Seattle may not be the first city people name when they talk about the movie industry, but there is an incredible amount of weird and wonderful film culture humming along here anyway: theaters held together by volunteers and sheer force of will, obsessive programmers creating found-footage fever dreams, curators who stretch what a moving image can even be, editors who find the pulse inside a pile of footage, actors who keep turning up in the best local productions, and filmmakers making work that could only have come from this corner of the world. The talents here remind us that cinema is both an artform and an ecosystem.
The truth of the matter is films succeed or fail in the editing room. If a director is saddled with a weak editor, then no matter how well they shot a film, no matter how perfect the performances, it will certainly miss the mark when it hits the screen. And what is the key to a great film editor? A strong sense of visual rhythm. The editor is to a movie what a drummer is to a band. (If you’re wondering: The director is the lead singer; the cinematographer is the lead guitar; the art director is on the keyboards.) The editor is all heart and soul.
The best film editor in Seattle is, without a doubt, Celia Beasley. She was raised in Oakland, educated in NYC, and spent some time in Paris (her mother is French). After accumulating experience as a photojournalist, she settled in Seattle in 2001. Beasley entered film editing in the middle of this century’s first decade by way of documentaries, TV shows, and short films. She eventually made her mark in the following decade with three highly regarded, locally produced films: S. J. Chiro’s Lane 1974 (2017), Lynn Shelton’s Outside In (2017), and Megan Griffiths’s Sadie (2018). During the present decade, she has worked primarily with Griffiths—I’ll Show You Mine (2022) and Year of the Fox (2023), as well as Penelope, an eight-episode TV show produced by Mark Duplass.
All of these works benefited from what I can only describe as Beasley’s soulfulness. Her ability to smoothly move the transitions between shots (the drum) and form sequences (the beat) is music to my eyes. CHARLES MUDEDE
If you’re wondering why Cadence Video Poetry Festival isn’t slotted under literature or visual art or “difficult to classify,” you’re not wrong. Hell, if you’re wondering what video poetry even is, you’re also not wrong. Video poetry is both exactly what it sounds like and surprisingly difficult to define. The visually sumptuous byproduct of two disparate art forms, the video poem was born in the late ’70s and has continued to gain popularity and expand in range of approaches, styles, and formats—some pieces shot on phones, others on 16 mm film. Definitely a poem, but also very unlike reading Keats. Cadence Video Poetry Festival co-directors Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San define video poetry as a literary genre that blends moving image with text.
Since 2018, Werner-Jatzke and San have worked tirelessly to bring video poems to Seattle through Cadence Video Poetry Festival, an annual screening that takes place each April at Northwest Film Forum. Like so many good things in Seattle, Cadence is a labor of love—this one born from a dream conceived over a bowl of pad thai at Little Uncle on Capitol Hill one day in 2017. Both Werner-Jatzke and San are artists who continue to work day jobs while simultaneously running their nonprofit.
This past April, Cadence Video Poetry Festival mounted its ninth program, screening dozens of pieces by local and international artists. Beyond its annual festival, Cadence facilitates generative and collaborative workshops, runs an artist-in-residence program that fosters new work by local artists, and curates satellite screenings at venues around the city, including Seattle Art Museum and the Frye. If you’re curious to dip a toe into video poetry, start with Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances, co-curated by Werner-Jatzke and San and published by the 3rd Thing, an independent press dedicated to providing year-round video poetry subscriptions delivered to your device. Thanks to these two, you will never be without a video poem, whenever and wherever you need one. AMANDA MANITACH
For 16 years, Collide-O-Scope founders Shane Wahlund and Michael Anderson have been pumping out the wildest, most delightful video montages woven together with splices of vintage media you’ve either loved, totally forgotten about, or never seen before.
To make their movies, Wahlund, a former Stranger staffer, and Anderson, a freelance video editor for the paper, spend hours sifting through their vast archive, finding thematic threads throughout bits of documentaries, cult and B-films, commercials, corporate training videos, obscure music videos, bits of vintage newscasts, and other oddities to create short films that are as transcendent as they are silly. (They’re also the perfect thing to watch while stoned out of your gourd.)
Wahlund and Anderson’s fascination with visual culture started early—for decades they recorded everything that came on TV, archiving it away on VHS tapes and DVD-Rs. They’d put together edit reels of all the weird, funny, and strange stuff they found to show one another and friends. In 2010, the pair debuted Collide-O-Scope at Re-bar, where they amassed a cult following of open-minded media enthusiasts who similarly love the visual detritus of mass culture. After Re-bar closed during the pandemic, they’ve now settled their monthly show at Clock-Out Lounge in Beacon Hill.
Over the years, they’ve lent their video expertise to drag icons like past Genius Award winner Dina Martina and BenDeLaCreme, and they routinely sell out their annual Halloween screenings. Through it all, the pair says their creative partnership has been an animating force. “It’s a 100 percent collaborative effort between the two of us,” says Wahlund. “Whatever little magic we think we find, it comes from just working together on it. That’s a precious gift to have.” JAS KEIMIG
The wonder is that Bao Tran has not directed another feature film since his debut, The Paper Tigers, dropped in 2020. The martial arts film/comedy caught many viewers and critics by surprise because it was so hard to place. And that’s because its place—though it produced the greatest martial arts star in the history of cinema, Bruce Lee—is hardly on the martial arts map. The Paper Tigers is set in Seattle and concerns three middle-aged men who rejoin forces to do what martial arts films often boil down to: “You killed my master, so I’m going to kill you.” And it’s a hoot! And it has a whole lot of heart. Only Seattle could produce such a singular and highly entertaining Asian American concoction.
Tran, who also edited Jackpot (2015), which Vietnam submitted as Best Foreign Language Film in the 88th Academy Awards, was raised by Vietnamese immigrants in Olympia and Shoreline. Part of his film education occurred in Vietnam, where he edited a variety of films. But Tran names the Hong Kong icon Jackie Chan as his primary inspiration. Now, anyone who is familiar with martial arts films knows that the genre is as much about coordinating complicated fight scenes as editing them. And this is what you see in The Paper Tigers: a director who can also expertly cut the chaos of live-action combat into something that’s as graceful as a dance sequence in a musical. There is a good reason why Chan holds Gene Kelly in such high regard. One hopes editor/director Tran makes another local film soon. CHARLES MUDEDE
I’ll begin with a disclosure: Annette Toutonghi starred in a film I directed, Thin Skin. Indeed, she provided the best performance in the work, a performance I feel deserved more attention than it received. Also, directing her was nothing but pure joy. She mastered her character, an American who raised two racially mixed children after her Nigerian husband abandoned her, and added a lot of her own genius to it. Most importantly, she never required more than four takes to produce a shot that met all of the film’s editing needs.
But who is Toutonghi? Firstly, she comes from the stage. That is her artistic home: ACT Theatre’s hit The Women (2007), Seattle Rep’s You Can’t Take It With You (2008–09), and the like. But her impact on local cinema is considerable. Along with Thin Skin (2020), she performed in Guy Maddin’s locally produced Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), S. J. Chiro’s soulful Lane 1974 (2017), Bao Tran’s iconic The Paper Tigers (2020), Wes Hurley’s autobiographical Potato Dreams of America (2021), and HBO’s surreal TV series Three Busy Debras (2020–22).
As a performer, Toutonghi can range from electric (as in Thin Skin) to deeply somber (as in Lane 1974). Indeed, I didn’t even recognize her in the latter film until I saw it a second time (she plays the grandmother of a young girl neglected by her hippie mother). To top it all off, Toutonghi is an educator and a theater activist. The city is blessed to call her one of its own. CHARLES MUDEDE
Back in 1970, Seattle’s longest-running movie theater, the Grand Illusion (then called the Movie House), opened in a former University District dentist office, becoming the city’s first sanctuary for old movies, arthouse films, and world cinema. In 2004, the Grand Illusion became an independent arts nonprofit when it was bought by a group of passionate volunteers and supporters, making it the only fully volunteer-operated nonprofit cinema in the US. Then, in 2023, the building they’d occupied for 50-plus years (pictured here) was sold, and the new owner declined to renew their lease. I will forever miss that tiny little theater, draped in red velvet curtains with its funky floral theater seats. (They were incredible, I don’t care how uncomfortable they were!) This was also a huge loss for the U-District, which has since closed the doors to the remaining neighborhood theaters, AMC Seattle 10 and Varsity Theater. Despite being without a home for the past three years, the Grand Illusion hasn’t stopped its brilliant programming. While they raise money and scout out a new space, you can catch pop-up screenings at SIFF Film Center, Central Cinema, and Northwest Film Forum. (In September alone, they’re screening Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses in 35 mm, and the rockumentary Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt.) AUDREY VANN
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