This paper marks the return of The Stranger’s SIFF Notes: an absolutely (maybe manically?) exhaustive rundown of what’s happening at the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival. We watched more than 100 films in the last month (which, if we’d watched them all back-to-back, adds up to about a week’s worth of film. YOU’RE WELCOME). And we dug a lot of them! Even found a handful that you absolutely shouldn’t miss. 

In that week’s worth of film, we learned that high camp is still alive and well, that hitting someone in the face with a dildo is still funny, that anti-capitalism still rocks, and that the people who are kind to animals deserve the world. 

The massive, artistic endeavor of a film festival feels especially impressive in 2025—when everything that makes it possible is under attack. Stranger Staff Writers Vivian McCall and Nathalie Graham both dug into the ways that the Trump administration is making it increasingly difficult to make and preserve good art. Vivian visited the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS), where they’re racing against time to preserve VHS and anything else catalogued on magnetic tape, and Nathalie dug into the new fascist rules at the National Endowment of the Humanities (everyone loves art about the Founding Fathers, right?).

And while we were watching hours and hours of people’s actual art, the world was still turning—unfortunately. The week we finished making this issue, Trump crossed over the 100-day mark of his second term as president. In that time, he crossed a lot of other lines too: He deported legal US residents; he ignored orders from the Supreme Court; he had a judge arrested for (allegedly) obstructing ICE while trying to arrest someone in her courtroom; he tried to single-handedly restrict voting access; he defunded government agencies so severely that private companies (oligarchs) may be the only way we can access essential services; he released government reports with the express purpose of seeding disinformation (looking at you, HHS). 

That’s an incomplete list, and it’ll surely be even more incomplete by the time you’re reading this. But it’s enough to say the next, essential sentence: We have a dictator. 

Stranger Senior Writer Charles Mudede lays it out for us: “Tyrants come in different flavors,” he writes. “In the case of the US, Trump is only a concentration of what was already well established in this society: the relentless repression of voting rights, institutional racism, systemic misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, science denial, and bogus economic reasoning.” Trump is made of the stuff that made this country, and it’s on us to reject him. 

The very last day we were working on this issue was May Day. Just outside our office, a march stretched block after block through Capitol Hill—a coalition of progressives who, rather than being exhausted by the Hands Off! protests, showed up again. And I believe we’ll keep showing up. 

We’ll be back for the Queer Issue in June, and I’m sure we’ll have a new, non-exhaustive list of nightmares, but we’ll also have spent a whole month showing up: showing up for good fucking art, showing up for SIFF screenings, showing up for protests. So until June, see you there. 

Hannah Murphy Winter

Editor-in-Chief

Cover Art by Jean Michel Tixier