The Grand Illusion

This feature-length “mixtape” unearths and reintroduces a stunning, singular body of work by the enigmatic Kati Kelli, an outsider video artist and digital native whose subversive online uploads push at the seams of the digital form. Curated by Jane Schoenbrun (writer/director of WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR and I SAW THE TV GLOW) and Kati's widower, Jordan Wippell.

For nearly a decade before her passing in 2019, Kati ran “Girl Internet Show,” a YouTube channel, parasocial experiment, and epically deranged one-woman universe built from scratch in her bedroom. This presentation features a lovingly curated selection of Kati’s online work, unreleased videos, and her first (and final) short film opus, "Total Body Removal Surgery".

“…a surreal, fun, and disorienting 79 minutes.” Siddhant Adlakha, Mashable

“…some of this decade’s funniest, most cutting, and truly most bizarre works of art.” GQ Magazine

“…one of the strangest, funniest, and [most] heartbreaking viewing experiences I have ever had… practically perfect in every way.” Tori Potenza, Movie Jawn

An early access screening, featuring exclusive bonus content, of the new horror/comedy from director/co-writer Meredith Alloway and producer Diablo Cody.

Free Eden employee Apple (Lilli Reinhart) secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall store after hours – with fellow fruits Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp). But, when new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung) challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.

Official selection SXSW 2026 (World Premiere)

25th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's monumental production of Stanley Kubrick's unrealized science fiction dream project; a bold, humanistic vision that pays tribute to Kubrick’s aesthetic while also remaining a quintessential Spielberg film.

This high-tech Pinocchio story—about a robot child (Haley Joel Osment) on a quest to become a real boy after being abandoned by his adopted parents—is one of Spielberg’s most challenging and visually astonishing films, featuring one unforgettable sight after another, and an ending that will forever lodge in your memory drive.

“Deeply thoughtful and thoroughly fascinating.” Todd McCarthy, Variety

“One of the most poetic and haunting allegories about the cinema that I can think of… It’s also the most philosophical film in Kubrick’s canon, the most intelligent in Spielberg’s.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Twenty-fifth encore screening! The Beavers are bringing the March Madness!

Our friends at Central Cinema are generously helping us keep the beavers gnawing away while we search for a new home. 60% of ticket sales go to our relocation fund! This month marks two years since we first unleashed the Beavers on Seattle!

In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.

“Starts strange, gets stranger, and yet remains resolutely adorable… embraces the defiant glee of art cinema and distills it into something so thoroughly pure and sincere that it is surely hard not to fall in love with it.” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alliance of Women Film Journalists

“It’s sure to develop a significant cult following with its unique mix of silent-era slapstick, animation elements, theme-park-style critter costumes, and general air of inspired absurdity.” Dennis Harvey, Variety

“Steroidally swollen with gags and smarts.” Guy Maddin

Directed, narrated, and written by legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog, GHOST ELEPHANTS is a lyrical tale of survival, reconnection, and the enduring power of ancient knowledge in the face of modern loss.

In the mist-covered highlands of Angola, deep within its forests, a mystery endures: the elusive ghost elephants of Lisima, the potential living descendants of the largest land mammal ever recorded. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and leader of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project, is determined to prove their existence.

In order to find these elusive elephants, Boyes and fellow National Geographic Explorer Kerllen Costa have teamed up with three KhoiSan master trackers: Xui, Xui Dawid, and Kobus. Refugees from a war-torn past who have faced considerable marginalization in southern Africa, the trackers return to their ancestral lands to succeed where advanced technology could not.

Stick around after the movie for a pre-recorded Q&A with Werner Herzog, Steve Boyes, Producer Ariel Leon Isacovitch and Executive Producer Brian Nugent, moderated by filmmaker Kirsten Johnson.

“Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.” Lisa Kennedy, The New York Times

4/4 stars! “It’s a portrait of obsession that, while gentler than some of Herzog’s other works, is mesmerizing from the first moment to the last, yet another title of note in what remains one of the most incredible filmographies of our time.” Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com

In honor of the Grand Illusion's 22nd anniversary as a volunteer-operated non-profit, we're screening a movie that is very much our bag: the wonderfully weird cult classic, KIN-DZA-DZA!, beautifully restored by Mosfilm and distributed by the fine folks at Deaf Crocodile. Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa SOLARIS directing Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you’ll come close to the existential strangeness of this delightfully loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Two average Muscovites – a plainspoken construction foreman (Stanislav Lyubshin) and a Georgian violin student (Levan Gabriadze) – encounter an odd man on the street who asks, “Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?” In a flash, they’re teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin–Dza–Dza galaxy – a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative (their main words are “ku” for good and “kyu” for very bad) and where common wooden matches are tremendously valuable.

A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, and Jodorowsky’s never-made DUNE, where alien cultures are even more haphazard and WTF than our own; the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction no matter what political system you’re living under – or what planet you’re living on.

In Russian with English subtitles.

“…possibly the most underrated science fiction film of the past 50 years.” Joel Blackledge, Little White Lies

“Bittersweet satire posing as postapocalyptic science fiction, Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-dza-dza! has as much to say about today as it does the last gasps of the Soviet Union.” Budd Wilkins, Slant

The long-awaited animated feature from sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know.

A zany crew of misfits blasts off to Mars, only to find they've been duped by a scheming billionaire. Chaos ensues as they face bizarre challenges and unexpected surprises on their wacky interplanetary journey. Featuring the voices of Sam Brown, Darren Trumeter, Timmy Williams, Zach Cregger (writer/director of BARBARIAN and WEAPONS), and the late Trevor Moore. Written by Cregger, Brown, and Moore.

“The pacing, stakes, and dialogue, despite all of them being coated in absolute absurdity, stand on their own and delivers one of the best full-length comedic feature scripts, animated or otherwise, that I’ve seen in a very long time.” Liz Wiest, Movie Jawn

Shot on vibrant 35mm with striking 16mm sequences and directed by Julie Pacino in her feature debut, I LIVE HERE NOW is a haunting, dreamlike psychodrama about identity, trauma, and the fragile line between memory and madness.

Struggling actress Rose (Lucy Fry) finds her life upended by unexpected news and is suddenly forced to confront a future she never thought possible, just as a major career opportunity with a top agent comes into view. Things spiral further when her casual boyfriend brings his overbearing mother (Sheryl Lee) into the fold, pushing Rose to the brink.

She flees to The Crown Inn, a crumbling motel at the edge of nowhere, where time fractures and reality bends. Haunted by sleep paralysis, splintered memories, and eerie motel dwellers (including the enigmatic Lillian, played by Madeline Brewer), Rose begins to unravel. To move forward, she must confront the buried truth of her past that her body has never forgotten.

“A surreal descent into hysteria makes way for a story so inherently feminine that it could birth an army. I Live Here Now might look lavishly pretty, but it houses a powerful message that warrants screaming from the rooftops.” Kat Hughes, THN

“…one of the most self-assured first features I’ve seen in recent memory… a film so specific yet so universal, a tale you can feel resonate in your bone marrow, shaking awake the darkest parts of yourself you’ve kept buried for years… Pacino bears her soul here and you can feel it pulsating in every gorgeous frame. If this is Pacino just getting started, I cannot wait to see what’s next.” Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

John Woo's jaw-dropping bullet ballet classic, newly restored!

When an expert assassin (Chow Yun-Fat) accidentally blinds a nightclub singer (Sally Yeh), he chooses to retire after one last job to pay for his unintended victim's sight-restoring operation. But when he's double-crossed, he reluctantly joins forces with a rogue policeman (Danny Lee) to make things right.

In Cantonese with English subtitles.

Special live intro from local Hong Kong genre film connoisseur and one of the programmers of the Seattle Film Society, Patrick McFarland.

“It starts over the top then blasts through the roof. It takes your breath away!” J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“…The Killer is John Woo at his pinnacle.” Mark Dinning, Empire

Two masterworks from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, released theatrically for the first time in the US!

A masterclass in escalating dread and shocking violence, CHIME reaffirms Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of modern horror’s most innovative and unpredictable visionaries. During a class, culinary instructor Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) witnesses the suicide of a young student (Seiichi Kohinata), driven to insanity by what he claims is a chiming sound that controls his mind. Soon, Matsuoka begins hearing it, too, and descends into a mental abyss that warps his perception of reality and gives vent to his darkest impulses. Expertly blending psychological portraiture and hallucinatory mystery, Kurosawa offers a chilling depiction of madness that interrogates the very stability of our everyday existence, with the director’s patented creeping tracking shots and complex sound design fashioning an immersively terrifying and unnerving cinematic experience. CHIME will only be available in theaters and will never be released on streaming platforms.

SERPENT’S PATH (1998) is a dark gangland thriller with philosophical overtones. Obsessed with avenging his young daughter’s murder, yakuza subordinate Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa) recruits Nijima (Sho Aikawa), a brilliant yet strangely detached math teacher, to help carry out a scheme to kidnap and torture the man allegedly responsible. But the plan goes awry when their target, Otsuki (Yurei Yanagi), fingers another mobster as the mastermind behind Miyashita’s tragedy. As the two partners ascend the yakuza chain of command in search of the true culprit, Miyashita and Nijima follow the cold, calculating logic of revenge, descending into a moral abyss from which they may never surface. Featuring Kurosawa’s patented long takes and his claustrophobic arrangement of space, SERPENT’S PATH is one of the legendary director’s most chilling investigations into the endless cycle of violence and the evil that lodges in every heart. Kurosawa would go on to remake the story in 2024, but the original, now newly restored, remains as shocking and timeless as ever.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

“Chime is great not because it refuses interpretation or analysis, but because it welcomes it, secure in the knowledge—at once apt and hopelessly bleak—that coherence is of little consolation in a contingent universe.” Adam Nayman, Film Comment

“Serpent’s Path is as challenging and rewarding, not to mention gripping, as anything [Kurosawa] has made.” Tom Mes, Midnight Eye

The Grand Illusion and Central Cinema welcome you to freek land. Roll up, roll up, sad normies! Feast your trembling eyes on the bonkers spectacle that is FREAKED, the delightfully absurd 1993 cult comedy from the mischievous minds of Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Tom Stern (Idiot Box).

In this gleefully unhinged satire of celebrity culture and corporate greed, Winter stars as Ricky Coogan, a washed-up child actor who agrees to endorse a toxic product and is transformed into a carnival “freak” by the deranged tycoon Elijah C. Skuggs. The inspired ensemble includes an early fan-favorite appearance by Norm Macdonald and an uncredited, nearly unrecognizable Keanu Reeves under heavy prosthetics, alongside Brooke Shields, Bobcat Goldthwait, William Sadler, Deep Roy, Morgan Fairchild, and even Mr. T.

Wildly underappreciated upon its initial release by 20^th Century Fox, the film found new life on VHS and late-night cable, earning a devoted following for its anarchic humor, elaborate practical effects by the Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space), and fearless weirdness. Decades later, FREAKED stands as a testament to unfiltered creative ambition within the studio system. Experience this magnificently strange cult classic in a glorious new restoration.

“So overflowing with anarchic invention that it holds up against such certified classics as Duck Soup and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Glenn Kenny, Entertainment Weekly

“Attempting to compare Freaked to any other movie would prove an exercise in futility.” Film Threat

A long-lost oddity of underground cinema and a notorious fixture in outsider film lore, SCARLET WARNING 666 was lovingly restored after decades of obscurity and is celebrated (and derided) as a bewildering example of independent psychedelia and eccentric ambition.

SCARLET WARNING 666 stars cult auteur Palmer Rockey in multiple roles — including twin brothers trapped in an unfathomable tale of Satanic skullduggery, bizarre occult rituals, and “demonic assassination” on a country estate. The film’s narrative logic dissolves into a collage of ritual scenes, disjointed character arcs, and surreal confrontations with the infernal, as the characters grapple with forces they barely comprehend in an increasingly chaotic rural nightmare. Palmer Rockey's vanity project defies conventional storytelling and embraces its own idiosyncratic creation mythology — alternately dismissed as “the worst movie ever made” and cherished as a cult curio.

Grindhouse Releasing has painstakingly restored SCARLET WARNING 666 from the original camera negative, going beyond the limits of sanity to preserve every agonizing frame of Palmer Rockey’s cinematic tribulation.

Select audience reactions/reviews from the January 2026 world premiere of the new restoration at the Texas Theatre in Dallas:

“A movie for those who always wondered what Ben from Blue Velvet got up to in his spare time. The work of a genuinely unwell mind, possibly the ultimate Dallas-shot trashterpiece. Soundtrack unironically slaps.”

“Kinda like if Neil Breen made A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. The psychosis oozes off the screen at every moment.”

“The product of a demented, disjointed psyche… This is TRULY one for the sickos. A masochist’s delight.”