Category Archives: Cinema

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

May 24, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, News, Thought for the Day, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

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.

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.

Strong 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.

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.

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.

Arts Friday | Are Things Getting Better For Women In Hollywood?

May 17, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Essay, Politics, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

From the earliest days of Hollywood, women were stage managed and manipulated by older men in powerful positions. And it remains clear that, although Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, John Lasseter, Luc Besson, among a host of other male predatory Hollywood executives who have been outed, little good has been achieved still for women in the film industry.
In the Hollywood dream factory, trauma surfaces as light entertainment.
In 2013, introducing the list of best supporting actress nominees during the Oscar ceremony, actor and comedian Seth MacFarlane quipped: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” What was chilling was that no one got the joke. The idea that female stars and aspiring, often young, female stars are required to accept the attentions, at the very least, of older male studio executives, producers and prominent male stars, is as old as the Hollywood hills.
Given the profile that the #MeToo movement has brought to sex discrimination, why does sexism continue to prevail in Hollywood?

According to San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women made up only 7 per cent of directors on the top 250 films of 2018, which was actually a 2 per cent decline from 2017. The same study found that while women made up higher percentages of other fields in the industry — 24% of producers, or 17 per cent of editors, for example — they only accounted for 17 per cent of the workforce of all the jobs surveyed. And that too, was a 2 per cent decline from the year before.
The University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) revealed how sexism is embodied by characters on the silver screen. If female characters are taken out of the plot, it often makes no difference to the story the study found.
Analyzing 1000 scripts, the study found that there were seven times more male than female writers & twelve times more male directors than women.
The biggest impact in counteracting the gender imbalance was if female writers were present at script meetings. If this was the case, female characters on screen was around 50% greater.
Inherent in these observations of the film industry are powerful messages about what it means to be female.
In our “post-feminist” era, where we are frequently told the problems of girls are yesterday’s news — that girls are awash in the largesse of civil rights, and it is boys who really require our attention — it is worthwhile to consider the conduct of male Hollywood writers and executives.

Actress Geena Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

The problem is so glaring that in 2005, the actress Geena Davis, who would go on to start her own gender institute, commissioned Stacy Smith, a researcher at the University of Southern California, to study the issue and help push the studios beyond the staid male-centred film industry.
From 2007 through 2017, according to Smith’s research, women made up only 30.2% of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reports that films featuring women are financially profitable. “Guess what, Hollywood? Female-led films consistently make more money, year over year,” Madeline Di Nonno, the Institutes chief executive has reported to the heads of Hollywood studios.
Hollywood actor Charlize Theron has criticized the movie industry for gender bias. Promoting her film Atomic Blonde, she told feminist Bustle magazine: “Fifteen, ten years ago, it was almost impossible to produce female-driven films, in any genre, just because nobody wanted to make it.”

A quiz that was designed to find out how sexist a film might be was developed by Alison Bechdel and Liz Wallace in 1985. To pass, the film needed three positive answers to these questions: Does it have more than two named female characters? Do those two talk to each other? Is that conversation about something other than a man?
The Hollywood Reporter applied the Bechdel-Wallace test to the top-selling movies of 2018, finding that only around half of the films passed the test.

Actress-writer-director Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series, "Girls"

Female directors are in what “Girls” creator Lena Dunham calls “a dark loop.” If they don’t have experience, they can’t get hired, and if they can’t get hired, they can’t get experience. “Without Googling it,” Dunham asked a recent Sundance panel, “Ask anybody to name more than five female filmmakers who’ve made more than three films. It’s shockingly hard.”

The sheer scale of rampant Hollywood sexism is daunting, the stories of what actresses have to put up with disturbing, the tales of pay inequity and pushing for more female-led stories are instructive.

Actress-writer-producer Zoe Kazan, star of the Oscar-nominated film Big Sick, and writer and executive producer of the films, Ruby Sparks and Wildlife (the latter now on Netflix)

Actress Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick) told IndieWire reporter, Kate Erbland, “There’s so much sexual harassment on set. And there’s no HR department, right? We don’t have a redress. We have our union, but no one ever resorts to that, because you don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult.”
The Oscar winner and star of The Favourite, Rachel Weisz, told Out Magazine that a number of her male co-stars have taken lower salaries in order to match her own. “In my career so far, I’ve needed my male co-stars to take a pay cut so that I may have parity with them,” she said.
Actress Emmy Rossum sounded off during a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable about her experience with overt sexism in the industry.

“I’ve never been in a situation where somebody asked me to do something really obviously physical in exchange for a job, but even as recently as a year ago, my agent called me and was like, ‘I’m so embarrassed to make this call, but there’s a big movie and they’re going to offer it to you. They really love your work on Shameless. But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There’s no audition. That’s all you have to do.'”

If the dynamic of older men and younger, submissive women greases the wheels of Hollywood production offices repeats itself on screen, it is not an accident, but the desires of the producers and directors who create these films played out on the biggest stage of all: Hollywood cinema, the world’s most effective propaganda machine. Who is Hollywood trying to kid?

Arts Friday | Netflix and the Death of the Theatrical Experience

May 10, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Diversions, Media, Netflix, Pop Culture, Television, Video & DVD, Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

With movie theatre attendance at a two-decade low and profits dwindling, with revenues hovering slightly above $10 billion, Hollywood is on the verge of experiencing the kind of disruption that hit the music, publishing, and related cultural industries a decade ago and more.
Hollywood once ruled the world with must-see movies that would entice people to head to the nearest cinema every weekend. But movie crowds have been declining as more people opt to “Netflix”, and chill at home.
Like other industries, entertainment is feeling the shock of technology and scrambling to adapt to sharply shifting economics. Studios are increasingly banking on big-budget franchise films to bring in bucks. But is that enough?
Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz considered those issues in his book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies.

“Netflix is having a massive impact on Hollywood,” Fritz writes. “They’re disrupting all the traditional economics of television and movies. It’s inescapable how much Netflix has become the TV diet for so many people. Now it’s happening to movies.”

“The movie industry is going through what the record industry has gone through. Subscription streaming is changing the movie business. The music business has had to adapt to people streaming, and that’s going to happen in the movie business. A lot of traditionalists are saying, ‘No, a movie is made to be seen in a theatre.’ That may be what Hollywood wants, but that is not what a lot of consumers want.”

As we wrote in a column published in 2018, in recent years Hollywood has been gun shy about producing romantic comedies.

Netflix, though, has proven just how durable the romcom formula is.
When Lara Condon and Noah Centineo’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before débuted last August, it set Netflix streaming records, with over 45 million viewers tuning in. Needless to say, a sequel will be released later this year, as is the case with Joey King’s breakout hit, The Kissing Booth.
Meanwhile, Rose McIver’s The Christmas Prince also spawned a much-anticipated sequel on Netflix this past holiday season.
In 2019, Netflix is set to spend around $18 billion on original programming, most of which is slated for movie production and documentaries, consisting of a 121 movie and documentary slate. Warner Bros.will release 23 films this year, while Disney (Hollywood’s most profitable studio) will début a mere 10. All the Hollywood studios combined in 2019 won’t spend $18 billion on production, and will release only a mere fraction of Netflix’s titles.
Looking into the financial crystal ball, investment firm Goldman Sachs predicts that Netflix could have an annual spending budget of $22.5 billion in 2022, a staggering number that would see Netflix far outstrip the total spending by all of the Hollywood movie studios combined.
With Netflix boasting 139 million subscribers, and growing by millions every month, according to tech mogul Barry Diller, a former senior member of the executive team at Paramount and 20th Century Fox and current Chairman of the Expedia group, “Hollywood is now irrelevant.”

Having disrupted the model for TV broadcasters by making schedules extraneous and grabbing millions of viewers at the same time, Netflix is now making a run at Hollywood. “I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch,” says US journalist Gina Keating, author of Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs.
Netflix’s deep pockets have lured Hollywood stars such as Will Smith (Bright), Joel Edgerton, Sandra Bullock (Bird Box), Ben Affleck (Triple Frontier), Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson (The Highwaymen), Anne Hathaway, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel, the latter three of whom will star in Martin Scorcese’s $150 million epic, The Irishman, arriving day and date on Netflix and a handful of theatres across the continent this upcoming autumn season, just in time for the Oscars.
And talking about the Oscars, Netflix’s Roma won a slew of Oscars this past Ocotber, winning Best Director, Cinematographer and Foreign Language Film for Alfonso Cuarón, while Period, End of Sentence won Best Documentary. Both films have been available on Netflix since December.
Although Netflix has been around for over two decades, the company’s rise to the top of Hollywood happened in a remarkably short period of time.
House of Cards, Neflix’s first foray into original content, débuted only six years ago. By expending monies to produce more shows and movies, it has managed to grow so rapidly that even its own executives are surprised.

“We’ve outperformed the business in a way we didn’t predict,” David Wells, Netflix’s (now former) chief financial officer, told The Hollywood Reporter in late February, after the company announced that its subscriber base had increased by over seven million in the first two months of 2019, its largest increase ever.

While Hollywood could take control of its fate, it’s very difficult for mature businesses — ones that have operated in similar ways for decades and where the top players have entrenched interests — to embrace change.
One can imagine the future looking something like this: You come home (in a driverless car) and say aloud to Alexa, Siri, Google Home or some A.I. assistant that doesn’t exist yet, “I want to watch a comedy with two female actors as the leads.” Alexa responds, “O.K., but you have to be at dinner at 8pm. Should I make the movie one hour long?” “Sure, that sounds good.” Then you’ll sit down to watch on a screen that resembles digital wallpaper.
At the Consumer Electronics Show this year Samsung débuted a flexible display that rolls up like paper.
There are other, more dystopian theories which predict that film and video games will merge, and we will become actors in a movie, reading lines or being told to “look out!” as an exploding car comes hurtling in our direction, not too dissimilar from Mildred Montag’s evening rituals in Fahrenheit 451.
When we finally get there, you can be sure of two things.
The bad news is that many of the people on the set of a standard Hollywood production won’t have a job anymore. The good news?
You’ll never be bored again.

Arts Friday | DOXA 2019 | Selina Crammond Celebration Day

May 3, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, CinemaRaymond Tomlin

On VanRamblings yesterday, we wrote about Selina Crammond, all around good person, community activist, person of principle, and someone who keeps VanRamblings on the straight and narrow (as must appear obvious to anyone, VanRamblings needs all the help we can get — particularly when it comes from persons of conscience like Selina).

In addition to Selina Crammond’s community activism and commitment to change for the better, her ace drumming in the feminist four-piece moody-pop buddy-rock band supergroup Supermoon (see the video above), growing up in the chilly, rural climes of The Pas (630 km northwest of Winnipeg, and considered to be the Gateway to the North), Selina’s sterling work over the years with the good folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival, her longtime membership in Vancouver’s progressive, working class, roots-based political party, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, and by very dint of her presence in our lives just generally bringing a sense of joy, optimism and activism into people’s lives, the aforementioned 34-year-old Selina Crammond is also the Director of Programming (this is her second year in that capacity, although she’d worked with Dorothy Woodend and the fine staff and volunteers at DOXA, for years and years and years) with Vancouver’s prestigious, groundbreaking spring film festival, the acclaimed DOXA Documentary Film Festival, which kicked off last night, and gets fully underway tomorrow, although there’ll be screenings this evening at 6pm of Chilean director Nicolás Molina’s Flow, followed by an 8pm screening of Emmanuelle Antille’s A Bright Light: Karen and the Process, both films screening at The Cinematheque, located at 1131 Howe Street.

DOXA Documentary Film Festival Director of Programming Selina Crammond (left), and DOXA’s Operations & Volunteer Manager, Gina Garenkooper. Photo credit: Milena Salazar.

After a full year of preparing for DOXA 2019, VanRamblings believes that Selina Crammond is deserving of recognition for her critically important work in the arts, and across our community to makes ours a better world, and a more understanding love-based world. Therefore, VanRamblings officially declares today, Friday, May 3rd 2019 Selina Crammond Day (we’re sure our Vancouver City Council will be on board for next year!).

Here are a couple of the DOXA 2019 Programmer’s Picks …

Selina Crammond’s pick …
Midnight Traveler
After receiving threats from the Taliban, filmmaker Hassan Fazili, his wife and their two young daughters are forced to flee their home in Afghanistan and seek refuge in Eastern Europe. Intimate, and often shaky, footage shot by the family on their iPhones captures a wide range of moments, from startling racism in eastern Europe – to meditative reflections on Fazili’s love of cinema. The result is a portrait of a resilient family that offers a very human face to the ongoing refugee crisis.

Hassan Fazili, Emelie Mahdavian | US/Qatar/Canada/UK | 2019 | 87 min.
Saturday, May 11, 2019 - 6:30pm
Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour Street)
Sunday, May 12, 2019 - 6pm
Cinematheque (1131 Howe Street)

Joseph Clark’s pick …
Instructions on Parting
Prepare to be devastated. Instructions on Parting is an emotionally challenging film, that is at once hand-crafted and cinematically stunning. Rarely has such an intimate film demanded to be seen on the big screen.

Amy Jenkins | US | 2018 | 95 minutes
Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - 8pm
Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour Street)

Click here for the DOXA Documentary Film Festival 2019 Twitter account, and hashtag

Click on the graphic above to be taken to the #DOXA2019 Twitter account.

#DOXA2019 will present 82 films from across Canada and around the world, representing the very best in contemporary documentary cinema. Get your tickets at www.doxafestival.ca. Better hurry. Quite a few #DOXA2019 screenings are already sold out, or have limited tickets remaining for the scheduled screenings.
Here’s the full schedule. See ya at #DOXA2019. Bring your dancin’ shoes!