SpIFF offers cinematic smorgasbord

Now in its 17th year, the Spokane International Film Festival continues to revel in the unexpected, bringing in the kind of fare you would never dream of seeing on a typical multiplex screen. For a couple weeks in February, Spokane theaters fill up with foreign and independent movies, and the odds of seeing something that’s pedestrian or predictable are low.

There’s a refreshing diversity to SpIFF’s upcoming schedule, not only in terms of the genres on display – comedies, dramas, documentaries, period pieces, animated features, horror films – but the countries represented – you can see films from France, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Poland and Kosovo.

It’s also a great way to watch films that started getting buzz during the Cannes and Toronto festivals this time last year. While it might take awhile for Spokane to acquire some of the more esoteric movies from the festival circuit, it’s a wonder we get them at all: Where else in town but SpIFF could you see “Goodbye to Language,” French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard’s critically lauded experiment in 3-D photography?

The festival kicks off Thursday, and here are a few titles that struck me as particularly intriguing.

• “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” – Although it doesn’t exactly redefine a well-trodden genre, there are a few nifty twists in writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s moody, creepy, sometimes darkly amusing black-and-white vampire tale. Set on the shadowy streets of a corrupt industrial town called Bad City, the film, shot in California with an Iranian cast, follows a hipster bloodsucker clad in a traditional Islamic chador who falls for a petty thief and drug dealer. The movie is more of an exercise in style than anything of substance (shades of Jim Jarmusch and Guy Maddin), but that style is immediately disarming and visually sumptuous. Feb. 13 at midnight, Garland Theater.

• “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” – Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 masterpiece “Fargo” begins with a (false) disclaimer that the film is based on a true story. Toward the end, a briefcase full of cash is buried in the snow by a character who is later murdered. In the Zellner brothers’ hypnotic and unsettling “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” an unsociable, possibly unstable Japanese woman (Rinko Kikuchi) sees the Coens’ film and, convinced that it’s real, heads to Minnesota to uncover the buried money. Kikuchi’s performance is the movie’s greatest asset, finding sadness and warmth in an otherwise impenetrable character. Feb. 9 at 6:30 p.m., Magic Lantern Theatre.

• “Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed” – The festival’s opening night selection is the closest to a mainstream crowd-pleaser you’ll get in this program: It swept the Spanish Oscars and was the country’s official submission for a foreign language Academy Award. Pedro Almodóvar regular Javier Cámara stars as an English teacher and Beatles fanatic (the film’s title is lifted from a “Strawberry Fields Forever” lyric) who, in 1966, travels to the city of Almeria, where John Lennon is filming the Richard Lester comedy “How I Won the War.” Along the way, he picks up two young hitchhikers, and what results is the kind of warm, amiable road-trip film indicative of the era in which it’s set. Thursday at 7 p.m., AMC River Park Square 20.

• “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” – This current Oscar nominee for best animated feature from director Isao Takahata, whose “Grave of the Fireflies” is one of the greatest of all animated films, is a striking and unusual visual experience. Based on a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, the movie concerns a girl who emerges from a stalk of bamboo and is raised by a peasant couple, later forced into a life as a sought-after princess. It’s leisurely paced and ultimately tragic, and its hand-drawn animation style, inspired by centuries-old Japanese watercolors, is one of the most arresting in recent memory. Feb. 8 at 4 p.m., AMC River Park Square 20.

• “The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga” – Combining real footage and simple animation (somewhat similar to the Oscar-nominated “The Missing Picture,” which played at last year’s SpIFF), director Jessica Oreck’s documentary approaches its weighty subjects with the droll abstraction of Werner Herzog. The film is a beguiling visual essay that serves as both a travelogue of Eastern Europe and a meditation on man’s relationship with and fear of nature, anchored by a Slavic legend about a forest-dwelling witch who lives in a house perched atop giant chicken legs. Feb. 7 at noon and Feb. 12 at 6:45 p.m., Magic Lantern Theatre.