Category Archives: Cinema

VIFF 2020 | Vancouver’s Premiere Film Festival Wending to a Close

October 5, 2020Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

The newly-renovated Vancouver International Film Festival Centre | Vancity Theatre

Here we are fewer than 54 hours until the 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival wends its way to a close fourteen days on, at 11:59pm precisely, this upcoming late evening, Wednesday, October 7th.

This past weekend, VIFF 2020 awarded nine outstanding films, including …
The Reason I Jump | VIFF Impact Award

Call Me Human | VIFF Best Canadian Documentary Award

Cake Day | Best British Columbia short

Nuxalk Radio | Sea to Sky Award

Brother, I Cry | Jessie Anthony, B.C. Emerging Filmmaker Award

The Hidden Life of Trees | Rob Stewart Eco Warrior Award

Bad Omen | VIFF Short Forum: Programme 4

At 6pm Tuesday, VIFF passholders will be able to go online to gain insight into the making of Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan’s hard-hitting The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel, and their insight into how all of us can come together to engage in the fight to limit the power of corporations & engage in the struggle to respond to our climate emergency.

The Pencil. Recommended by VanRamblings friend and longtime VIFF aficionado, Joseph Jones, awarded both best director & Special Jury Prize at Japan’s Skip City Film Festival, and Russian Film Festival Grand Jury Prize & Best Actress winner, The Pencil emerges as yet another VIFF 2020 knockout, Russian director /writer /actress Natalya Nazarova’s heartwrenching tale of redemption framed by shots of a town’s pencil factory machinery, the film tracking Atonina — a young woman from St. Petersburg, who uproots to a cold, forbidding region of rural northern Russia where her artist husband is being held as a political prisoner — as she takes on a job as an art teacher at the local school. Confronted by a violent thuggish element who torment her and bully the children, as determined as she is to transform the lives of the children she engages, she soon becomes aware that she, and she alone, is the only one in the town willing to tackle the cruel realities of corruption in her new home.
Note of perspective: at the start of the film, Nazarova shows a pencil factory making millions of yellow pencils, the pencils emerging as both a metaphor and a symbol for the children in the town, who the adults see as both fragile and dispensable. At one point in the film, a bully easily snaps a pencil in half, as easily broken as the spirits of the children Atonina has set about to rescue. A hopeful note: at film’s end, Nazarova shows the factory again, except now the pencils are green, a symbol perhaps for the inspiring possibility of change Atonina has wrought in the lives of the children.

Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2020 may be found here.

VIFF 2020 | You Have Less Than One Week to Stream VIFF Films

October 2, 2020Arts Friday, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblings, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

Tracey Deer's new film on 1991's OKA crisis, Beans, awarded Best Canadian Film at the 2020 Vancouver International Film Festival

Click or tap on the picture above to access the trailer for Tracey Deer’s new film, Beans

Flat out VanRamblings’ favourite film at VIFF 2020 — along with Jennifer Abbott’s new documentary, The Magnitude of All Things — writer-director Tracey Deer’s new film, Beans, is a poignant, wrenching, heartrending, gut-punch of a film, the first narrative feature to focus on 1991’s Oka Crisis on Québec’s Kahnawake reserve, the story told through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl (the ‘Beans’ of the title) whose family, friends and neighbours lived through the violent 78-day conflict on Mohawk land, with young Kiawentiio embodying, with beyond-her-years wisdom, and forceful determination, director Deer’s own experience as a young girl. An absolute knock-out of a film that had me in tears throughout, and as I say above, a must-see.
VanRamblings’ review of The Magnitude of All Things may be found here.

Another film that has emerged as one of VanRamblings’ favourites is the Serbia/Croatia/Slovenia/Bosnia and Herzegovina co-production, Father, about which Taste of Cinema’s David House writes …

“unsettling, a bleak and heartbreaking tale of the struggle of a father, Nikola, to regain custody of his children from a corrupt Serbian bureaucracy determined to separate the children from their family. With a powerful, quiet, understated, award-worthy performance from Goran Bogdan as Nikola, whose love and devotion to his family emerges as a drama of tender devastation, that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity redolent of the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.

In addition, Father offers a damning critique of an uncaring Eastern European government, as well as a rallying cry for those who fall through the cracks. A film filled with gentle humanity, and an unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance, Father is a spare, unadorned film, with as touching a story as you’ll see at VIFF 2020. Recommended.
More Taste of Cinema VIFF 2020 reviews may be found by clicking here.

Finally for today, a few VIFF 2020 reviews written by Kinetoscope film critics, the acclaimed Jason Chen and Robert Snow.

My Salinger Year | Opening night film Berlinale 2020 | Kinetoscope review by Jason Chen

My Prince Edward | Best New Director Hong Kong 20 | Kinetoscope review by Jason Chen

The Reason I Jump | Audience Award, World Documentary Competition, Sundance 2020 | Kinetoscope review by Robert Snow

A Life Turned Upside Down: My Dad’s an Alcoholic | Kinetoscope review by Jason Chen

VIFF 2020 | Creating Quite the Stir at Vancouver’s Film Festival

September 30, 2020A & E, Cinema, Media, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

There’s a new online arts & culture magazine in Vancouver that’s creating quite the stir. Staffed mostly by former (and recent) arts staff at The Georgia Straight — said the weekly’s new owners, MediaCentral (a condition of employment: management must show their horns at all times) “Nah, we’re not cutting arts coverage. We’re just rationalizing it, by dumping a whole lotta staff, and refocusing editorial categories by eliminating any focus whatsoever on venues and the arts”) — the glorious new Stir is the illustrious new home for arts & culture coverage in our city.
Where to find beloved Straight arts & entertainment editor, the kindly but tough Janet Smith, or bon vivant, Adrian Mack, and acclaimed journalist, Gail Johnson? Vancouver’s nascent Stir magazine is the place where you’ll find Janet, Adrian and Gail, as well as a number of other former Straight staffers, and first-rate British Columbia-based arts & culture journalists, who in Stir have created the place to be for arts coverage in our city.
And isn’t that what makes a city, culture? Otherwise, what are we but an amalgam of greenhouse gas spewing towers, and windy roads laden with too many carbon emitting vehicles. Vancouver’s many and varied arts & culture institutions breathe life and meaning into our paradise by the ocean.

In 2020, at the virtual Vancouver International Film Festival, Stir has emerged as the place for coverage of VIFF 2020.
For instance, in her enthusiastic review of Jimmy Carter: Roll and Roll President (which VanRamblings just loved when we screened it at 3 a.m. yesterday morning), Ms. Smith writes …

Jimmy Carter was cooler than you ever knew — even more so when he’s put up against the presidential candidates for the 2020 U.S. election. Turns out the man once derided as the Peanut Farmer was besties with the likes of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, both of whom sing his praises here. He also hosted regular concerts, first at the guv’nah’s mansion in Georgia, and later at the White House, after the Allmann Brothers helped propel him to election. In her fun, well-researched, and zippily edited documentary, director Mary Wharton connects Carter’s open-minded approach to music to his political achievements.

The review above is just one of many VIFF 2020 reviews you’ll find on the Stir Vancouver online website, from Janet Smith, Adrian Mack and Gail Johnson, in 2020, your go-to website for Vancouver’s finest VIFF coverage.
Here’s hoping Stir thrives long, long into the future, that Ottawa’s modernized Canadian Periodical Fund provides sustaining monies to aid Stir in its necessary endeavours, and that readers (and advertisers) flock by the thousands to Stir Vancouver, such that Stir becomes a west coast institution, a Canadian version of New York Magazine’s Vulture website.

VIFF 2020 | Canada’s National Film Board Shines With 2 Great Docs

September 28, 2020Cinema, Environment, Food & Health, News, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

The Magnitude of All Things, director Jennifer Abbott’s devastating NFB co-production about personal and planetary grief, premièred at VIFF’s Vancity Theatre, with Abbott and co-producers Shirley Vercruysse and Andrew Williamson in attendance. #VIFF2020.

The Magnitude of All Things (Canada). Truth telling, a call to action, and gorgeously filmed by cinematographer Vince Arvidson, Sundance and Genie award-winning director Jennifer Abbott (The Corporation) offers viewers an intimate and emotional punch-in-the-gut with her new documentary.
The Magnitude of All Things draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief — personal for the filmmaker in coming to terms with the passing of her sister, and planetary, as Magnitude takes us across the globe to witness planet Earth in crisis: from the catastrophic fires Australia suffered at the end of 2019, to the devastating role our current climate emergency has played in destroying a southern hemisphere eco-system, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the rising sea levels drowning the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati, to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest arising from the grievous policies of Brazilian and Ecuadorian presidents Jair Bolsonaro and Lénín Moreno, the struggles of the Indigenous peoples who are waging a desperate battle against oil and mining extraction and, at home, how the melting ice in the autonomous Newfoundland and Labrador Inuit community of Nunatsiavut has permanently altered the landscape.
Lest you believe The Magnitude of All Things to be a polemic, didactic filmmaking regurgitating what you’ve heard before, allow this writer to assure you that is not at all the case. Rather, Magnitude is a film about battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony that coalesces into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty, a film that transform darkness into light, and grief into action.

The Magnitude of All Things. A film by Jennifer Abbott. An NFB & partners production.

John Ware Reclaimed (Canada). A genealogical exploration of the life of 19th century Alberta cowboy, John Ware, that seeks to reclaim the narrative of his life, filmmaker and historian Cheryl Foggo expands on the work she undertook in mounting her 2012 award winning play, John Ware Re-imagined, as she re-examines the history of Alberta’s famous early black folk hero and Prairie cowboy, who was rugged, independent & black.
From a story written by Omayra Issa for CBC Saskatchewan …

“It is a history that has been erased,” says Foggo. Both sets of her maternal grandparents came to Saskatchewan from the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Three generations lived in the province before moving to Alberta, the family eventually spanning across the 3 Prairie provinces.

Foggo’s ancestors were among the 1,500 to 2,000 African American farmers who came from the southern U.S. from 1905 to 1911 in search of a better life and a place that was less hostile and dangerous than Jim Crow America. They established five small pioneering communities: one in Saskatchewan and four in Alberta. Their story is steeped in slavery, racial segregation, and the fierce desire for emancipation.

Foggo has been reclaiming her family history for decades. More recently, she has been doing the same for an iconic Black figure on the Prairies, John Ware.

Ware proved himself to be a charismatic man and a highly skilled rancher. He owned two ranches, ultimately reaching one thousand head of cattle. He also pioneered irrigation in the region. Legends of his talents as a horseman were known in Indigenous communities on Treaty 7 territory, where he was close friends with chief Crowfoot of the Siksika First Nation.

John Ware’s story is a fundamental Prairie story and an indelible thread in the Canadian narrative. “It is important to connect John Ware to the Black history that was here in his time, carried on, and has been here from that time forward,” Foggo told CBC Saskatchewan journalist, Omayra Issa.