VIFF Executive Director Kyle Fostner, and VIFF’s Chief Programmer, Curtis Woloschuk, attended the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival this past May, and were able to secure — for the first time ever — commitments to bring every Cannes’ awarding winning film, in the Main Selection, Un Certain Regard, and Directors Fortnight to the 44th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, placing those films in this year’s Galas & Special Presentations programme.

In Day 2 of VanRamblings’ peek at VIFF #44’s Galas & Special Presentations programme, we’ll begin with the 2025 Cannes’ Palme d’or winner. Clicking on the underlined title will take you to the VIFF web page, which will enable you, if you are of a mind, to purchase tickets to the films listed below.

It Was Just An Accident. In his latest film, a 24-hour narrative, Iranian film director Jafar Panani welds scorching social critique to a masterful command of form: a devastating cry for justice, the film also emerging as as a superb thriller. Film Comment calls the film, “A towering achievement.”

For Panahi, It Was Just an Accident marks a return to a more classic style of filmmaking, the film about anger, violence, revenge and empathy, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it.  Organically taking shape when Vahid encounters him who he believes tortured him in prison years earlier — Eghbal a former Iranian intelligence officer — Vahid tracks Eghbal to a repair shop, and abducts Eghbal, driving him out to the desert, where he digs a hole with the intent of burying him alive.

A certain Oscar nominee for Best International Feature Film in next year’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, here’s your opportunity to get an early peek at one of the best films of the year, brought to you by the good folks at VIFF.

Young Mothers. The Dardennes brothers are back again with their latest multiple Cannes award winning film, Young Mothers. Says Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Deeply moving but never manipulative, Young Mothers amounts to the brothers’ best film in more than a decade.” Immersive, observational, Dardennes’ engaging ensemble drama dedicates quality time to a quartet of young women — girls, really — under the care of a maternal assistance home in Liège.

Pregnancy is the common thread between these four teens, who otherwise represent very different instances of children bringing children into the world. Jessica (Babette Verbeek) anxiously waits beside a bus stop, hoping to recognize the birth mother who put her up for adoption. It’s not until the camera steps away that we see this young girl is pregnant herself. She’s already picked out the name for her baby, Alba, and swears she’ll never abandon her — a commitment to breaking the cycle by someone who desperately craves her own mother’s embrace.

Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan) has practically the opposite problem: Her welfare-dependent single parent Nathalie (Christelle Cornil) pressures her to deliver, promising to help raise the child, but Ariane wants a better life for her baby.

A tender look at women at a crossroads, with stripped-down aesthetic principles, compassionate humanism and naturalistic purity, the Dardennes return to their roots as documentary filmmakers, in Young Mothers expanding the scope of their work while create gorgeous moments of empathy in the lives of the four teens, whose bare-bones existences on the fringes of society deserve our recognition.

Tomorrow on VanRamblings, we’ll complete our look at VIFF 44’s Galas and Special Presentations programme. See you here then.

Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

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