Although I began as an ardent attendee, my involvement with the annual Scottsdale International Film Festival (SIFF) has grown with each passing year, right along with the festival that has since screened 200 films from more than 48 nations around the globe to 37,000 attendees since its inception in 2001. Utterly inspired by the humanistic outlet for theatergoers and the power of cinema as a tool for global understanding, my devotion to merely attending soon felt like a call to duty as I morphed into first a volunteer team supervisor before finding my footing as an official festival blogger for The Arizona Republic online, became the Festival Ambassador, grant writer, and film festival guide summary contributor and editor here in 2008 as we celebrate our eighth year.
Needless to say, when it comes to SIFF, I’m a bit biased and all the more excited by the incredible events slated for this year’s festival scheduled from October 3 through the 7th. Although despite an impressive lineup of unique offerings that enable SIFF’s mission to “use film to foster a meaningful understanding of the world’s cultures, lifestyles, religions” and provide a haven from the constant barrage of grim realities and inescapable truths for our loyal attendees, this year festival goers are in for quite a treat as a bonus screening is scheduled for Thursday, October 9.
With director Mike Leigh and actress Sally Hawkins scheduled to attend the Arizona premiere of their award-winning critical favorite Happy-Go-Lucky, which earned honors in Berlin, it adds the icing on the cake of our Sundance-favorite Opening Night kickoff Phoebe in Wonderland and Barry Levinson’s supremely funny Hollywood insider comedy What Just Happened? starring 
Robert De Niro that closes the fest. While these three titles are all English language, it’s always been Festival Director Amy Ettinger’s goal to emphasize the international in the festival’s title.
In fact, when our inaugural festival was scheduled to commence on September 28, 2001, little did our festival director, the Scottsdale community or the rest of the globe know that they would soon be waking up to a very different world on 9/11/01 with the horrifying events that shook our nation. And while the global climate seemed so dire, the SIFF worried that the last thing people would want to do just 17 days after 9/11 was to come to a theatre to see a film yet much to the surprise of the festival, “the community turned out in force at double seating capacity” and sadly, attendees had to be turned away. What better thing for our mourning population to do than to run to “embrace diversity rather than run from it”-- attendees noted to the festival director—in order to utilize cinema as a vital “looking glass into other cultures and ways of life.”
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