In the age of Netflix, film festivals must adapt or die. Such is the case with the Toronto Film Festival, which kicked off last night, and such is the case with our homegrown, humanistic Vancouver International Film Festival.
This past Wednesday, at the opening press conference of the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, VIFF Executive Director Jacqueline Dupuis announced a new direction for our city’s much beloved international film festival, while maintaining the distinctive feature programmes that have long been at the heart of Vancouver’s glorious film festival by the sea.

“At this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, we are committed to ensuring our patrons are provided an opportunity to enjoy the best in world cinema,” Ms. Dupuis told the dozens of cinéastes and journalists gathered inside the Vancity Theatre at the kick-off press conference.

“To that end, at the 37th annual edition of VIFF, we’ll screen a dozen award-winning films from each of Robert Redford’s première independent Sundance Film Festival, and Europe’s pre-eminent film festival, the Berlinale, screening for appreciative Vancouver audiences the films that wowed audiences earlier this year, back in January & February.”

“In April, our superlative, dedicated and hard-working programmers travelled to New York City, where they identified a dozen prize-winning films that screened to much acclaim at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival, and in May our programming team negotiated with distributors to bring two dozen of the most acclaimed films that shook the Croisette back in May back home with them, to screen at the 37th annual edition of Vancouver’s and the west coast of North America’s première international film festival. What an opportunity will be provided film lovers in Vancouver in 2018. One can already sense the palpable anticipation across Vancouver’s cinéaste and extraordinarily vibrant arts community.”

“Working with distributors and the good folks at the Toronto Film Festivals, 68 of the finest TIFF films will also screen at VIFF this year! As Vancouver film festival audiences know, for decades the New York Film Festival has occurred at the same time and in concert with VIFF — in 2018, two dozen of the NYFF’s finest films will also screen at VIFF.”

“As VIFF consolidates its 2018 film schedule, we are proud to announce that a record number of the finest films made in Hollywood and across the pond, the certain Oscar nominees in early 2019, will also screen at VIFF 2018, after débuting to much acclaim at the Telluride, Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, providing au courant Vancouver audiences early entrée into the Oscar sweepstakes, and a unique early opportunity to sit in comfort in The Centre for the Performing Arts while enjoying this year’s certain Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress nominees unspool before their very eyes! In 2018, the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival will be the place to be for cinema lovers of every description!”

Today, tomorrow and Sunday, VanRamblings will provide early insight into the award-winning films that will arrive on our shores from across the globe that are absolute must-sees at VIFF 2018. The box office is open now: tickets, ticket packs and passes are readily available.
Click here for all the ticket and pass information you’ll need.

The absolutely free, and stunning beautiful 2018 Vancouver International Film Festival programme and guide is now available all over town. Just click on the preceding link to identify a location nearest to you. Congratulations to VIFF Associate Director of Programming Curtis Woloschuk and his able crew for all the hard work they’ve put in these past weeks and months to create this year’s glossy and readable guide to VIFF 2018.

Montréal born, Academy Award-nominated director Kim Nguyen’s thriller, the Wall Street drama The Hummingbird Project, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård and Salma Hayek opens VIFF 2018 on Thursday, September 27th at the must-attend Gala event of the season. You just know that candidates for office in the current Vancouver civic election will be out in droves hobnobbing for votes, and at the gala reception following the film’s screening, the place to be, and the place to be seen on the 27th.

VIFF 2018 closes 15 days later, on Friday, October 12th with the Closing Gala screening of Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner, tracking the rise and fall of Senator Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman), who captured the imagination of young voters and was considered the overwhelming front runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination when his campaign was sidelined by the story of an extramarital relationship with Donna Rice. As tabloid journalism and political journalism merged for the first time, Senator Hart was forced to drop out of the race — events that, prior to the era of Trump, left a profound impact on American politics through until 2015.
Over the course of 16 days, the Vancouver International Film Festival will screen 330 films, from 55 countries across the globe, at nine different venues, ranging from Cinemas 8, 9 and 10 at Cineplex International Village, SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts and the Vancouver Playhouse, to the reclaimed and thriving Rio Theatre on Vancouver’s Eastside, the Vancity Theatre on Seymour Street, the Orpheum Theatre, The Cinematheque, the Annex at 823 Seymour, and the always comfy and inviting Centre for the Performing Arts on Homer Street, opposite the Vancouver Public Library.
Screening Saturday, September 29th at 3pm at The Centre, and again on Wednesday, October 3rd at 6pm at The Centre, you’ll want to catch …

One month from today, the always spectacular and utterly humane Vancouver International Film Festival commences, unspooling 375 films from 70 countries spanning our globe, each one political in its own way, exploring the politics of personal discovery as well as personal tragedy, and the politics of how life is lived in every far flung country across our planet, the single most enlightening arts event of the calendar year, sure to remove the dimness or blindness from one’s eyes or heart, and a must attend event for any person of conscience concerned for the state of our world.

Screening at the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival this year: acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, a quietly devastating portrait of family and theft in contemporary Japan, resonant, compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda, and a film that stole the hearts of the Cannes jury and even the most cynical of film journalists attending Cannes this year, a film made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles, a heartbreaker that draws our empathy, and yet another charming, funny and affecting example of Kore-eda’s very special brand of tough-but-tender humanism.

Another Cannes favourite headed to VIFF 2018, Capernaum, Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s politically-charged fable about a child who launches a lawsuit against his parents, a staggering heart-in-mouth social-realist blockbuster teeming with sorrow, yet strewn with diamond-shards of beauty, wit and hope, at once quietly absorbing and fitfully shocking as we experience the sights, sounds and smells of the streets where a one-year-old child can wander around alone without anyone stopping to wonder why, and a film that while choosing dramatic power over narrative finesse makes a powerful statement on human misery and grotesque inequality while tackling its subject with intelligence, heart and furious compassion.

Another acclaimed film set to arrive at VIFF 2018, the much-looked-forward-to Cannes FIPRESCI Prize winner, South Korean director LEE Changdong’s Burning, starring Hollywood actor Steven Yuen (Okja, The Walking Dead). Here’s what Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang had to say about Burning …

At 2½ hours, Burning is a character study that morphs, with masterly patience, subtlety and nary a single wasted minute, into a teasing mystery and eventually a full-blown thriller. To reveal more would ruin the story’s slow-building pleasures, which are less about the haunting final destination than the subtle, razor-sharp microcurrents of class rage, family-inherited pain, everyday ennui and youthful despair that build in scene after scene, even when nothing more seems to be happening than a simple or not-so-simple conversation.

Defying expectations throughout, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries wondrous in their complexity and inscrutability, Burning, with its jazzy score, gorgeously immaculate camerawork, shifting moods and carefully calibrated minimalism emerges as a genre-bending murder-mystery that torches genre clichés, in one of the most scorching and beautifully unforgettable films of the year. Yet another VIFF 2018 must-see.

The full VIFF 2018 programme will be available across Metro Vancouver, in libraries, coffee shops and book stores late next week.
Weekday Matinée Passes, probably the best deal at VIFF (as is the case every year) — at only $160, allowing you to see all films Monday to Friday screening between 10am and 5:59pm (that’s as many as 50 films that would be available to you, not to mention Sandy Gow’s always can’t miss afternoon international shorts programmes) — are available by clicking here. Ticket pack information is available by clicking here.