Seattle Calling: Inside SIFF 2026’s Mix of Kafka, Midnight Madness and Space Needle Spectacle
From Boots Riley’s opening night satire to Olivia Wilde’s A24 closer, the festival’s 52nd edition offers 203 films, 18 world premieres and a program built for discovery.
The 52nd Seattle International Film Festival runs from May 7 to May 17, 2026. SIFF is the kind of festival where one day you can end up with a Czech Kafka film, the next with a wild midnight horror title, and the third with a documentary that turns into a real-life event in the city.
Seattle International Film Festival enters its 52nd edition this year and remains one of the biggest festival organisms in North America. The lineup includes 203 films from 71 countries and regions: 66 narrative features, 34 documentaries, 98 short films, 3 archival titles and 2 secret screenings. There will also be 18 world premieres, 12 North American premieres and 10 U.S. premieres. The festival takes place in cinemas and other venues across Seattle.
A festival that still believes in discovery
Technically, SIFF is divided into competitions, thematic sections and geographic strands. The program includes Official Competition, Documentary Competition, New American Cinema, New Directors, Ibero-American Competition and short film competitions, alongside sections such as Culinary Cinema, Face the Music, cINeDIGENOUS, Northwest Connections, Archival Films, Alternate Cinema and probably my most dangerous weakness: WTF: Wild, Terrifying, Fantastic!
67% of the films do not yet have U.S. distribution, and 62% of the feature films come from first- or second-time directors.
Opening Night: Boots Riley and professional shoplifters
The festival opens with I Love Boosters, the new film from Boots Riley, screening on May 7 at the Paramount Theatre. After Sorry to Bother You, Riley returns with a story about a group of professional shoplifters who take aim at a ruthless fashion mogul. The cast is a festival billboard in itself: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle and Demi Moore. The screening will be followed by an opening night party at Cannonball Arts.
The Czech connection: Kafka returns through Seattle
For Czech audiences, the most visible title in the lineup is Franz by Agnieszka Holland. The film is listed as a co-production between the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, France and Turkey, and SIFF presents it in the World Cinema section. It is a 127-minute portrait of Franz Kafka that, according to the festival description, avoids the path of a conventional biography and instead moves through fictional interviews, dives into Kafka’s writing and a look at the modern “Kafka industry” in Prague.
The film stars, among others, Jenovéfa Boková and Ivan Trojan. The screenplay was written by Marek Epstein and Agnieszka Holland, and the producer is Šárka Cimbalová. The film is in German and Czech with English subtitles, and SIFF will screen it on May 8 and May 10 at SIFF Cinema Downtown.
WTF: the section where the program stops behaving
The WTF: Wild, Terrifying, Fantastic! section is one of the main reasons SIFF interests me this year. The festival describes it as a journey into the strangest, most unsettling and most absurd corners of the planet. The lineup includes titles such as Camp, Fifteen, The Furious, Gaua, Obsession and The Restoration at Grayson Manor.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor has the kind of synopsis that sounds like a mix of gothic horror, deranged black comedy and a film you maybe should not watch after a long festival day: a spoiled Irish playboy loses his hands, and his mother replaces them with mechanical ones controlled by his darker subconscious.
Then there is WTF! Nightmare Fuel, a 96-minute block of short films that SIFF describes as ranging from unsettling to disgusting. For me, this is exactly the kind of section that tests whether a festival is only playing it safe, or whether it is willing to show films where the audience may leave the cinema laughing nervously rather than giving a polite standing ovation.
A special event in the section is a screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street with a live soundtrack by Seattle DJ NicFit, which SIFF presents on May 12.
The Ascent: when the festival escapes the cinema and climbs the Space Needle
The documentary The Ascent follows Mandy Horvath, a bilateral amputee athlete attempting to climb Mount Kilimanjaro without prosthetics. During the festival, Horvath will attempt to climb the 832 stairs inside the Space Needle as a charity climb supporting cancer research and awareness. The attempt is planned for the morning of May 8, weather permitting.
The Ascent screens on May 9 at the PACCAR IMAX Theater and on May 10 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Directors Edward Drake and Scott Veltri, along with Mandy Horvath, are expected to attend both screenings.
(You can already read the movie review and interview with Mandy and directors from my SXSW coverage.)
Seattle also wants its own stories
SIFF is also working strongly with local context this year. The Stranger highlights, for example, Sky Hopinka’s documentary Powwow People, filmed at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle’s Discovery Park, as well as Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine, a documentary touching on the current obsession with artificial intelligence and local technology culture.
Closing Night: Olivia Wilde, A24 and a neighbourly dinner gone wrong
The closing night film will be The Invite, a new A24 film directed by Olivia Wilde. Wilde also stars in the film alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. SIFF presents it on May 17 at SIFF Cinema Downtown, where Wilde is expected to attend and take part in a post-screening Q&A.
SIFF 2026 feels like a classic audience and press festival program that is worth breaking down by mood: one film for the Czech connection, one for horror madness, one for local Seattle, one for a documentary physical feat and one completely blind. And maybe that is better than a festival that already knows in advance what we are supposed to admire.