The Popcorn List @ SIFF Film Center

The theatrically released small-to-mid-budget movie is an endangered species.

You can point the finger at any number of recent developments: the rise of algorithm-exploiting streaming content and subsequent decline of physical media; the death of monoculture; five megacorporations owning entire movie studios, television networks and news outlets. The average moviegoer still shows up for the latest bit of eventized blockbuster IP, but aside from the critic- and recession-proof genre of horror, these people tend to wait to watch movies at home. (If at all!) Is there theatrical life after the festival circuit?

Enter The Popcorn List, a volunteer-based independent film initiative founded in 2024 that “spotlights films that are not yet in wide release but deserve a much bigger audience.” Each year, they create a free, searchable database of up-and-coming bangers and do pop-up screening series at some of the country’s best arthouses.

For 2026, film programmers Ouma Amadou (Ragtag Cinema), Dr. Alicia Kozma (Indiana University Cinema) and freelancer Monica Castillo have chosen six films, all by first-time female directors, to play the SIFF Film Center.

Four of them you may remember from the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival:

• Official Competition Grand Jury Prize winner “Seeds,” Brittany Shyne’s delicately immersive nonfiction about multiple generations of Southern Black farmers.
  
• The breakout cult hit “Fucktoys,” Annapurna Sriram’s bold, revelatory bubblegum grindhouse extravaganza about a sex worker’s raunchy odyssey through Trashtown, U.S.A.
  
• The SXSW-winning documentary “Remaining Native,” about an Indigenous teen runner and his family’s dark legacy.
  
• Across the Pacific, there’s “Summer’s Camera,” Divine Sung’s tender examination of queer life in South Korea.

The other two are just as worthy of your time, such as the delightfully named “Trash Baby,”JacyMairs’ ode to all things trashy around the turn of the millennium through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl coming of age, and Zoey Martinson’s Venice Film Festival-winning magical realist comedy “The Fisherman,” where an aging man seeks help from a talking dead fish.