Today, VanRamblings will take you on a journey into the cinematic worlds envisioned by East Asia’s boldest filmmakers, while introducing the most adventurous & exciting cinema to emerge this past year from the Far East.
Long the heart of the Vancouver International Film Festival, each year for 37 years VIFF’s Dragons & Tigers and Gateway series have represented the largest and richest annual exhibition of Pacific Asian films outside of Asia.

Every year, VIFF’s annual Dragons & Tigers and Gateway programmes attract a strong retinue of internationally recognized filmmakers, film critics, distributors, and scholars, these well-attended programmes highlighting cutting-edge cinema and bodies of work from Asia’s boldest creators, encompassing the exceptional work of established masters as well as those who may soon be recognized alongside them, with films arriving on our shores from South Korea, Singapore, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia & Thailand.
Over the course of the past 37 years, VIFF has steadfastly sought to convey the richness and diversity of East Asian cinema to appreciative audiences.

Director Jia Jia Zhang-ke’s Ash is the Purest White took Cannes by storm this year, a fierce, gripping, heartbreaking and at times loopy tale of Qiao (Zhao Tao) who in defending her mobster boyfriend Bin fires a gun to protect him, resulting in a five year sentence in prison for her act of loyalty.
Out of prison and up for adventure, in the film’s most stunning visual sequence, Qiao takes a ferry ride down the Yangtze River and, after a little misfortune, finds Bin shacked up in a shabby motel. Bin has seemingly lost his pride. “Was I ever that important?” he asks. “Well, if not you, then what is?!” Qiao responds with all the quiet force of a knee to the stomach.

A gripping parable about the vanity of human wishes, and an impassioned portrait of national malaise, in the end Jia Zhang-ke’s latest emerges as a glorious drama about how one woman’s journey from self-sacrificial moll to avenging criminal echoes her country’s wanton embrace of capitalism.

And let us not forget the master of Asian cinema, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou), who this year brings Shadow, as rousing and beautifully rendered a film as you’ll see at VIFF this year, and a stunning epic re-imagining of the Wuxia third century Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history.
With its gorgeously choreographed sword duels, sabres slicing through paddles of blood and rain, watercolour bi-chromatic palettes and sumptuous costumes, Shadow offers a visual feast from the maestro of Chinese cinema. Here’s how Jessica Kiang opened her review in Variety …

Black ink drips from the tip of a brush and daggers into clear water, spiraling out like smoke; a Chinese zither sounds a ferocious, twanging note that warps and buckles in its sustain; rain mottles the sky to a heavy watercolour grey, forming pools on paving stones into which warriors bleed; whispery drafts from hidden palace chambers stir tendrils of hair and set the hems of luxuriant, patterned robes fluttering. Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful Shadow is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.

And just think: there are 25 more equally spectacular, moving & sumptuous films in the Gateway and Dragons & Tigers programmes this year!
VanRamblings wrote about Cannes FIPRESCI Critics Prize winner Burning and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters last week, two of the lauded must-see films in the Gateway programme that will screen at VIFF 2018.
Now there are just 23 more films from East Asia for you to discover at the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, which kicks off in only 11 days, running from Thursday, September 27 thru Friday, October 12.

VanRamblings has, perhaps, overstated the “new direction” of the VIFF.
For, in reality, the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival is the same well-programmed festival of heart and conscience, as ever, offering a Cinema of Despair, and an unparalleled insight into the human condition, and as ever holding out the thrilling possibility of hope for much better.
There is no better example of the thesis above than the first two films which were on offer as advance festival screenings this past Wednesday morning & early afternoon at VIFF’s year-round home, the Vancity Theatre on Seymour, for members of the press, industry folks and passholders.

Documentarian Jane Magnusson’s warts-and-all biography of the flawed, mad genius of Swedish film, the incomparable Ingmar Bergman, examines the problematical personal history of one of the world’s most cherished and prolific filmmakers. Who among us could not love 1957’s Wild Strawberries, the achingly wise exploration of the life of a self-absorbed old doctor (Victor Sjöström) who quietly steps back into the slipstream of humanity while traveling to receive an honorary degree; or The Seventh Seal (also produced in 1957), in which a man (Max von Sydow) seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper, a film which stars the young & beautiful Bibi Andersson, Bergman’s fifth wife and muse, who would star in more than a dozen Bergman films.

Filmgoers & lovers of film will be provided the opportunity to see Bergman: A Year in the Life at no other time than at the always splendid 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival — offering all the more reason for you to set about to purchase your tickets for this penetrating documentary, about which Owen Gleiberman, Variety’s lead film critic, writes, “(Magnusson’s documentary) captures Bergman as the tender and prickly, effusive and demon-driven, tyrannical and half-crazy celebrity-genius he was: a man so consumed by work, and by his obsessive relationships with women, that he seemed to be carrying on three lives at once.”

The second VIFF advance screening of the day was introduced by Alan Franey, VIFF’s Director of International Programming — who told those of us gathered in the Vancity Theatre, that he did not and has not resigned from the festival, but instead has given up the day-to-day administrative tasks that consumed a good portion of his life for a quarter century, to focus on his first love: programming the best in world cinema.
And so Alan has, and so he will continue to do, a calm, warm, articulate, unruffled renaissance man of spirit, humility and uncommon intelligence.
Arantxa Echevarría’s Carmen & Lola, which Alan brought back from Cannes this year, is the perfect, low-production value, trenchant and moving slice-of-life-drama that Alan, as a person of heart and conscience, has so long loved, a vibrantly realized story of two teenage Roma gypsy girls that proves to be a spirited addition to the ‘coming out as gay in a repressive culture’ genre, a queer awakening drama buoyed by wildly sympathetic performances from the principles of the film’s title, an authentic evocation of life in Madrid’s scruffy satellite towns, and a perfect example of the informing intelligence and defining ethos of the Vancouver International Film Festival: a humane and hopeful, and a heady, compassionate, joyful, deeply felt and transcendent window on our too often troubled world.