The 29th annual Vancouver Film Festival continues into it’s second week (and second, and final, weekend) with much more world cinema débuting during the next seven days, including this Thanksgiving weekend.
The folks on the programming team at the Vancouver International Film Festival — through a series of press releases — are pointing filmgoers towards the following noteworthy films in particular …
- Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, screening for a final time at 1 p.m. on Sunday, at the Park Theatre. The NY Times’ lead critic, A.O. Scott calls the film, “”a short, late minor gem from (the) French master of long-form cinema … transporting and graceful …”
- Director Benjamin Heisenberg’s Bourne-like thriller The Robber, a hit at both the New York and Chicago Film Festivals, both currently underway. The Robber screens on Sunday, Oct 10th @ 7:00pm GR2; Tues., Oct 12th @ 3 pm @ GR4, and Fri., Oct 15th @ 11 am, GR7.
- Charles-Olivier Michaud’s 2010 Slamdance winner, Snow and Ashes. Writing form the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival, critic Elliot V. Kotek called Snow and Ashes, “a formidable first effort by (the Québec-based) 30-year-old writer-director.” Snow and Ashes screens for a final time on Sunday, October 10th @ 10:45am, Pacific Cinémathèque.
As to a film VanRamblings loved, we took in a screening of Sophie Letourneur smashing début film, Chicks (which should have more appropriately been titled Life at the Ranch, the name for the communal house shared by the film’s outré female protagonists).
An entirely fetching anthropological examination tracking the lives of a half-dozen twenty-something young women, La Vie Au Ranch (Chicks ) offers an entirely fresh and authentic take on GenY culture, the sex, the sensuality, the drinking, the drugs, the dancing and clubbing, amour (and falling out of love), and the general joie de vivre with which most twenty-somethings approach life. Chicks is a wonderful, life affirming film, and definitely worth catching this holiday weekend, the film screening for a final time on Thanksgiving Monday, Oct 11th @ 7 pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
