Seattle Film Festival Opens Full Time Theater
Written by: FFT Webmaster | August 17th, 2011
The Seattle International Film Festival has announced that it has taken over The Uptown Theater, one of Seattle’s oldest movie houses, to house a year-round cinematheque. The theater, which closed last November, hails from the 1920s when it was a single screen movie palace. In the 1980s, it was turned into a triplex. The Festival and its Film Society have leased the theater for the next five years, using all three of the screens for what it is dubbing SIFF Cinema at the Uptown. Programming there will begin Oct. 21, the same day SIFF officially opens a single-screen theater at the newly opened SIFF Film Center on the Seattle Center campus. “We are so excited,” said Carl Spence, the Festival’s Artistic Director. The theater had been part of the AMC Theater chain for the past number of years but was closed down by the chain because of lagging attendance. Spence and SIFF Managing Director Deborah Person emphasized that a multiplex chain’s business model is very different from that of a film festival showing art-house fare year round — and that having four available screens in a range of sizes (from 100 to 500 seaters) will make it much easier to present a wide array of programming. The theater will also house much of the programming of the Festival itself,
held every year from late May to mid-June. For more information, visit: www.siff.net