50 Years of SIFF: Your Sister’s Sister
February 25 - March 10, 2024
Hometown heroine Lynn Shelton’s fourth feature and follow-up to the acclaimed Humpday is an engaging, humor-infused relationship drama about how the sibling and romantic relationships of three people are redefined over the course of a weekend island getaway. The cast (Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass) excels under Shelton’s signature method of marrying improvisation and scripted dialog. BETH BARRETT CHOICE.
Seattle International Film Festival 2012 selection - Opening Night. Your Sister’s Sister marked the first time in the history of SIFF that work by a Seattle-based filmmaker opened the festival.
OPEN CAPTION SCREENING - For all Your Sister's Sister screenings
Related Event
50 Years of SIFF - Lynn Shelton Tribute Screening: Your Sister's Sister
Intro and extended Q&A on February 25 from producers Mel Eslyn and Megan Griffiths, cinematographer Ben Kasulke, production designer John Lavin, and others who worked on the film. The Q&A will be moderated by Lacey Leavitt Gray. Q&A included with admission.
“What can I say about Lynn Shelton, and Your Sister’s Sister? Lynn had a command of the story like few directors did, and that understanding of where the story was going to go allowed her actors to live in it, to take their characters deeper, and to create new avenues into Lynn’s vision. Her love and care for everyone involved with the production comes through in every frame of this film: the relationships, the humor, the free range of emotional vulnerability that makes even the darkest moment somehow mean more, and feel a little lighter for having happened.”--Beth Barrett, SIFF Artistic Director
Hometown heroine Lynn Shelton’s fourth feature and follow-up to the acclaimed Humpday is an engaging, humor-infused relationship drama, shot entirely in the Northwest. A year after his brother’s death, Jack (Mark Duplass) is alternately emotionally wobbly and outright volatile. When he makes a scene at a memorial party, good friend Iris (Emily Blunt) arranges for Mark to take a solitary retreat at her father’s cabin on a Puget Sound island, theorizing this isolation will offer closure and spiritual relief. When he arrives at the cabin, however, he finds not solitude but Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), herself nursing a wounded heart and a bottle of tequila. After several shots and some slurred commiseration, romantic complications unfurl, growing in complexity when Iris arrives at the cabin unannounced the next morning. Shelton’s maturation as a filmmaker is on full display here; the stellar cast excels under her signature method of marrying improvisation and scripted dialogue, resulting in a pitch-perfect comedy of errors. Though ripe for love-triangle trappings, Your Sister’s Sister offers an uncontrived navigation of romantic rivalry and sibling relationships, rendered with equal parts pathos, humor, and intelligence.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
- Director: Lynn Shelton
- Principal Cast: Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia
- Country: USA
- Year: 2011
- Running Time: 90 min.
- Producer: Steven Schardt
- Screenplay: Lynn Shelton
- Cinematographers: Benjamin Kasulke
- Editors: Nat Sanders
- Music: Vinny Smith
- Filmography: We Go Way Back (2006), What the Funny (2008), My Effortless Brilliance (2008), Humpday (2009), Touchy Feely (2013), Laggies (2014), Outside In (2017), Sword of Trust (2019)
- Language: English
- US Distributor: Sundance Selects
- International Sales: Submarine Entertainment