Looking Back: The SIFF Archives Are Now Available Online

As we ring in SIFFTY Years of Surprising Cinema with this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, we’ve been indulging in a healthy dose of nostalgia, looking back on photos from past Opening Night Parties, wearing vintage SIFF merch to the office, rewatching winners of the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Film... After all, it isn’t every year that you celebrate half a century of anything, let alone incredible cinema from around the world. In addition to our stellar lineup of 261 films and our fabulous Tribute events, we’re honoring SIFF’s history this year by making the Seattle International Film Festival Archives available online.

The SIFF Archives are the culmination of nearly two years of compiling, digitizing, and organizing materials from SIFF’s past. You’ll find interactive flipbooks of each Festival’s catalog, photo and video assets, full lists of the feature films that we played each year, and other highlights. Learning about the history of Seattle’s film scene has never been easier, and it’s all publicly available—for researchers and the casually interested alike.

The SIFF Archives are indebted to grant funding from 4Culture’s Heritage Collections Care program, which allowed SIFF to contract an archivist to develop a preservation plan and funded the cost of digitizing the Festival catalogs, as well as hours upon hours of hard work from our digital marketing team as well as volunteers. We are thrilled to finally share this milestone achievement with all you curious cinephiles!

Explore the Archives