Golden Space Needle Award
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Film director Kathryn Bigelow with SIFF Artistic Director Carl Spence - Photo by Matt Daniels
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| Location | Seattle, Washington, United States |
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| Founded | 1976 |
| Language | English |
| Website | siff |
The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), held annually in Seattle, Washington since 1976, is among the top film festivals in North America. Audiences have grown steadily; the 2006 festival had 160,000 attendees. The SIFF runs for more than three weeks (24 days), in May/June, and features a diverse assortment of predominantly independent and foreign films, and a strong contingent of documentaries.
SIFF 2006 included more than 300 films and was the first SIFF to include a venue in neighboring Bellevue, Washington, after an ill-fated early attempt. However, in 2008, the festival was back to being entirely in Seattle, and had a slight decrease in the number of feature films. The 2010 festival featured over 400 films, shown primarily in downtown Seattle and its nearby neighborhoods, and in Renton, Kirkland, and Juanita Beach Park.
The festival began in 1976 at a then-independent cinema, the Moore Egyptian Theater. The first five festivals were held at The Moore Egyptian, now back under its earlier name the Moore Theater and functioning as a concert venue. When founders Dan Ireland and Darryl Macdonald of the Moore Egyptian lost their lease, they founded the Egyptian theater in a former Masonic Temple on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The Egyptian theater remains a prime festival venue to this day, although the festival now typically uses about half a dozen cinemas (including, since 2007, its own SIFF Cinema at Seattle Center), with the exact roster varying from year to year.
During the 1980s, SIFF audiences developed a reputation for appreciating films that did not fit standard industry niches, such as Richard Rush's multi-layered The Stunt Man (1980). SIFF was instrumental in the entry of Dutch films into the United States market, including the first major American debut for director Paul Verhoeven.
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