SBIFF Mandate: Roll Film, Repeat, Repeat…
Dense Film Program, Centered at the
New Five-Screen Film Center and Riviera Theatre,
Showcases Women Directors, World and U.S. Premieres
By Josef Woodard | February 5, 2025

Read more of our 2025 SBIFF cover story here.
As the SBIFF big top rolls into town, a 12-day affair versus the usual 10 in honor of the festival’s 40th anniversary, there are varying degrees of visibility at street level. The Arlington Theatre is home base for the steady flow of tribute evenings, home to the klieg lights and a rotating roster of celebrity marquee promises. Throngs of flags along State Street remind us of the festival’s presence as a dominant feature on the civic cultural calendar this time of year.
Meanwhile, down in the festival program trenches of the basement theater space of the newly anointed and acquired SBIFF Film Center, the real meat of the SBIFF enterprise unreels its program of screenings. Each day starts with breakfast, a k a the “Breakfast Club” screenings around the 8 a.m. hour, and ends late at night, in each of the Center’s five theaters. More screenings are being slotted, for the first time, up on the scenic hill where the SBIFF-run Riviera Theatre resides.
In the thicket of films this year, programmed by noted film critic Claudia Puig and her team, the list includes 33 world premieres, 74 U.S. premieres, and, notably, a ratio of 52 percent women directors (roughly mirroring the standard balance of genders in the human race). As usual here, the programming agenda takes care to foster SBIFF’s “international” status and forum.
Framing the film program this year are two French connected films — the U.S. premiere of director Laura Piani’s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life on opening night (Feb. 4) and Guillaume Senez’s A Missing Part (Une part manquante) on closing night, February 15.
Among the list of U.S. premieres of promise are My Fathers’ Daughter (Biru Unjárga), a coming-of-age story from the rarely spotlighted Sami culture in northern Norway; The Wolves Always Come at Night, a docufiction film about a Mongolian couple forced to go urban by climate change; and the domestic abuse–oriented Taiwanese film Yen and Ai-Lee. Also on the U.S. premiere front are films from Scandinavia, a strong point of focus in recent festival programs, including the Icelandic Top 10 Must (Topp 10 Möst), the Swedish film The Swedish Torpedo, and the Danish film The Quiet One.
Latin American entries range from the Colombian Skin in Spring to Mexico’s The Good Teacher and the Peruvian Mistura. From Eastern Europe come the Czech Our Lovely Pig Slaughter, the Bosnian documentary At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking (Ko će pokucati na vrata mog doma), and the Bulgarian film Triumph. And from countries not often accounted for in the festival’s “international” spectrum, there are the Indonesian Crocodile Tears, Bauryna Salu from Kazakhstan, the Nigerian Mothers of Chibok, and, from Egypt, Seeking a Haven for Mr. Rambo. Iran, long respected for its cinematic artistry and well-represented in past SBIFF, comes through with My Stolen Planet.
Documentaries piquing our interest include the Daryl Hannah–directed Coastal, Ai Weiwei’s Turandot, and Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself.
This is just a smattering of film offerings from a voluminous list, and geared more toward festivalgoers leaning more toward foreign titles. A healthy showing of American independent films, Canadian films, and U.K. films are also on view, for those preferring English-language cinema. Also on view are short film and animation programs, the Social Justice Award competition, the family-friendly “Mike’s Field Trip to the Movies,” and the 10-10-10 Student Screenwriting and Filmmaking Mentorship and Competition, with films shot in 10 days screening at festival’s end.
SBIFF 2025 offers up a full slate of options, ready to be plunged into, passionately or casually, according to one’s time allotment and degree of film fanaticism. This fanatical reporter will be lost in film for 12 days, coming up for air after February 15 and rejoining the real world (versus the reel world) already in progress.
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