Category Archives: A & E

VIFF 2019 | Award Winners & More at This Year’s Film Festival

VIFF 2019 award winning films set to screen at the 38th Vancouver International Film Festival

In the 11½ months between the annual Vancouver film festivals, festival programming staff spend their year attending film festivals across the globe identifying for patrons the best in world cinema to bring to our shores, the vast majority of scheduled films set to screen each year only two or three times in Vancouver, never to be seen again in local cinemas. The Vancouver International Film Festival, then, affords appreciative audiences with the singular opportunity to participate in a venture that, during the 16-day running time of the festival, provides viewers with an utterly unique and gently humane window on the world, a not-to-be-missed artistic endeavour.

Contemporary World Cinema set to screen at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival

Synonyms, Golden Bear and FIPRESCI Prize winners at the 2019 Berlinale Film Festival

VIFF 2019’s Contemporary World Cinema programme this year is composed of 47 films from 28 countries, and as the programme suggests, represents:

” … a sprawling collection of award winners, new discoveries, and noteworthy premières, be they offbeat comedies, deeply humane dramas or progressive cinema that pushes both boundaries & buttons, this series is a showcase of the best new work from international filmmmakers.”

Today, four award-winning films worthy of your consideration, films that will screen at the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival in 2019, sometime between Thursday September 26th and Friday, October 11th …

Rigorously charting the fracturing of a grieving former police detective’s world as he comes to suspect that his late wife, who died in a strange car accident, was having an affair with a younger colleague, this deeply unsettling and grimly hypnotic second feature by Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Palmason, A White White Day won both the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award and Critics’ Week prize at Cannes 2019.
As Lisa Nesselson writes in her review of the film in Screen Daily

A White White Day is an exquisite, complex, visually arresting and emotionally rewarding film, the tug of the splendidly varied landscape in this film both internal and external in a manner that would be hard to pull off in a dense urban setting, the pleasingly off-kilter string score a plus, and the trajectory of the film percolating from tender — the protagonist’s relationship with his granddaughter — to robustly no-nonsense, offering the viewer throughout with a flesh and blood catalogue of ways to be masculine, to be human, and how to grieve.

The film’s title refers to an Icelandic proverb suggesting that on days so “white” that the earth meets the sky, the dead can communicate with those still living.


Winner of the Golden Bear (the top prize) as well as the FIPRESCI Prize (the critics prize) at Berlinale 2019, in early February of this year …

Nadav Lapid’s third feature, Synonyms, emerged (as critics wrote) as …

… deliriously unpredictable, brilliant, maddening, enthrallingly impenetrable and breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning, the film an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this nakedly hypnotic and astonishingly audacious début, which sees Mercier often naked, clothes only a superfluity, his raw physicality the only pure expression of control as he see-saws the imbalance between power and helplessness.

A sui generis work of tormented genius, Synonyms is not to be missed.

This year’s Cannes’ prestigious Un Certain Regard winner, here’s what VIFF 2019’s programme has to say about The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão:

Karim Aïnouz’s (Madame Satã) stylish, colour-saturated “tropical melodrama” tells the story of two sisters, proper Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and freedom-loving Guida (Julia Stockler), in 1950s Rio de Janeiro who are divided by their father’s duplicitous misogyny. Pure pleasure for the eyes and told from a decidedly feminist slant, this is a tale of “high emotion articulated with utmost sincerity and heady stylistic excess, all in the perspiring environs of midcentury Rio de Janeiro.”

Thus far, then, contemporary, award winning cinema from Iceland, Brazil and France / Israel. Let’s now take a look at Queen of Hearts, the Denmark / Sweden co-production that won the Audience Award in the World Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Director and co-writer May el-Toukhy offers a master class in how to shoot a blossoming physical attraction. From shy touching while trying to find the perfect spot for the “world’s smallest tattoo”, to the frankly explicit sex that actually seems sexy … to confuse matters, though, Queen of Hearts explores the inappropriate relationship involving a middle-aged lawyer’s twisting, highly-charged sexual tryst with her troubled teenage stepson, the film on the one hand an impossibly glamorous, sexually charged and immoral melodrama and on the other a subtle Sirkian, almost Hitchcockian tragedy that explores the wages of familial sin and deceit, all while peeling back the veneer of ultra-civilized Scandinavian society. Not to be missed.

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VIFF 2019 | Late Summer Early Autumn Film Festival Season

IndieWire coverage of the Telluride Film Festival, with Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson, and chief film critic and deputy editor, Eric Kohn.

VIFF 2019 | Late Summer Early Autumn Film Festival Season

Autumn 2019 film festivals

Although many believe that the Oscar season begins in mid-May at the Cannes Film Festival, in fact the Oscar race officially kicks off at the end of August with the Telluride (Aug. 30 – Sept. 2), Venice (Aug. 28 – Sept. 7), Toronto (Sept. 5 – 15) and, at the end of September, both the New York Film Festival (Sept. 27 – Oct. 13) and our very own homegrown film festival (VIFF 2019, Sept. 26 – Oct. 11), where most of the upcoming Oscar contenders will make their auspicious and much-anticipated débuts.

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes this year, Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables — débuting at VIFF 2019 as part of the Spotlight on France series — emerged as one of Jeff Wells’ (Hollywood Elsewhere) favourite films at Cannes this year, a film he describes as “explosive, urgent, furious, riveting, breathless and impactful,” and about which VIFF’s festival guide says …

Set in the same suburban Paris neighbourhood, Montfermeil, used by Victor Hugo as the location for the Thénardiers’ Inn in his Les Misérables, débuting director Ladj Ly’s gripping, incendiary police-thriller gives us a young cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who joins an Anti-Crime Squad team led by loose cannon Chris (co-writer Alexis Manenti, superb) and is soon immersed in a world of poverty and internecine power struggles. When images of police brutality start circulating, the shit hits the fan…

The full VIFF 2019 festival guide will be online two weeks from today, on Friday, September 6th, on the same day the glossy cover programme will be available at libraries and various other outlets across Metro Vancouver.
With the summer silly season of dreaded movie sequels having drawn to a close, with box office down 19% this summer over last, the failed popcorn blockbusters are about to give way to the more serious fare all cinephiles cherish, all of which are ready to elbow their way into the Oscar derby.
At the various film festivals that will unspool future Oscar award winners over the course of the next month and a half, new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Noah Baumbach, Terrence Malick, Edward Norton, and more will launch into the awards season or fizzle out.
In respect of VIFF 2019, as more information about the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival becomes available, we’ll publish our idiosyncratic take and insight into the information with which we’re provided. In the meantime, take a look below for films that will début at one or more of the above-mentioned film festivals, including our own illustrious Vancouver International Film Festival

Writer-director-producer Edward Norton has transplanted the main character of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel Motherless Brooklyn 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.


Portrait of a Lady on Fire

On the cusp of the 19th century, young painter Marianne travels to a rugged, rocky island off the coast of Brittany to create a wedding portrait of the wealthy yet free-spirited Héloise. An emotional and erotic bond develops between the women in Céline Sciamma’s Cannes-awarded subversion of the story of an artist and “his” muse.

In this richly burnished, occasionally harrowing rendering of the persistent scars of war, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), attempt to readjust to a haunted post-WWII Leningrad.

Noah Baumbach’s new film is about 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.

Pedro Almodóvar taps into new reservoirs of introspection and emotional warmth with this miraculous, internalized portrayal of Salvador Mallo, a director not too subtly modeled on Almodóvar himself and played by Antonio Banderas, who deservedly won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

A searing exploration of the consequences of upholding one’s convictions in a time of terrifying upheaval, this 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 a little-known true story of quiet heroism.

Music Sundays | Angus and Julia Stone | Sibling Folk

The Australian folk duo, Angus and Julia Stone

Julia Natasha Stone was born on the 13th of April 1984 in Sydney Australia.
Julia’s parents, Kim and John Stone, were both well-regarded Australian folk musicians who played locally. Two years later, on April 27th 1986, her brother Angus was born. At family gatherings, it was not uncommon to see the two siblings perform — all was well until, in 2000, their parents split.
After finishing secondary school and while on a holiday with her brother in South America, Julia was impressed by her brother’s musical talent, “Angus was writing amazing songs … he had shown me how to play guitar when we were traveling in Bolivia, and those songs had gotten me through that year (Julia had, earlier that year separated from her boyfriend, from all reports a turbulent relationship, which left Julia emotionally devastated)”.
Within a year, in 2004, Julia began writing her own songs.
By 2005, and back in Sydney, Angus and Julia began to play gigs at open mic nights, with Angus performing backing vocals for Julia, as in time Julia did for Angus, on the songs he wrote. Finally, in 2006, the two formed a duo, Angus and Julia Stone. In March of that year the pair recorded their début extended play, Chocolates and Cigarettes, a remarkably chill amalgam of songs written and recorded live at home.
The EP, released in August, went on to win the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) 2006 Best Album award, with Angus and Julia also taking home the Best New Group prize. The rest, as they say, is history.

Chocolates & Cigarettes directed by Angus and Julia Stone — from their 2006 début EP.

Angus and Julia Stone’s second album, Down the Way (March 2010), débuted at number one on the ARIA Albums Chart and was certified 3x platinum in 2011, It was the highest-selling album by an Australian artist for 2010. At the 2010 ARIA Music Awards the duo won ARIA Album of the Year for Down the Way and ARIA Single of the Year for Big Jet Plane, attaining the number-one position in the Triple J Hottest 100 in 2011, as voted on by radio station listeners across Australia.

Angus and Julia Stone last played in Vancouver on November 28th 2017, to a sold-out audience of 1280 fans at The Vogue.

Arts Friday | The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival | Winners!

The 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival | 2019

Saturday night, the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival draws to a close.
Why should that matter to you?
Well, if you love film, and foreign cinema in particular, the award winning films that will be announced Saturday night in Cannes highlight the most important films made outside the North American continent this year, and most probably predict this year’s Oscar award contenders for what used to be called Best Foreign Language Film but for the 2020 Oscar ceremony will be renamed the Best International Feature Film. Not to mention, for aficionados of the Vancouver International Film Festival, a raft of Cannes films will arrive on our shores this upcoming September and October.
Here’s IndieWire chief film critic Eric Kohn’s wrap up column on the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival, Class War & the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
WINNER, Palme d’Or | Director: Bong Joon-ho
Parasite | South Korea

The fearlessly and fiendishly well-crafted new film from director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiecer) offers a masterful dissection of social inequality, in a film that while a diabolically fun watch is also resolutely political, the film’s tonal shifts clearly in service of its class politics, infecting Parasite’s breezy dark-comedy with notes of rage and melancholy. Bong delivers a stunning return to form with this newest venture, which takes bold leaps between tenors and tone, the film entertaining and intelligent, and an unsparing social indictment of class inequality — a roaringly raucous, blood-spattered social satire that is also luxuriously watchable, suspenseful, uproarious, and a brilliant return to form for South Korean auteur Bong.
For background on how the Cannes Jury chose Parasite, click here.
WINNER, Grand Prix | Director: Mati Diop
Atlantics | Senegal

Mati Diop entered the Official Competition at Cannes with plenty of attention, as the first black woman with a film in the section across the festival’s 72 years. But, according to IndieWire film critic, Eric Kohn …

“The real reason to pay attention to Atlantics is its singular vision of the migration crisis. Diop’s gorgeous, mesmerizing feature directorial début focuses on the experiences of a young woman named Ada (Mama Sané) stuck in repressive circumstances on the coast of Dakar after her boyfriend vanishes en route to Spain. But the film is less fixated on his departure than with the community around her.

Diop’s enigmatic, lyrical narrative left audiences dazzled by its cinematic textures and haunting atmosphere. The peculiar allegorical nature of its story, and a supernatural twist that creeps into the plot, could make it a tough consensus choice for this year’s jury. But it’s quite the impressive début, and could very well wind up with some sort of prize by the end of the festival.”

There was a tie for the next category …
WINNER, Jury Prize | Tie
Les Misérables | France | Director: Ladj Ly

The directorial début of Ladj Ly offers a relentless tale of mounting tension between tough police officers and an oppressed Muslim population in modern-day Paris. Ly’s jittery, naturalistic style spends much of its running time focused on several officers as they clash with the neighborhood youth, and one conflicted new recruit (Damien Bonnard) with a moral conscience. The suspense builds to an anxiety-inducing showdown involving the bubbling frustrations of a local Muslim boy (Issa Perica) whose pithy crimes receive a nasty comeuppance in the film’s wrenching finale, causing audiences to draw thematic parallels to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Bacurau | Brazil | Directors: Kleber Mendonça Filho Juliano Dornelles

A bracingly confrontational commentary on the direction his home country of Brazil is taking in the Trump-like era of Bolsonaro, Bacurau’s propulsive storytelling doesn’t come at the expense of the vividly sketched personality of Brazil, in this often strange fever-dream Jacobean-style bloodbath of a film, all at once densely layered and rich, ruthless and clear-minded, a film that divided the critics, but not this year’s Cannes Jury, it would seem. Mendonça Filho has scored before at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with his absolutely brilliant Neighbouring Sounds, which took VIFF 2016 by storm, emerging as an audience favourite.
Best Screenplay | Writer / director: Céline Sciamma
Queer Palm (Feature) | Céline Sciamma
Portrait of a Lady on Fire | France

Acclaimed French director Céline Sciamma makes her long-overdue Competition début with this vivid period drama, which focuses on an 18th century lesbian romance about a painter (Noémie Merlant) hired to create a portrait of a woman from a wealthy family (Adèle Haenel) without her knowledge. In the process, the two women fall in love, against the backdrop of a magical seaside landscape. Sciamma’s sharp, picturesque imagery meshes with the palpable erotic sparks between her two stars, who transform this emotionally resonant two-hander into a riveting portrait of hidden sexuality, a film Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells writes is “as close to perfect as a gently erotic, deeply passionate period drama could be,” while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw writes in his five-star review …

Céline Sciamma has brought a superbly elegant, enigmatic drama to Cannes that compels a shiver of aesthetic pleasure and fear, demonstrating a deeply satisfying new mastery of classical style to go with the contemporary social realism she showed in Girlhood (2014) and Tomboy (2011).

The setting is 18th-century Brittany, where an Italian noblewoman (Valeria Golino) has engaged what is officially a ladies’ companion for her beautiful daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just come out of a convent and is recovering from the loss of her sister. The companion, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is actually an artist, and the countess wishes her to paint a portrait of Héloïse in secret, to be shown to a wealthy prospective husband in Milan, because headstrong Héloïse would never consent to sitting for any such picture.

Sciamma brings the erotic together with the cerebral. The final scenes set in the art gallery and the opera house are gripping: a past obsession simultaneously sour and yet vividly alive. What did it remind me of? De Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons? Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing? I don’t know.

But what a story of desire.

From the reviews out of Cannes, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a sure-fire contender for the Palme d’Or, with a seeming Best Actress nod for the luminous Adèle Haenel [2017’s BPM (Beats Per Minute)] a near certainty.
Best Actor | Antonio Banderas
Pain and Glory | Spain

A beautiful, full-hearted celebration of the craft of filmmaking, Pain and Glory is one of the most meditative of Pedro Almodóvar’s career, an especially personal work, anchored by the director’s on-off muse Antonio Banderas in perhaps his greatest performance, as he sweeps through the Spanish maestro’s recurrent themes: high melodrama and kitsch comedy, piety and carnal lust, sex and death, human pain and transcendent glory.
Best Actress | Emily Beecham
Little Joe | France

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant, visually Little Joe is a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s. Another film that divided the critics, with CineVue critic John Bleasdale writing, “compared to the sophisticated and nuanced horrors of Black Mirror, Little Joe feels like a fairly straightforward riff on a very familiar idea. Nonethless, because it won an award at Cannes, because it’s a horror film (and outside of the hothouse of the Cannes Film Festival, the film will receive stronger reviews), Little Joe will likely arrive on our shores at some point this summer or autumn.
Best Director | Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
The Young Ahmed | Belgium

Camera d’Or
Our Mothers | Guatemala | Director: César Díaz

From the military dictatorship established in the late 1970’s in Guatemala was born a civil war that only ended some twenty years later, leaving in its wake more than 200, 000 victims, and burying the memories of 40, 000 missing people. With Our Mothers, selected in the Critics’ Week section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, César Díaz offers a film of remembrance and resilience, Our Mothers erupting like a shout in the darkness that surrounds this often overlooked massacre that cost mostly Indian lives, the film a heartbreaking portrait of a mother and her son.

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Otherwise, the following films garnered praise at Cannes 2019 …

An American film, but director Quentin Tarantino and his all-star cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Lena Dunham, Kurt Russell, Dakota Fanning, James Marsden, Tim Roth, Timothy Olyphant and a host of other actors, stepped onto The Croisette at Cannes for the international début of his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which more than lived up to its hype in advance of the film’s much-anticipated mid-summer (July 26th) release in theatres across the continent.

The buzz out of Cannes 2019 for a Best Oscar nomination for Brad Pitt was very strongStrong buzz out of Cannes 2019 for Brad Pitt as a potential Best Actor Oscar winner in Quentin Tarantino’s enthusiastically received Once Upon a Time in Hollywood..

At screening’s end, Once Upon a Time received a rare 7-minute standing ovation, with both Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio scoring great reviews and buzz for the two as potential Best Actor Oscar nominees.

Another film emerging from Cannes with immense positive buzz for probable Best Actor Oscar nominee Taron Egerton, in the title role, is Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman, the story of Elton John’s life, from his years as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music through his influential and enduring musical partnership with Bernie Taupin, a film that the critics raved about, writing that Rocketman “explodes with the kind of colour and energy that only Elton John himself could invoke.”

“Freddie Mercury may have had the better voice,” writes the New York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski. “but it’s Elton John who gets the better movie. Rocketman, director Dexter Fletcher’s trippy new biopic about the flamboyant rocker is braver, deeper and more enlightening than last year’s slobbering piece of Queen propaganda Bohemian Rhapsody (which he also partly directed), a flashy fantasia of a movie that will have you both cheering and in tears in the film’s phenomenally moving pivotal scene.”

We’ll know soon enough — Rocketman opens in theatres next Friday.

Films striving to winner the coveted Cannes 2019 Palme d'Or

Since 1955, the Cannes Film Festival has awarded the coveted Palme d’Or to the greatest filmmakers of our age, from Frances Ford Coppola to Michael Haneke, Terrence Malick, Abdellatif Kechiche, Costas Gavras and Jane Campion. While Oscar season involves thousands of voters and aggressive, months-long campaigns, the Palme d’Or race among the 20, or so, films selected for Official Competition is often difficult to predict.
This year’s Cannes jury stands out for being particularly filmmaker-centric, with Cannes veteran Alejandro G. Iñarritu serving as president, joined by fellow directors Kelly Reichardt, Alice Rohrwatcher, Maimouna N’Diaye, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Pawel Pawlikowski — as well as Elle Fanning, the youngest Cannes juror in history. All have screened work at the festival, this year’s jury composed of particularly complex & disparate sensibilities.
Today’s update: the winners, and more, at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, some of which will receive a Best International Film Feature Oscar nomination, most of which will screen at the 38th Vancouver International Film Festival, running from September 26th through October 11th, 2019.

Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson Wins Fipresci Critics Awards At Cannes Film Festival

Just announced: The Lighthouse has won the Fipresci Critics Awards at Cannes, about which the Deadline website writes …

“A story of two lighthouse keepers who drive each other to madness, won the Cannes Film Festival critics’ award for best first or second features in Directors’ Fortnight and Critics Week. The award was announced Saturday by the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci).

Robert Eggers The Lighthouse was shot in black and white and starred Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.


Fipresci also honoured Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven as the best film in competition and Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole as best film in the sidebar Un Certain Regard.

Terrence Malick’s Cannes competition entry, Hidden Life, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

The Lighthouse sees ‘two lead actors give stormy, career-best performances,” according to the statement from the Fipresci jury. It described the Eggers film as “a brutal work of art, all shot in beautiful black-and-white cinematography and fueled by a soundscape that echoes like a foghorn.”

The full list of winners at the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival.