Editor

The nine-day event showcases the best in web series, storytelling apps, and other Transmedia, as well as underground and off-beat independent film, filling a need for boundary-pushing artists whose work is not exhibited at more traditional festivals. 

May 1-10, 2015
 

STIFF presents its 11th festival with a new name and exciting new program. Newly re-dubbed as the “Seattle TRANSMEDIA and Independent Film Festival,” STIFF 2015 will offer an impressive slate of web series, video game concepts, storytelling apps for mobile phone and tablet, and social media narratives in addition to some of the best truly independent films from around the world.  This year’s festival will take place May 1-9 in six venues, including three new spaces, and a multi level gallery space where non-traditional work can best be exhibited.  

Until last year (2014) the festival was known as the Seattle True Independent Film Festival. Says STIFF Director of Programming Will Chase, “We noticed there wasn’t a home for a rapidly growing genre of storytelling and interactive experiences, and we wanted to help fill that void. Transmedia is part of the future of independent filmmaking, and the time has come to put these works on display in their many forms.” Chase intends for the festival to help artists build an audience, and encourage them to continue telling their stories across one medium and then another as the needs of the story grows and changes, rather than confining them to one format to suit festival exhibition.

The question “What is Transmedia?” has been cropping up increasingly over the past few years, and STIFF is making its move to become one of very few festivals to display a curated selection of responses to that question. Always a champion of independent, local, underground, experimental and zero-budget films and filmmakers, the festival now opens its arms even wider to encompass alternative and emerging forms of storytelling.

“We showcase artists and storytellers who are pushing the boundaries of their medium and working across multiple mediums to create memorable experiences for our audience,” says STIFF’s executive director, Tim Vernor.

Highlights include
 

• The world premiere of Seattle-based filmmaker Jen Marlowe’s “WitnessBahrain.” The documentary is a piercing look into Bahrain two years after the Arab Spring. Marlowe uncovered stories of doctors tortured for treating protesters, nurses treating injured youth at underground clinics, and the arrest of children and prominent human rights defenders. Marlowe entered Bahrain under false pretenses, filming clandestinely before being deported. The resulting guerilla-style documentary captures an intimate portrayal of Bahrain's uprising.
   

• Phoenix Run is a transmedia franchise consisting of a web series, a console/mobile video game, a comic book series, an interactive digital comic, and episodic online/mobile content. Set in a near post-pandemic future where superheroes and zombies exist, a street-smart smuggler takes a job to hijack a vaccine shipment, and finds himself in possession of an experimental serum that could cure the world’s Superhuman pandemic.

• Pirate Fishing is a ground-breaking interactive web game that allows the gamer to learn how to expose the multi-million dollar illegal fishing trade affecting West Africa’s poorest people. It’s based on a report by journalist Juliana Ruhfus “Pirate Fishing”, made for the Al Jazeera series People & Power, and has been nominated for the Royal Television Society Awards.

• Assent is an immersive documentary developed in the Unity game engine for theOculus Rift Virtual Reality headset. This autobiographical immersive documentary puts the user in the footsteps of creator Oscar Raby's father, who in 1973 was a 22-year-old army officer stationed in the north of Chile on the day when the Caravan of Death came to his regiment. Assent invites the user to witness that day through his father’s eyes.

Throughout the Festival, in addition to the sit-down cinema presentations of features, documentaries and shorts packages STIFF-goers love and expect, STIFF will showcase transmedia projects in gallery spaces, at interactive play centers, and during Festival parties and networking events.

Last year's event showcased a potent blend of over 130 films, plus alternative music happenings, wild parties, and after-hours shenanigans.

Join STIFF for the biggest achievements in independent, underground, off-beat, experimental, and cutting-edge film and new media, right here in Seattle.

Full schedule and tickets will be available at: www.trueindependent.org