For the past three years, there’s been an ongoing discussion inside the offices of the Vancouver International Film Festival about taking the mantle from the Toronto Film Festival, and making VIFF the fall film festival where all of the big Oscar contenders would début.
Given Vancouver’s proximity to Los Angeles, given that Vancouver continues to be the second largest film and television production centre on the continent, given our province’s booming economy and vibrant arts community, the thinking goes that now may be the time for VIFF to step up to the plate and show the world that we belong in the big leagues.
The rationale for developing the Vancouver International Film Festival into North American’s première film festival is almost in its entirety a financial, rather than an artistic, consideration. Make no mistake, VIFF filmgoers continue to express support for the world cinema / East Asia orientation of our film festival by the sea, and among diehard VIFF fans much satisfaction is expressed for the tried-and-true, reflected in the burgeoning box office.
Still and all, with financial support for VIFF from major corporate sponsors waning and still prejudiced (for instance, both VISA and Air Canada have withdrawn their financial support from VIFF), it’s likely that the discussion of converting VIFF into more of a high profile Oscar contender oriented film festival will likely continue. It’s not like it’s a roiling discussion, though — for now, for the most part, it’s status quo at VIFF: the best in world cinema, bringing in directors, actors and producers to introduce their films and answer audience questions at films’ end, moderated by the well-considered, erudite, utterly humane and world cinema loving VIFF programmers.

As indicated in yesterday’s column, in 2018, the Vancouver International Film Festival will début a record number of potential Oscar contenders, which is the orientation of today’s VanRamblings column on VIFF 2018.

Melissa McCarthy is a lock for the Best Actress Oscar
Who’da thunk that Melissa McCarthy would emerge from the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals as the front runner for the Best Actress Oscar? Here’s what IndieWire lead film critic Eric Kohn has to say in his review …

Director Marielle Heller’s charming melancholic comedy about real-life writer-turned-criminal Lee Israel, who forged some 400 letters by dead celebrities and pawned them off until the FBI caught up with her scheme, sees McCarthy elevating the material at every opportunity, and whenever the camera lingers on her expressions, she’s a study in contradictions — tough and tender all at once, unsure which side of that spectrum to unleash. It’s dizzying to watch her world fall apart as she scrambles to hold the scraps together. Here’s a character and a performance you can’t help but root for, one of the year’s best performances, in one of the best films of the year, and a certain Oscar contender.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? screens at VIFF 2018 only one time: Saturday, October 6th, 8:45pm at the luxurious Centre for the Performing Arts, located on Homer Street just opposite the Vancouver Public Library.

The Old Man & The Gun. Reportedly Robert Redford’s final performance onscreen, in a film directed by one of my favourite new directors, David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), the film garnering critical acclaim at Telluride for its cast’s superb performances. The Old Man & The Gun will screen only once at VIFF 2018, on Saturday, September 29th at 6pm, at the comfy Centre for the Performing Arts.

There’s a reason that you have to purchase a VIFF membership: it’s for films like this that will arrive at VIFF unrated, but when it’s released later this year will most assuredly garner a hard-R.
Violent and unrelenting, The Sisters Brothers — acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard’s North American, English language début — wowed the critics at last weekend’s Venice Film Festival, as those in attendance watched as Audiard explored the meaning of manhood, brotherhood and the unexpected bonds of fraternity, while reveling in the brutality and cruel hostilities of the world, and as The Playlist film critic Rodrigo Perez writes, “the innocence lost in the madness and the possibilities of a humanity still to be found scattered through the debris of American carnage.” The Sisters Brothers screens twice at VIFF, at 3pm on Sunday, September 30th at The Centre, and again on Monday, October 1st, at 6pm, at The Centre.

Boy Erased. A richly humanistic, emotionally searing drama that sticks in the memory, Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) stars as Jared, the son of a Baptist pastor in a small American town, who is outed to his parents (Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe) at age 19. Jared is faced with an ultimatum: attend a gay conversion therapy programme — or be permanently exiled and shunned by his family, friends, and faith. One of the most talked about films at Telluride this year, The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Farber writes, “bring out the handkerchiefs.” Word is that Hedges is a lock for an Oscar nomination for his performance. Boy Erased screens only once at VIFF, at 9:15pm on Saturday, October 6th at The Centre.
Aren’t you glad that Vision Vancouver City Councillor Tim Stevenson brought a motion to Council banning conversion therapy in Vancouver, the motion seconded by retiring Vancouver Non-Partisan Association Councillor, George Affleck? Who says that opposition Councillors can’t co-operate?

Oscar award-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s latest drama, Everybody Knows, opened Cannes this year to much acclaim, uniting lovers and longtime married couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz in a suspenseful kidnapping thriller set in Spain that will have you on the edge of your seat throughout, in the most gripping and propulsive popcorn-chomping genre film of the year, sociological cinema that explores the meaning of love, bitter resentment, societal divisions, class and the secrets that bind us together and pull us apart. Gosh, sounds just like our current Vancouver civic election — and probably just as compelling, too. Let’s face it, here’s a film not to be missed at VIFF 2018 — hey, it’s Asghar Farhadi … who misses an Asghar Farhadi film? Everybody Knows screens only once at VIFF, Friday, September 28th, 9pm at The Centre for the Performing Arts.

Cold War. A passionate love story between two people of different backgrounds and temperaments, who are fatally mismatched, set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, Pawel Pawlikowski not only won Best Director at Cannes this year, Cold War has emerged as the odds-on favourite to pick up the Best Foreign Language Oscar this year (Pawlikowski’s film Ida won that very same award back in 2013). Says Time Out film critic Phil de Semlyen …

The Polish filmmaker has conjured a dazzling, painful, universal odyssey through the human heart and all its strange compulsions. It could be the most achingly romantic film you’ll see this year, or just a really painful reminder of the one that got away.

Accessible, humane, compassionate, epic, dreamlike, bittersweet and unbearably lovely, tell me, are you really planning on missing Cold War? No, I didn’t think so. Lucky us, Cold War screens twice at The Centre for the Performing Arts, on Tuesday, October 2nd at 6:30pm, and Wednesday, October 10th at 6:15pm. See ya there.

The Favourite. According to IndieWire’s Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn, The Favourite is one of the three films this year that is a guaranteed lock for a Best Picture nomination (the other two are Damien Chazelle’s First Man, the riveting story of NASA and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s mission to land a man on the moon, and Alfonso Cuarón’s autobiographically inspired Roma), Yorgos Lanthimos’ restoration farce, The Favourite, will sweep a number of Oscar awards this upcoming season for a film that simply enraptured the critics at Venice this year, who wrote about this “Satyricon-era Fellini-esque tragicomedy all hopped up with enough sex, deviance, hypocrisy, decadence, and spicy profanity to make your average Masterpiece Theatre patron reach into their PBS tote bag for some smelling salts” (Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty wrote that): here’s a film with enough ribaldry and fiercely intelligent women and loopy nightmarish visions to invigorate the most lachrymose of souls. Ah yes. The Favourite screens only once at VIFF, at 9pm on Tuesday, October 2nd at The Centre.

The Happy Prince. Directed by and starring Rupert Everett, this poignant dramatization of Oscar Wilde’s final years in exile is a powerful parable of passion and redemption, and a gripping drama about poignantly ruined magnificence. A deeply felt, tremendously acted tribute to courage, The Happy Prince screens twice at VIFF, both times at The Vancouver Playhouse, 3:15pm, Tuesday, October 2nd & 6:45pm, Friday, October 5th.

A Private War. In a world where journalism is under attack, Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike) is one of the most celebrated war correspondents of our time. Colvin is an utterly fearless and rebellious spirit, driven to the frontlines of conflicts across the globe to give voice to the voiceless, while constantly testing the limits between bravery and bravado. After being hit by a grenade in Sri Lanka, she wears a distinctive eye patch and is still as comfortable sipping martinis with London’s elite as she is confronting dictators. Colvin sacrifices loving relationships, and over time, her personal life starts to unravel as the trauma she’s witnessed takes its toll. Yet, her mission to show the true cost of war leads her — along with renowned war photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) — to embark on the most dangerous assignment of their lives in the besieged Syrian city of Homs. There are no reviews for A Private War as of this writing. A Private War screens once at VIFF, 8:45pm on Wednesday, October 10th at The Centre.

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.