No news, SIFF is keeping me too busy!

But here’s what we’ve got in the paper this week.

Sandi Cioffi writes about being detained in Nigeria during the filming of a documentary about oil production there. (Sweet Crude screened in a work-in-progress version at last year’s SIFF.) From her feature:

At one point, after sleeping for two hours, I was woken for interrogation. I was questioned four times total—once for six hours. A constant feature of interrogation is the fear of what might come if I failed to give them what they wanted, though I never knew what that actually was. I tried to think of some of the questions as really bad moments from film-fest audience Q&As, just to keep my sanity—it helped.

Opening this week:

Charles Mudede reviews the SIFF ‘08 alum Before the Rains (“Fidel Castro, Kenneth Kaunda, Robert Mugabe, Julius Nyerere—all were heroes during the war for self-determination, and villains during the period of independence. The promises made before the war [free health care, increased freedoms, better education, fairer distribution of wealth] were all broken not long after the war ended. The breaking of the promises ultimately led to the betrayal: the moment when the revolutionary became a dictator, the moment when the leader of the oppressed became worse than the overthrown oppressor. In our post–Cold War period, this betrayal we instantly recognize and condemn. But there is another, earlier betrayal that is mostly forgotten, and is surprisingly the subject of a new film from India, Before the Rains: the betrayal of the progressive colonist”).

Bradley Steinbacher writes further on The Fall, which also opened at this year’s SIFF (“Every frame has been meticulously crafted; every scene bursts with imagination. The primary colors and absurdly exotic locations pop from the screen, and the story’s many false starts, quick rewrites, and major plot holes perfectly match the nature of a wild bedtime story cooked up on the fly. It’s when matters return to unimaginative reality, however, that [Tarsem] Singh’s film begins to fray”).

Brendan Kiley really likes the new Doug Pray doc, Surfwise (it’s a “a case study of a uniquely American eccentric who treated recreation as necessity and the beach as a frontier”).

I finally succeeded in posting my interview with Errol Morris, but thanks to torture-averse Seattle filmgoers, the movie is no longer in theaters. Damn it! It’s good, I swear. The book based on Morris’s research for the film is out now, though. It’s been getting some impressive reviews.

And in Concessions this week, Lindy West discusses the now-somewhat-infamous SIFF opening night.

Limited Runs may be found by browsing our exhaustive Movie Times search. Reviews this week include Bradley Steinbacher on Woman on the Beach (“a smart, moody dramedy”) at the Grand Illusion and me on Northwest Film Forum’s Lagerfeld Confidential (“the only interesting thing about the film is how unflattering it is to the filmmaker”). If you’re still into the fashion movie conceit—NWFF is doing ‘em all week—I’d try Yves Saint Laurent: 5 Avenue Marceau 75116 Paris, which is about an old-school atelier just a year before it closed forever. Also, I can’t review Dennis James’s amazing organ performances before they occur, but the Paramount’s Silent Movie Mondays series is opening a Douglas Fairbanks series this week, and When Clouds Roll By (1919) has got to be the most eccentric and interesting film in the series. Now why did SIFF have to program Night Tide for the exact same time slot? Megan Seling also reviews Sex and the City in this cramped little space, because the studio refused to screen it early enough for us to review in the print edition. But that’s okay. You pretty much know what to expect anyway.

For new SIFF reviews, schedule revisions, reports, and gossip, keep current at thestranger.com/siff.