Our comprehensive guide to the Seattle International Film Festival should go live later this evening, but I’ve got a few early tips to whet your appetite. From my introduction to the guide:

If you’re thinking about a weeklong pass, the first week of the festival seems especially packed with gems, including this year’s low-key Sundance discovery Ballast; The Last Mistress, Catherine Breillat’s exciting venture into period filmmaking; The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin’s superb followup to Head-On; Jia Zhang-ke’s semi-recent feature Still Life; and Casting a Glance, a new landscape film by experimental filmmaker James Benning. We also adored the lower-profile entries The Pope’s Toilet; Continental, A Film Without Guns; Fantastic Parasuicides; Boy A; Chris & Don: A Love Story; and more.

To that list I’d also add The Fall (which opens in Seattle next week), The Red Awn, Before the Rains (which also opens in Seattle next week), Elite Squad, All Will Be Well, My Effortless Brilliance (which is a conflict of interest! Former Stranger film editor Sean Nelson is in it. But our East Coast freelance writer Michael Atkinson, who’s never met Sean, confirms it’s worth seeing), and… oh, that’s enough for now.

I’ve just been scouring Week 2 for Stranger Suggests possibilities, though, and that stretch is looking pretty dire. ShortsFest—an all-shorts weekend featuring one or two local films in almost every program (the better to fill seats with, my dear)—makes it pretty easy to skip SIFF Cinema entirely for a few days; and some of our least favorite movies in the festival (Ben X, One Hundred Nails, Young People Fucking, Magnus, Garden Party) are screening then. There are certainly worthwhile films scattered throughout the week, but individual tickets are probably a better choice.