SIFF tickets are on sale today to the general public—the web site’s a little pokey today, but if you have patience, you can buy ‘em online here. Other outlets are at Pacific Place (second floor kiosk), SIFF Cinema, and SIFF HQ (400 Ninth Ave N in South Lake Union).

Our full guide doesn’t come out for another week and a half, but I’ll do some advance tips on the Slog every so often.

Fond of UK gangsters? You are so in luck. In addition to a screening of Sexy Beast (here’s a vintage Stranger review) introduced by Sir Ben Kingsley himself, there’s an archival screening of the 1947 Robert Hamer film It Always Rains on Sunday and a brand-new documentary about East End toughs called The End.

Fascinated by China’s Three Gorges Dam project? The festival has both a narrative feature and a doc about by the social upheaval caused by its construction: Jia Zhang-ke’s much-admired Still Life and the new Canadian-made doc Up the Yangtze.

Did you attend Translations: Seattle’s Transgender Film Festival this weekend and still haven’t had enough? One of the best docs in SIFF this year is Be Like Others, a look at the differential treatment of transsexuals and gays by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Though it doesn’t push any one conclusion, it does bring up the frightening possibility that garden-variety gay teens are getting their dicks chopped off because clerics and doctors tell their parents that the Qu’ran is totally OK with sex change operations, but that homosexuality is punishable by death. There’s also an intriguing narrative film from Argentina called XXY about a pubescent hermophrodite being pressured to choose a sex.