The Stranger Seattle Film Feature The New Guy
Northwest Film Forum's Incoming Program Director -BY ANNIE WAGNER

Jaime Keeling has been the lead film programmer at Northwest Film Forum for nearly five years, presiding over the most explosive growth period in the organization's history. She started off assembling a quarterly schedule of movies for a cozy 49-seat neighborhood theater in North Capitol Hill; [here I'd have preferred a sentence re what she was doing in last year - moving them into a much bigger, more centrally located space - being the programmer for all of it .. then new sentence- ] at 28, she's become a major tastemaker in the Seattle film scene, responsible for bringing hundreds of films every year exclusively to Northwest Film Forum's two-screen cinematheque. This week she will pack her car and head to Arkansas to visit family. She plans to relocate permanently to New York City.

The transfer of power won't have a dramatic impact on the kind of films you'll see on the Film Forum calendar, though Sekuler would like to program more short films in conjunction with features. It's helpful that Sekuler already has established relationships with the distributors that rent film prints to Northwest Film Forum. (While a theater's location, its total number of seats—and, in the case of chains like Landmark, the possibility of expansion or holdover of a film—dictate many of the choices distributors make about where to send their titles, personal relationships with programmers also have weight, especially when dealing with valuable archival prints.) Seiwerath says that the fact Sekuler is coming from Minneapolis—which, like Seattle, has a large number of Landmark screens—was also a point in his favor. He "understands the ecology" of that casual competition.
But expect subtle changes—a shift in tone rather than direction. Jaime Keeling was all personality. I don't see any more participatory theatrical adaptations of bad surf movies in the Film Forum's future (Keeling conceived and helped produce Point Break Live! at the Little Theatre in 2003), and I expect there will be fewer double-dutch jump-rope demonstrations at Film Forum parties (Keeling was a member of the local troupe On the Double). I haven't met Sekuler in person yet, but I suspect that when I do, he won't be wearing an astounding vintage coat with a collar made from the fur of some unidentified animal, as Keeling was when I saw her last.