Damn the French. Wait, I’ve already used that. Never mind. Damn the French.

As you remember, our hopes for the micro-farm being able to scam some serious cash from the discretionary income being tossed around by Bainbridge Islanders like so much confetti at a parade were dashed by the non-appearance of the lesoeufs laying, originally-French, Salmon Faverolle chicks some five weeks back. We settled for the more pedestrian sounding Iowa Blue chicks which have gone on to win our hearts with their Midwestern practicality and stoic pragmatism. As if.

No, it must be said that the lack of French hens was a serious blow to our boutique-egg selling plans to say nothing of our hopes to someday have all twelve days of Christmas available for tourists to see, live, on the micro-farm. Sure, we could say that our Iowa hens, were really French, but I’m not sure they have the chops to pull off that particular deception.

And then we went to Bay Hay and Feed. Oops.

Walking in the front door you pass by the chick brooder strategically placed to force incoming customers to view the ever-so-cute, days-old baby chicks, packed cheek by jowl into the tiny wooden box, slowly roasting under a heat lamp.

“Oh, Mommy,” the children say. “Aren’t they cute? Can we get one?”

“No, honey, we just got you that puppy you wanted. And the kitten the week before.”

“Waaaaa!!!!!!”

At this point the mother walks over, sees the chicks languishing in the overcrowded oven, and her maternal instincts kick in.

“Awwwww,” she says. “Okay. But you have to get two to keep each other company.”

Fifteen minutes later the mother and child walk out of Bay Hay carrying seven dollars-worth of chickens and four hundred pounds of “accessories.”

Fortunately, that could never happen to us.

Because we already had the accessories.

I don’t recall ever having seen a MasterCard appear so fast, seemingly plucked out of thin air. Suffice it to say that the les oeufs plans are somewhat back on track due to the unplanned arrival of three extraordinarily soft, fuzzy, and oh-so-cute French Hens. The Salmon Faverolles finally arrived.

Damn the French.

But they do make good movies, or, as they say over there, les flicks.

Which brings us to my planned topic for today: Film.

Last summer I received a request that I write about the Seattle International Film Festival, SIFF for short. I was unable to do this at the time as I had not really been to SIFF (other than a couple of individual films) so knew nothing about it. My commenter did not think that this would be a problem because, as he wrote, my blog was “obviously written by stealing the details of other people’s lives and passing them off as my own personal experiences.” How did he find out?

Be that as it may, while gardening the other day I was forced to reflect on this request and, as I have now experienced SIFF, it’s time to make amends to my commenter and share the experience with you – even though it’s most likely not my experience.

SIFF is hyped as the “largest, most well attended, film festival in the country.” But, as with “in bed” at the end of cookie fortunes, they leave out “that nobody’s heard of.”

Such was the case with me. Up until the spring following my move to Seattle in 2011, I was unaware of its existence. This really didn’t surprise me because I was never much of a film buff, I preferred the mindless entertainment extruded like some beige porridge of blandness by the Hollywood machine. But, given that pretty much all creativity has vanished from a Hollywood whose fare now seems limited to movies based on earlier movies that were stolen from comic books or remakes of movies that were originally done in other countries thereby eliminating any profits for American producers, I decided to give film a try.

Just for clarity’s sake I would like to differentiate between “film” and “movies”. “Film” is significant, “Movies” are not.

This difference is something of a problem when one is looking to go to the movies and not come away weeping for the abused, neglected, and downtrodden of the world, but rather clapping one’s hands together in glee and saying things like: “Wow! Wasn’t that cool when the spaceship slammed into the asteroid?”

SIFF is the largest festival in the U.S. because it shows the most films. It shows the most films because, for the fifty weeks out of the year that SIFF is not going on, there is nothing to do in Seattle except select films to show during the other two weeks. The result is that SIFF screens over four hundred films, both feature length and shorts, during its brief run.

The films are selected by programmers each of whom, I’m assuming with the help of others, watches hundreds of films in their genre and picks out their favorites. Fortunately, in the resulting assembly of films, we were able to find several that, at first blush, looked like they might be entertaining even if not so significant. I based my votes for what we would see based on three important criteria: 1) does something blow up? 2) Does the film contain themes of time travel, aliens, or what will really happen when the Mayan calendar rolls over? And 3) is it French?

One thing we have not noticed here in the United States is that the rest of the world is slowly becoming French. We, in the U.S., have long envied the French. We want to be svelte and sensuous; we want to spend three hours with a bottle of white wine and a small plate of canapés and call it lunch; and, most of all, we want to feel significant. However, to the French, and now to the rest of the world, we have never been more than provincial, gun-toting cowboys whose major contribution to world culture has been Jerry Lewis.

This global attitude is reflected in the fact that none of the top film festivals in the world are to be found in the United States; at least according to the International Federation of Film Producers Associations. None of the U.S.’s major film festivals; not New York, not Sundance, not Tribeca, and not even Seattle; is held in as high regard on the global stage as that of Cairo, Egypt or Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. None of them. At Cannes, the films compete for the Palme d’Or, in Seattle they’re shooting for the “Golden Space Needle”.

This explains why the International in SIFF’s title weighs so heavily. SIFF’s reasoning seems to be: If no one else thinks much of American Film, well, then why should we? This leads to an extremely high percentage of the festival’s screenings coming from the more significant and erudite film makers of far-off lands.

Until I attended SIFF, I had never stood in a movie line and heard comments along the lines of:

“Of course I watched ‘Men Who Talk to Yaks’ twice. I mean, the director’s Mongolian.” Or

“If it comes from South Korea, Belarus, or Moldova I am so going to be there.” Or

“What language do they speak in Cambodia? I didn’t understand a word.”

And so it was for most of the films we saw. From Italy, India, Australia, Great Britain, and, yes, France, our festival films were, except for two, made overseas.

Those two U.S. entries were very entertaining. If you like robots and cat burglars, try and see “Robot and Frank”. If your tastes run more to time travel and government conspiracies be sure to catch “Safety not Guaranteed.” If you live in a town where multiple screens are going to be dedicated to the “Spiderman” remake then you may have to wait until these films show up on Netflix.

Of the others, the Italian film “The Last Man on Earth”, which is not what it was titled in Italian, is a film reminiscent of the B-movies of the 1960s and well worth seeing.

But, of course, my favorites were the two French films we saw, “The Intouchables” (les Intouchables) and “The Chef” (le Chef). They were both well-acted, wittily written, boldly predictable, and, best of all, subtitled.

My four years of French classes were overlorded by Madame Aubin, originally from Paris, France. Mme. Aubin ruled her class with a rapier tongue and I was constantly being chastised with scoldings like: “No, Monsieur Ewing, you provincial, gun-toting cowboy, in this word you don’t pronounce the ‘l’s, ‘p’s, ‘s’s, or any of the vowels.” Which sounds so much better in French, but basically means that there is not really a word there to say. Such is the French language. The upside of those traumatic years is that even at this great remove I can still understand some of what is said on the screen while at the same time read subtitles that are completely different than what is being said.

This is one of the ways the French make fun of us.

The ultimate ha-ha at our expense, the piéce de résistance as it were, came not from the French but from a humble filmmaker in Uganda whose short film “Zebu and the Photo Fish” tells the story of a teenage businessman who outsmarts the evil shopkeeper to whom his father owes money. The film was shot on the shores of Lake Victoria with the dialogue clearly spoken in the language of the Ugandan people: namely, English.

The director realized that if his film was ever to play in Peoria, as it were, it would have to appeal to the mass of provincial, gun-toting cowboys that is the American film-going public. To that end, he pulled out all the stops and thoughtfully subtitled every word in the film just for us.

In English.