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VIFF 2020 | An Introductory Column To VIFF’s Virtual Film Festival

A & E, Cinema, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2020

The 2020, 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival

As of today, we are less than two weeks away from the glorious start of the 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival as tremendously engaging, moving, and humane an event as occurs on Vancouver’s arts calendar each year, easily as absorbing, gripping, engrossing and captivating as all of VIFF’s previous festival iterations, representing the culmination of a year’s dedicated and devoted work by VIFF’s utterly humane and talented group of programmers, who working with their formidably talented and hard working support staff once again this year bring you films that will move, fascinate, educate, mesmerize, entreat, bewitch and, in many cases, change you forever for the better, where by festival’s end you will come to see yourself as a citizen of the world, working relentlessly to realize a fairer and a more just world for all of us.
In the midst of our current pandemic, the good folks at VIFF have made some necessary changes to this year’s film festival: for the most part, VIFF 2020 will be a virtual film festival, a festival where you will be afforded the opportunity to watch the more than 100 films on offer in the comfort of your home — no frustrating lineups for tickets this year, no having to wait in the pouring rain as the previous screening to the film you’re waiting in line to see is running late, no having to rush to get the seat you want. Nope, this year, the good folks at VIFF perform the extraordinary, bringing our much cherished international film festival to you, in your comfy home.
And you know what else? Yep, VIFF 2020 is available to British Columbians across the province. So, if you’ve got friends, or children / grandchildren in the far flung towns, cities and villages across our great province, for the very first time, our annual Vancouver International Film Festival will be available to kith and kin, wherever they reside across our belle province.
What’s that I hear? Enough of this palaver? Get down to brass tacks, you say, give us the information we need to engage with VIFF 2020?

The 2020, 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, tickets and subscriptions

First up, you’re going to want to buy tickets for individual films, or — and this is a much, much better deal — you’re going to want to purchase a subscription, so that you can see as many films as you can squeeze into the two-week running time of VIFF 2020.
Individual tickets for screenings go for $9, but the much, much better deal is to purchase either a VIFF Connect Festival Subscription, for the low, low price of $50, which will afford you the opportunity to watch any VIFF film on offer, as well as take part in any online Creator Talk, while the VIFF Connect Gold Subscription, at $95, allows you to watch any VIFF 2020 film, as well as offering you a free VIFF+ Gold Membership valid for one year (worth $240), and a free year-round subscription to VIFF Connect (worth $60), cuz let’s face it, folks, this pandemic thing ain’t ending any time soon, so if you want to catch the best in international cinema over the course of the next 12 months, the VIFF Connect Gold Subscription is the way to go.
Now, about this streaming thing. All your questions are answered here.
That said, here’s the bit of info you’re really going to need.
As the good folks at VIFF suggest, you’re gonna need a streaming platform.

  • Apple TV (4th Generation or newer)

  • Roku
  • Amazon FireStick
  • Chromecast (where you can stream films thru the Chrome browser).

As above, your laptop or desktop computer, via your preferred web browser, when you log onto the VIFF site with your account will allow you to stream any of the VIFF 2020 films, may / will be necessary. Yes, yes, we know, it all sounds sort of intimidating. It’s not. Rather, you’ll find — once you get over your initial jitters — that it’s easy peasy, nice and easy.
As an experiment, VanRamblings logged onto the VIFF site, and played a couple of VIFF trailers through our iPhone’s Chromecast app. Soon, the VIFF Connect app will be available. For the festival, we’re probably going to “cast” VIFF films on the Chrome browser through our Chromecast “dongle” right onto our 4K TV, as we did during the recent DOXA film festival, after the National Film Board’s Katja De Bock (we just love that name!) cajoled us into purchasing Chromecast (which we picked up at Best Buy for $35). Chances are, though, that we may also use one of our iPads or the iPhone to stream VIFF 2020 films through our iOS Chromecast app.

The 2020, 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, Panorama

What about the films, we hear you ask? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. Beginning next week, three (or perhaps more) times a week, VanRamblings will publish “previews” of three or more films each day, replete with the trailers for the films, as well as a round-up of the over-the-moon reviews the films garnered when these films screened at Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca, Taipei, Locarno, Hong Kong, Venice, Toronto or New York.
As is VanRamblings usual practice, we will identify 20 films that are worthy of your time, so that by the time the festival commences on Thursday, September 24th — when you can start streaming films at home — you’ll have some idea as to what the more recommendable films are that are set to screen at VIFF 2020, films such as Viggo Mortenson’s directorial début.

The 2020, 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival logo

In 2020, VanRamblings find ourselves able to bring you VIFF’s annual press conference, where board chair Lucille Pacey and (interim) executive director Kyle Fostner introduce you to VIFF’s fine programming staff, names you may have heard but this year with faces that you can put to those names, including VIFF’s winsome associate director of programming, Curtis Woloschuk who, along with Tammy Banister and Rylan Friday, provide insight into the twenty-four acclaimed Canadian films VIFF has on offer this year, as well as VIFF’s director of creative engagement and live programming, Ken Tsui, who introduces this year’s Talks and Masterclasses series (there’s so much more available than you’ll find in the previous link that you’ll simply just have to set about to explore), and Totally Indie Day, a day of online panels dedicated to the next generation of filmmakers.
And saving the best for last, VIFF programme manager and senior programmer, PoChu AuYeung, and the heart of the festival since it’s inception in 1981, director of international programming, Alan Franey, who at the outset of his address speaks about a Belgian film he saw earlier in the year, My Voice Will Be With You, before moving on to introduce another Belgian film, this time a documentary titled I Am Not a Hero, the first film made about COVID-19. Alan then talks about the winner of this year’s top prize (the Golden Bear) at February’s Berlin Film Festival, There Is No Evil, while PoChu introduces films by three emerging female filmmakers from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea — you’ll just have to watch the press conference to discover the titles of those award-winning Asian films.
Other buzz films set to screen digitally at this year’s festival: Ecuador’s Yellow Sunglasses, Danish master Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, Sundance Grand Jury and Audience Award winner The Reason I Jump, the B.C. première of The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel by Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, the international première of Japan’s The Town of Headcounts, the North American première of Anerca, Breath of Life, and the Annecy International Animation Film Festival official selection Beauty Water, from South Korea.
Christian Petzold’s Undine also arrives at VIFF with good buzz, as is the case with VIFF favourite François Ozon’s look back at the mid-80s, Summer of 85, a romantic, sexy, and ultimately tragic coming-of-age tale.
VIFF’s opening film — which will screen in 50 cinemas across B.C. on September 24th — Monkey Beach, Loretta Sarah Todd adaptation of Eden Robinson’s beloved novel also arrives at VIFF to much acclaim.
As in past years, VIFF will offer full programmes of shorts, including animated gems and the female-focused Tell Us About Her Life compilation, which will be available beginning September 24th.
For those willing to take the risk, VIFF 2020 has planned 54 in-cinema screenings at the Vancity and the Cinematheque, providing the only opportunity for patrons to see two of the year’s most buzzed about films: The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins, and Ammonite, a 19th century set film starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, both of which films will be Oscar bound early next year.
Here, for your edification and enjoyment, the one, the only, the official …
VIFF 2020 Press Conference

The 2020 | 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival Press Launch, on Vimeo.

Arts Friday | Vancity Theatre To Screen the Best Films of 2019

A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2019

The Best Films of 2019 will screen at Vancouver's Vancity Theatre over the holiday season

VanRamblings absolutely loves lists. As the year nears its end, we are in list heaven — best albums, best books, best tech and, most important of all and much to our delight, best films, for which lists galore may be found.
Just this week, the National Board of Review critics association released their list of the best films of 2019, awarding several films of distinction in the process. The very next day, the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle — comprised of most of the continent’s finest film critics — released their list of 2019’s best films, conferring awards on actors, directors and films. In both instances, Martin Scorsese’s epic film The Irishman won Best Picture.

The Vancouver International Film Festival's Vancity Theatre, in the evening

With the above in mind, Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tom Charity put his list of the year’s best together — and, fortunate for us, all of those films will get a screening at the comfiest, most welcoming cinema venue in town, VIFF’s year ’round home, the cozy Vancity Theatre.
VIFF’s Best of 2019 gets underway on Friday, December 20th with …

Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood. Friday, December 20th, 7:45pm, Vancity Theatre.

Jordan Peele’s Us, starring NYFCC Best Actress winner, Lupita Nyong’o. Screens only once, on Saturday night, December 21st, 7:45pm, at the Vancity Theatre, on Seymour Street.

nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up. Sunday, December 22nd, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.

Clicking on any of the title links above and below, will take you to the film title’s VIFF page, where you will see a full description of the film, and where you may purchase tickets for the screening. Individual tickets, $11 (VIFF membership required). A discount three-ticket pack is available for $30.

Multiple award winner Monos will screen Monday, Dec. 23rd, 7:45pm, Vancity Theatre.

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Next up, VanRamblings’ nominee as the best film of 2019, urgent, intimate, subtle, moving, the only truly wrenching, punch in the gut film of the year we’ve seen, an absolute must-see, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s tour-de-force The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open — set in and around Stamps Place (once called the Raymur Housing Project), on Vancouver’s eastside. As Sarah-Tai Black writes in the Globe and Mail, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is “transforming, striking, gentle, impactful, world-affirming, utterly remarkable, essential, heartrending, tender … and wholly authentic.”

The Body Remembers. Boxing Day, Thursday, December 26th, 7:45pm, Vancity Theatre.

The Farewell will screen on Friday, December 27th, 7:20pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Honeyland will screen on Saturday, December 28th, 7:20pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

And screening immediately following the luminous & utterly unforgettable, award-winning documentary Honeyland, Australian director Jennifer Kent’s controversial follow-up to The Babadook, the unrelenting horror pic …

The Nightingale screens on Saturday, December 28th, 9pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

And on Sunday, December 29th, 7pm at the Vancity Theatre an international film feature double bill that will knock your socks off: Spain’s auteur filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s best film in years, with a Cannes Best Actor award-winning performance by Antonio Banderas at its centre, Pain and Glory — which will screen at the Vancity Theatre on Sunday, December 29th at 7pm — offers mature, understated and evocative filmmaking of the first order, combining a deep sense of humanity with a touch of erotic beauty, an emotional rendering of a person that is at once gentle and naked, hushed, agonizing and dazzling, full of life, electric, heart-wrenching and as piercing and deeply intimate a reflection on what it means to grow old as you’ll ever see on film, Pain and Glory is the filmmaker’s best and most personal movie in years, a cinematic momento full of indelible moments, redolent with a meditative force that will knock you sideways, a tragicomic swirl of heartbreak and joy, and an utter triumph. A must-see.

And at 9pm, following the screening of Pain and Glory, Mati Diop’s stunner Atlantics, about which at one time lead Globe and Mail film critic Liam Lacey wrote, “A magic realist fantasy, a ghost story, a love story and political allegory, a film of tactile intimacy and teeming energy, about women’s autonomy, migration and corruption, vital and realist, a world-shattering film about unspeakable tragedy, Atlantics packs a deceptive amount of complexity into its 104 minute running time, offering a narrative perspective about class and post-imperialism that is touching, romantic, impressively nuanced and an expertly rendered tour-de-force.”

A World Cinema Dramatic prize winner at Sundance earlier this year, director Joanna Hogg’s best film yet, The Souvenir, is an instant British classic. The New York Times’ A. O. Scott writes, “The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours,” while Guy Lodge writes in Variety, “Achingly well-observed in its study of a young artist inspired, derailed and finally strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is at once the coming-of-age story of many women and a specific creative manifesto for one of modern British cinema’s most singular writer-directors.”

The Souvenir screens on Monday, December 30th, 7:45pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

There are four more films that are screening as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Best of 2019 film series — at least two of which will vye for a Best Picture win at the Oscars on February 9th, but you’ll just have to click here for the titles of those films, and the date and time that each will screen at the Vancity Theatre. Enjoy your film-going holidays.

Best of 2019 | Video created by Cindy Shi for the Vancouver International Film Festival.

VIFF 2019 | The Oscar Season Gets Underway in Vancouver | Pt 2

A & E, Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2019

The Oscar awards season gets underway as part of the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival

There are many reasons the 160,000 or so patrons attend the Vancouver International Film Festival each year.
First and foremost, there are the diehard festival attendees who, each year, live to see cinema from across the globe, obscure but heart-rending films of immense humanity from Niger, Lebanon, Malawi, Georgia, Ecuador, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Cape Verdi or Nigeria — all of which countries will have films screening at this year’s 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival. Sometimes these films are sparsely attended, but they nonetheless represent not only the raison d’être of the festival, but its beating heart.
The second group of patrons represent the financial heart of the festival. These patrons are most interested in gaining early insight and entrée into the Oscar awards season, purchasing tickets for films VanRamblings is writing about this weekend (our first ‘Oscar Derby’ column was published yesterday). These patrons not only want to screen the Oscar worthy films months before they’ll be released to multiplexes, but also want to be acknowledged as having engaged in the cultural cachet that comes with being able to say to their friends, “Oh yes, we attended the film festival this year, as we do every year, and were blown away by (name of film).”

VIFF 2019 venue, The Centre for the Performing Arts

Patrons attending screenings of the Oscar worthy films do so at the 1800 seat Centre for the Performing Arts on Homer Street, just across the street from the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. Twenty films times 1800 patrons times $15 equals a substantial amount of money contributing to the success and bottom line of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Needless to say, the VIFF administration is more than grateful to these patrons for their interest in the film festival, as are all festival devotees.

Oscars and critics awards for the best in cinema
Today, VanRamblings will present five more Oscar worthy films that will screen at VIFF 2019 that are guaranteed both critical acclaim and the Oscar nominations they are so richly due, come 5am, Monday, January 13, 2020.

Representing the first film in a knockout, must-see double bill at The Centre on Saturday, September 28th, as part of the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse took Cannes by storm (pun intended) at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring, winning the prestigious FIPRESCI International Film Critics Prize, and going on to win the Grand Special Prize at the French Deauville Film Festival.
The Guardian’s chief film critic, Peter Bradshaw, raves about The Lighthouse in his five-star review …

Robert Eggers’ gripping nightmare shows two lighthouse-keepers in 19th-century Maine going melancholy mad together: a toxic marriage, a dance of death. It is explosively scary and captivatingly beautiful in cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s fierce monochrome, like a daguerreotype of fear. And the performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson have a sledgehammer punch — Pattinson, in particular, just gets better and better.

What is so exhilarating and refreshing about The Lighthouse is that it declines to reveal whether or not it is a horror film as such, though an early reference to Salem, Massachusetts gives us a flashback to Eggers’ previous film, The Witch (2015).

It is not a question of a normal-realist set-up pivoting to supernatural scariness with reliably positioned jump-scares etc. The ostensible normality persists; perhaps something ghostly is going on, or perhaps this is a psychological thriller about delusion. But generic ambiguity is not the point: The Lighthouse keeps hold of us with the sheer muscular intelligence and even theatricality of the performances and the first-class writing. Even Sir Donald Wolfit or Robert Newton could not have got more out of the role of Tom than Willem Dafoe does and Pattinson is mesmeric in his bewilderment and uncertainty.

The Lighthouse screens at The Centre at 6pm, on day three of the festival, Saturday, September 28th, followed by the must-see screening of …

On Friday, September 6th, the first full day of the 44th annual Toronto International Film Festival director Destin Daniel Cretton’s true life civil rights drama, Just Mercy, catapulted itself into Oscar contention, placing Michael B. Jordan firmly into the Best Actor sweeps, and both Jamie Foxx and Rob Morgan into Best Supporting Actor contention.
Here’s what the critics had to say about Just Mercy …

Full-blooded performances from Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx add weight to the powerful fact-based Just Mercy, a retelling of one of influential lawyer and social justice and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson’s most enraging cases, presented in a film that will shake you to your soul. It’s the late 1980s, and Stevenson (Jordan), a young Harvard-educated African-American lawyer in crisp gray suits and neckties, has come to stay in Monroe County, Alabama, to take on the cases of death-row inmates who are innocent.

Death row as a morbid extension of slavery is what Just Mercy is about. “You’re guilty from the moment you’re born,” says Walter McMillian (Foxx), clarifying the rage that percolates throughout the movie. “It’s just another excuse to lynch a black man,” one of his peers concludes.

A celebration of what it takes to eke out justice in a broken system, Just Mercy builds throughout to its gripping resolution, based on the certainty that hatred, in all its terrible power, will never be as powerful as justice.”

Just Mercy screens at The Centre at 9pm on Saturday, September 28th.

A searing exploration of the consequences of upholding one’s convictions in a time of terrifying upheaval, the latest work from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) mines the themes of spirituality and engagement with the natural world that have permeated so much of the American auteur’s late-period renaissance. Set in Austria during the rise of the Third Reich, A Hidden Life movingly relays this little-known true story of quiet heroism.
A Hidden Life screens at The Centre, 8:45pm, Sunday, September 29th.

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-1800s, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada, reaching Canada by boat across Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, settling in Ontario and Nova Scotia, aided by abolitionists and others sympathetic to their cause.
Nova Scotia’s African American population was first settled by Black Loyalists during the American Revolution and then by Black Refugees in the War of 1812, with important black settlements developed across Canada, both in Québec and on Vancouver Island, where Governor James Douglas encouraged black immigration arising from his opposition to slavery.
Directed and co-written by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), Harriet relates the story of abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman (who, up until President Donald Trump intervened, was to bear her image on the $20 bill) who, following her escape from slavery in 1849, helped free hundreds of slaves from the American South, risking her life to lead others to freedom through the network of safehouses that came to be known as the Underground Railroad.
Lifting the heroic icon from the pages of history and into an epic, timeless tale, Harriet brings to the big screen the surge of faith, principle, and raw courage that drove diminutive Araminta Ross (who changed her name to Harriet Tubman) to greatness. The film’s star, Tony-winning Broadway actor Cynthia Erivo, was a discovery for many in Steve McQueen’s Widows. In Harriet, Erivo is riveting in every scene, giving her portrayal of Harriet Tubman the scale and depth appropriate to a legendary American leader.
Harriet screens once, at 3pm at The Centre, on Saturday, October 5th.

Taika Waititi directs a riotous cast — including Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Rebel Wilson, Thomasin McKenzie, and newcomer Roman Griffin Davis — in this daring, touching, and comedic satire about a young German boy who discovers a Jewish girl hiding in his home and consults with his imaginary best friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi).
In a series of deft, groundbreaking comedies, Taika Waititi took sharp left turns into coming-of-age stories (Boy), vampire movies (What We Do in the Shadows), and sacred superheroes (Thor: Ragnarok). Now he brings his half-Maori, half-Jewish, fully skewed sensibilities to his most daring film yet. A dazzling takedown of fascist thinking and the violence it fuels, Jojo Rabbit begins in biting satire but delivers surprising emotional impact.
Jojo Rabbit screens at 6:15pm at The Centre, on Wednesday, October 2nd.


Click here for more VanRamblings coverage of the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival

Part 3 of VanRamblings’ Oscar Derby series will conclude on Sunday with an exploration of the potential and probable Best International Films Oscar nominees (it used to be called Best Foreign Film, but the Academy changed that designation to International earlier this year) that will screen this year at the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.

VIFF 2019 | The Oscar Derby Begins Right Here in Vancouver | Pt 1

A & E, Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2019

The Vancouver International Film Festival Goes to the Oscars

At the Wednesday opening press conference, the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Associate Director of Programming, Curtis Woloschuk, announced the late addition of four Oscar-bound films that, although they didn’t make the printed Festival guide (which is available everywhere across Metro Vancouver today, and a mighty gorgeous work of art it is) will screen, nonetheless, at this year’s spectacular 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival (the schedule, and film information, is now available online).
And, oh yes, VIFF 2019 ticket (and pack) sales are now available online.
Although VanRamblings has written about and previously presented trailers for the four late addition films, to save you the work of searching through the previous columns, here are the four Oscar-bound films just added to the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival’s film schedule.

Noah Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, wowed ’em at both the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, and at this point is the odds on favourite to win Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, among other probable Oscar wins, tracks the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple — played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson — negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. It’s as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving. Marriage Story will screen at The Centre, 8:45pm, Thursday, October 10th.

Perhaps not the best reviewed film coming out of the Telluride Film Festival, writer-director-producer Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel, Motherless Brooklyn, transplants Lionel, the main character of the novel, from modern Brooklyn into an entirely new, richly woven neo-noir narrative: a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide, set in 1950s New York.
Here’s what IndieWire’s chief film critic, Eric Kohn, has to say about Motherless Brooklyn in his review …

Visually, Motherless Brooklyn doesn’t pull many exciting tricks, but veteran cinematographer Dick Pope manages to give New York City the L.A. Confidential treatment with evocative grey tones and shadowy street corners that deepen the mysterious atmosphere at every turn.

Some of Lionel’s encounters with various gruff characters hold more interest than others, but the movie really comes alive once he connects with Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, in a delicate turn), an activist fighting the city’s racist housing policies. As he follows her all the way up to Harlem, Lionel connects with an affable jazz musician (a terrifically assertive Michael K. Williams) and finds some measure of kinship in his quest for answers in a broken world. The movie’s finest moment finds Lionel unable to contain his stream of Tourette’s tics in the midst of a jazz performance that seems to commiserate with the stream-of-consciousness he struggles to control. It’s a cogent illustration of the movie’s most alluring trait — a character searching for meaning in a messy world, and lost in a sea of words at every turn.

Motherless Brooklyn screens at The Centre, 8:45pm, Monday, Sept. 30th.

While it’s true that Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Laundromat, will début on Netflix at some point in the fall season, do you really want to watch this big screen entertainment with the all star cast on your TV at home, no matter what kind of home theatre you have? No, I didn’t think so.
Bitterly funny and, at times, amusingly droll, The Laundromat emerged as a knock it out of the park favourite at the Venice Film Festival, a galvanizing, entertaining yet wistful Big Short style narrative about the 2016 Panama Papers scandal and how the wealthy elite across the globe are, daily, ripping us off and making our existences that much more challenging, through the use of tax havens, shell companies and money laundering (and, yes, as is becoming increasingly clear, Vancouver has a significant role to play), among other feats of dastardly financial derring do.
The Laundromat screens at 3pm at The Centre on Sunday, October 6th.

Clearly, Christian Bale and Matt Damon have Oscar nominations in the bag, in James Mangold’s propulsive new film, Ford v Ferrari, as fine an example of big Hollywood studio filmmaking as we’ve seen in many a year. The film crackles with dry humour throughout, an exhilarating re-telling of Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles’ (Christian Bale, in a transformative performance) years of racing cars at Daytona, Le Mans and on a makeshift LAX racetrack. Ford v Ferrari is about much more, though: it’s about friendship, the love of a father and his son, it’s about American ingenuity (although less than you’d expect) and, most unexpectedly, the evils of corporate marketing. Anyone who refers to it as the “perfect Dad movie” is simply not giving the filmmakers involved enough credit. You can detest auto racing and still be swept away with the events on screen.
Ford v Ferrari screens at The Playhouse as the VIFF 2019 closing film, on the last day of the festival, the screening at 6pm on Friday, October 11th.


Click here for more VanRamblings coverage of the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival

Parts 2 & 3 of VanRamblings’ VIFF 2019 Oscar Derby coverage will be published on Saturday and Sunday, with insight (and trailers) as well as scheduling information on the films that are set to pick up a slew of critics’ awards this autumn season, and in January: Academy Award nominations.