Protests, Open Screen, and Reflections on 2025

We finish out 2025 with a WTO Protest doc, the return of Open Screen, and a look back at a few of our favorite local shorts from the year that was.

November 04, 2025

Hey Friends!

We‘ve (basically) made it through the year. Congrats!

There’ve been ups and downs, friendships made, movies created, cinema enjoyed. Battles have been repeated. Materialists has been argued about. Jurassic World was inexplicably reborn. Jokes aside, I’m proud to say that we’ve accomplished a lot in the past ten months. Heck, a year ago this newsletter didn’t even exist and now look at us!

We’ve grown so much over the past ten months, and so many of you have come up to us at events and shared your thanks and praise. We want to extend the same to all of you. If you’ve attended a screening, a Discord event, read and shared a post or newsletter, or just generally been involved, thank you. SFS exists only because of the community support for this project. We’re proud and honored to bring our programming to you each month knowing that it will be supported and valued by the SFS community. From the bottom of our hearts: Thank You.

SFS will (mostly) be taking the month of December off which means that our November screenings will be our last for the year. We’re going out with a bang (figuratively speaking) with our first-ever mixer event and a new edition of Open Screen, as well as screenings of festival hit WTO/99, Derek Jarman’s haunting final statement BLUE, and our final Locals Only of the year- a 2025 rewind- to round things out.

Lets get into it.

Marcus Baker

SFS Creative Director

ANNOUNCEMENTS

We’ve put together a survey for our Screenwriting Group to get a better sense of what you’ve liked, and to contribute input as we prepare for our New Years relaunch. We welcome your feedback — whether you’ve attended a meeting, or have just been curious about attending. The survey will close at the end of November, so please get your responses in before then!

SFS Screenwriting Group - Survey

(Survey closes at 11:59 pm 11/30/2025)

SCREENINGS + EVENTS

Thursday, November 6th @ NW Film Forum | Doors at 6:30pm

For this Month’s TRUTH TO FICTION, we’re proud to screen the multi-award winning documentary WTO/99. An immersive, archival doc, the film reanimates the clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle to protest the WTO’s impact on human rights, labor, and the future effect of continued globalization. The result is an urgent document of class struggle set against the backdrop of millennium-era Seattle.

This screening is presented in partnership with the Seattle Documentary Association and the Northwest Film Forum. SFS Newsletter subscribers can get discounted tickets for this screening by using the code SFSWTO at check out.

Doors at 6:30PM, screening starts at 7:00PM.

Wednesday, November 12th @ M5 Creative | Doors at 6:30pm

We're co-hosting a mixer with Film Crew Training Program, Seattle Creates, and the Seattle Documentary Association on Wednesday November 12th from 6:30-8:30 at the M5 Creative building in Lower Queen Anne. For those who can’t get enough of us, we’ll also be hanging out afterwards at a nearby bar.

This will be a great opportunity to meet the teams behind four of Seattle's up-and-coming filmmaking and creative organizations. Gain a firsthand understanding of our operations, our goals, and how we plan to impact the future of Seattle’s creative infrastructure. And make some pals while you do it. RSVP at the link below!

This event is sponsored by Particle Creative, Element 7 Productions, and FilmTrade.

Tuesday, November 18th @ SOAP | Doors at 7pm, Films screening from 7:30-9pm

Our Open Mic Night for Filmmakers returns to help us close out the year on a typically wild and unpredictable note! Bring your film or video on a thumb drive, anything under 10 minutes goes up!

Thursday, November 20th @ NW Film Forum | Doors at 6:30pm, Films 7:30-8:30pm + Afters to follow

Our November Locals Only will be our final Locals Only of the year! This month’s event will be a retrospective and will feature seven of our favorite short films we’ve screened this year, interspersed with Q&A’s led by SFS’s Programming Team. The Films Screened will include:

  • Passenger (3 Min, Animation/Experimental, Dir. Patrick Connelly): An experimental animation about the experience of commuting by train. Hand scratched on 16mm film.

  • Femme (4 Min, Comedy/Horror, Dir. Laura Shelly): Best described as a "sour cupcake" Femme explores the dark comedy/horror/surrealist/feminist genre as experienced through the title character Femme.

  • Bubblegum (12 Min, Comedy/Drama, Dir. Celestine Ocean): Star and Cleo - two siblings from a small town have to choose between personal gain or honest sacrifice when they stumble upon a life changing reward.

  • Everything Happens (5 Min, Comedy/Drama, Dir. Andrew “Ducky” Dutkiewicz): A mother prepares a family dinner. Her son made other plans. A dog gets lost. Everything happens.

  • The Connoisseur (3 Min, Comedy/Horror, Dir. Eric Morgret): You've been invited to a very special wine tasting.

  • Hey… it’s me! (8 Min, Romance/Comedy, Dir. Brittney Cash): While preparing for a date, a severe case of deja vu sends a young woman down the rabbit hole of boyfriends past.

  • The Art, The Artist & The Enthusiast (3 Min, Narrative/Poetry, Dir. Nathan Abia Lawer-Yolar): A motion picture questioning the viewer about their relationship to art, process and consumption

Seven shorts, seven faves, seven chances to celebrate our filmmaking community. All the filmmakers with be with us for the screening + Q&A, so grab a friend and come help us send off 2025 on a high note!

Thursday, December 4th @ NW Film Forum | Doors at 6:30pm, Film at 7:00pm

Our Truth to Fiction Series closes out the year with Derek Jarman’s final- and most daring- cinematic statement BLUE. Over a lush soundscape pulsing against a purely blue screen, Jarman lays bare his physical and spiritual state in a narration about his life, his struggle with AIDS and his encroaching blindness, BLUE is by turns poignant, amusing, poetic and philosophical.

This screening is presented in partnership with the Seattle Documentary Association and the Northwest Film Forum. SFS Newsletter subscribers can get discounted tickets for this screening by using the code SFSBLUE at check out.

EDUCATION

Wednesdays | SFS Discord @ 7:00-8:30pm

Our Film Discussion Group will finish out 2025 with our first-ever series on a trilogy of films designed to dazzle and delight through heist and slight of hand. The NOW YOU SEE ME trilogy will cover all three films in this Magician-centric series. We’ll wrap out our year with a field trip to see the series’ latest entry NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON’T. The full list of films covered will include:

  • Wed. November 5th | Now You See Me (2013, Dir. Louis Leterrier)

  • Thurs. November 13th | Now You See Me 2 (2016, Dir. Jon M. Chu)

  • Wed. November 19th | Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (2025, Dir. Ruben Fleischer) - Field Trip!

All meetings (with the exception of the last one) will take place on the Seattle Film Society Discord server.

November 11th| SFS Discord @ 7:30pm

Our Screenwriting Group continues! Meetings are bi-weekly on our Discord channel and we are always looking for new submissions! Scripts can be submitted through our website. 

Although the group normally meets on 1st and 3rd Tuesdays, this month we’re only meeting on the second Tuesday, November 11th, and it will be our last for the year. We’ll be reading The Summa by Levi Sweeney.

SELECTED EVENTS

ALUMNI NEWS

Jack Chakerian (LO #1, 16) + Molly Muse (LO #1 ,#12, #18) + Geena Pietromonaco (LO #2, #12)

Jack, Molly, and Geena were all recently selected as recipients of Washington Filmworks Small Budget Production Initiative. Jack’s feature film The Absence of Violet is set to begin production in Port Townsend early next year. Geena and Molly’s film Christmas Popup is currently raising financing with an eye toward a January/February production. The latter project was also recently selected as a fiscally sponsored project through the Northwest Film Forum, meaning all donations to the film are tax deductible.

Tommy Heffernan | LO #5, IF #4

Filmmaking dynamo Tommy Heffernan recently released four new short films onto his YouTube channel after each completed extensive festival runs. His short Focal Plane was also recently released via Film Shortage and has garnered over 1500 views as of this writing. Tommy continues his workhorse ways, as he is also currently deep into editing the upcoming feature film he DP’d this past summer, Wild Ragerz.

Justin Robert Vinall | LO#5, #16, #22 + In Focus #1

Justin’s newest short film, the proof of concept cosmic horror film Stargazer, continues to scare up a host of festival screenings and awards. Most recently, the film was selected for the Tri-Cities International Film Festival and local favorite Bleedingham, where it took home four awards including Best Film. Congrats Justin!

THE BUSINESS OF FILM

With the release of Wicked: For Good just a few weeks away, I recently came across this interview with Wicked editor Myron Kerstein that I felt was particularly insightful. Kerstein was an experienced editor even before tackling Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the legendary Broadway production, having worked on films like Garden State, Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, Fame, and Little Fockers. Even with that experience under his belt, Kerstein doesn’t hide the fact that cutting Wicked was one of the most challenging experiences of his career:

Musicals are the hardest thing I could ever cut, because there’s just so many balls in the air. Just technically, there are many layers of things that can go wrong as far as the instrumentals, ensembles or different takes of live vocals. On top of all that, I have all these CG animals singing and monkeys flying. There’s a lot to manage, and at the same time there’s the ultimate goal of making it feel like one cohesive musical in itself. If you pull the yarn, the whole ball unravels. 

RESOURCES + TOOLS

Local Resource | Seattle Creates

Seattle Creates is a creative workforce development initiative designed to fuel the creative economy. Their aim is to empower local talent with the skills, connections, and opportunities needed to thrive in Seattle’s dynamic creative economy.

Franklin Leonard is a name that should be familiar to anyone in the world of Screenwriting. In addition to founding The Blacklist, he also runs a personal newsletter where he shares long-form writing on culture, power, and storytelling.

Free Tool | Handbrake

Handbrake is an open-source tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. It’s also multi-platform and works across Windows, Mac, or Linux.

SFS STAFF RECS

This month, we’ve got a Staff Rec from SFS Administrator Wes Klingele

This is for you, customer service workers.

2025 has been a year of incredible, scary, and thoughtful changes in my personal life. Usually, the winds of change can be unpredictable and damaging, but this year has been one of slow, steady, beautiful growth and transitions. One of these transitions that still hasn’t fully hit me yet is the end of my time at my café that I have worked at for three very interesting and fun years at the end of October. The closing of my job is in the same timeframe as me returning to school to pursue the next phase of my education and career, and there is a good chance I am never going to see the walls of customer service again as I enter this next chapter in my life.

As I look back on my ten years of being a barista, I’ve been exposed to many environments dedicated to the craft of making coffee. And one of the delights of the past year was discovering a new café near Broadway, called Phê on Life, just a hop skip and a jump away from Cal Anderson Park. Phê is a Vietnamese café that has a special claim to fame for their incredible matcha, which they quickly ran out of shortly after opening since their matcha is sourced from actual farms in Japan, and they have to get new shipments. It’s become something of a Capitol Hill staple since it opened, and it’s easy to find considering the Sunday lines stretch outside the café and around the block. Rest assured, these are some of the fastest, most dedicated baristas I’ve ever seen. The interior is warm and inviting, with wonderfully made pots and wispy plants adorning the walls behind the bar. Phê has been a special constant in my life during a year of transition, and you owe it to yourselves to give this new café a visit. The line is worth it.

My order (and the best coffee I’ve ever personally had): the Phê Kẹo, an iced coffee made with caramelly milk, cold foam and topped with honeycomb toffee bites. The trick is to dip the honeycomb bites in the foam and eat them like little cookies. If you don’t believe coffee is an art, you will after having had this drink. 

Thanks for reading! See you in January!

Got questions, suggestions, or news? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at [email protected].

Don’t forget, we’re a volunteer-run project under the fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization (Shun Pike) so you can always: