like a bit of an endurance test sometimes, but I think people get a lot out of it. I know at the [SIFF] members’ preview last year, when I said we had so many great films that we were considering extending the festival, I got a round of applause!” And though she admits “economic considerations” might lead to cutting the festival, she’s quick to add “I’m hoping to put off that evil day for some time.”
What can we expect from this year’s SIFF? Tablet’s deadline precludes a full preview, but as 2,000 short and feature length films were submitted, you can expect the usual diversity. Loveridge did say there would be more documentaries and probably more films from Seattle filmmakers. There will also be four special gala evenings celebrating the festival’s 30th anniversary, including an evening at the Moore Theatre, SIFF’s original home.
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