SIFF 2017 Week One Guests: Hirokazu Koreeda, Director of After the Storm, and Amanda Lipitz, Director of Step

Koreeda with translator and Shields.

I'm not certain why the great Hirokazu Koreeda (After Life) chose this year to grace Seattle with his presence, but I'm grateful that he did. If I'm not mistaken, he's never done so before (I caught a screening of Nobody Knows at the 2004 London Film Festival, but he was not in attendance).

I attended the second and final screening of After the Storm on May 20 at which Koreeda was accompanied by a translator and SIFF programming director Stan Shields. The roof-raising volume of the applause that greeted Shields' introduction appeared to truly humble the soft-spoken filmmaker.

In some ways, his new film plays like a companion piece to 2008's Still Walking, which I recently picked up on Criterion, not least because it also features small, sly performer Kirin Kiki as the family matriarch and lanky, sad-eyed Hiroshi Abe as her son--but a lot funnier (Kiki has appeared in every Koreeda film to date). In fact, it almost qualifies as a comedy, something that couldn't said of Still Walking, in which the two generations never quite come together.

During the Q&A, Koreeda says he drew from his own family--in addition to their typhoon-plagued Kiyose hometown--which surprised some audience members, since he's a successful film director, while the divorced father in the film, a gambling-addicted novelist struggling to maintain a relationship with his son, can't quite get his shit together, but there may be elements of Koreeda in Abe's character, Ryôta, that we don't know about, whereas Kiki's character, Yoshiko, was explicitly inspired by his widowed mother.

McIntyre, Giraldo, Grainger, Solomon, and Lipitz.

Compared to his other films, After the Storm feels smaller and looser, but it's definitely worth seeing--like everything he's ever done. His last film, Our Little Sister (SIFF '16) was among my favorites of the year. After the Storm, a Film Movement release, has finished its run of film festivals, but I was unable to find any US release dates. I'll update this post once I do.

I was initially skeptical of Step, because it received funding from Paul Allen's Vulcan Productions, so it's been getting a disproportionate amount of local attention. Like many midsize cities, Seattle tends to overpraise anything with ties to the local economy, but sincere praise from audience members and critics, like Mike Ward, encouraged me to leave work early to catch the final screening on May 22. It was a wise decision, not just because it's a fine film, but because director Amanda Lipitz was joined by Gari "Coach G" McIntyre and the Baltimore high school seniors featured in the film: Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger, and Tayla Solomon.

In the film, a sure bet for 2017's Oscar long list, Lipitz isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before, but that doesn't make it any less effective. Rousing, but free of false uplift, the documentary resides on a continuum with The Wire and Hoop Dreams (inner-city blues) to one side and Our Song and The Fits (youth steppers) to the other. I was also reminded of 20 Feet from Stardom, a SIFF Centerpiece selection focused on underappreciated women of color, and Precious, in which education gives a neglected teenager everything her parents have been unable (or unwilling) to provide. The former would end up winning the Academy Award for best documentary. Step, which seems likely to appeal to many of the same viewers, opens nationwide on 8/4. Don't miss it.



Endnote: Click here for my first dispatch, a write-up of Jeffrey Schwarz's The Fabulous Allan Carr. SIFF '17 runs through Sunday, June 11.