VanRamblings preview coverage is getting down to the crunch, given that the 36th annual Vancouver International Film Festival will nominally get underway this upcoming Thursday, and kick off in its full glory on Friday, September 29th. So many fine films to preview for readers, so little time.
If you’ve not read VanRamblings’ opening orientation column for VIFF 2017, you’ll want to click on the link that has just been provided you. If you’re looking for all of our coverage to date, simply click here.
In 2017, in addition to coverage of VIFF, VanRamblings is covering the Vancouver civic by-election, which somewhat ‘less partisan’ coverage oughta ramp up this week. Arising from our coverage of the by-election, VanRamblings’ coverage of VIFF 2017 will be somewhat prejudiced. Still, we’re almost as addicted to the film festival as has long been the case that we may not be able to help ourselves in providing more VIFF coverage.

Each September, the fine folks at VIFF present advance screenings of films set to ‘unspool’ at VIFF, films where VIFF will bring in writers / producers / directors or actors associated with a film. Of all the films in preview, by far the film with the most buzz is Melanie Woods’ Shut Up and Say Something, the must-see BC Spotlight film screening at VIFF 2017 on Wednesday, Oct. 4th at 6:15pm and Sunday, Oct. 8th at 12:30pm, at the Vancouver Playhouse. Spoken word artist Shane Koyczan (the “protagonist” in the film) and the film’s director will be in attendance at both screenings.

Each year the prestigious and heavily juried New York Film Festival takes place at the same time that the Vancouver International Film Festival does. Can’t make it to New York for NYFF55, not to worry — this year the 55th edition of the New York Film Festival shares 12 films with VIFF, which we’ll write about this upcoming Thursday, the kick off day for both festivals.
The trailer for Thelma, above, is there for a reason — cuz Thelma will screen this Friday, Sept. 29th at 1pm at the International Village (and again on Monday, October 9th, 6:30pm at the Vancouver Playhouse — and will also screen Friday and Saturday, October 6th and 7th at NYFF55 (just in case you want to take a break from VIFF and catch a screening of Thelma in New York). This Norway/Sweden/France/Denmark film directed by Joachim Trier (oh, c’mon, you know that Trier’s 2011 award winner, Oslo, August 31st just knocked your socks off) is another must-see at VIFF.
Here’s what Rodrigo Perez, in his review on The Playlist, has to say …

Trier’s beguiling, thought-provoking and icy supernatural thriller is his most ambitious film to date and yet still possesses the essence of the young filmmaker’s preoccupations about mental disorders and souls grappling with subconscious turmoil.

Moody and chilly, Thelma brings foreign language and arthouse sensibilities to the genre of the inexplicably psychic and mystical and this mélange — Stephen King fascinations and Ingmar Bergman’s fearful, existential relationship with God — makes for an utterly spellbinding portrayal of the unconscious mind and the terrible implications of transformative power. And yet, for all its genre tropes, Thelma is character-driven first and foremost and plays out like a vivid and nightmarish version of a coming of age story.

One more note before we close out today’s column: the big buzz film at Telluride this year, the film that knocked the socks off of filmgoers and critics alike at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month, the film that is a lock for a slew of Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture (which it could win) and Best Actress a lock for Saoirse Ronan, with a very probable Best Supporting Actress Oscar win for the always wonderful Laurie Metcalf, a simply stunning out of the blue début success for its novice director and longtime indie actress Greta Gerwig, yes, we’re writing about Lady Bird, which will screen at VIFF only once: on Monday, October 9th, 4pm at the Centre for the Performing Arts, after which it’ll be a whole month before the film opens in wide release Friday, November 10th.

Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2017 is available by clicking here.

Cinéastes of the western, eastern, northern and southern world are counting down the days to the start of next Thursday’s much-anticipated 36th annual edition of the glorious Vancouver International Film Festival.
Today for your edification, VanRamblings presents a preview of three much-lauded films: Call Me by Your Name, the film that took Sundance by storm and won the Audience Award at the Melbourne Film Festival; BPM (Beats Per Minute), the 1990s-set AIDS activist drama, the celebrated Grand Prix and FIPRESCI award winner at Cannes this year; and Léa Mysius’ Ava, the coming-of-age story about a young girl who goes blind, which won the SACD Cannes Critic’s Week Award supporting new writers.

The smash at Sundance in January of this year, and equally lauded at Telluride earlier this month, Call Me by Your Name is a lock for several Oscar nominations, the film picked up at Sundance by Sony Pictures Classics (to be distributed by Mongrel Media in Canada), and set for a wide release on Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S. (and Canada), on Nov. 24th.
At VIFF, sometimes you want to be the first person among your group of friends to see a film early, and not have to wait a couple of months to catch it in regular theatres. For VanRamblings, and for many others, that’s probably the case with Call Me by Your Name, which will screen three times at VIFF, each time at The Centre for the Performing Arts: Thurs., Oct. 5th at 9pm, Sun., Oct. 8th at 9pm, and Thurs., Oct. 12th at 3:15pm.

Almost as celebrated as Call Me by Your Name, as Guy Lodge wrote in his Cannes review for Variety, Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute) jumps off the screen as a “sprawling, thrilling, abrasive, consoling and emotionally immediate portrait of 1990s Parisian AIDS activists, melding the personal, the political and the erotic to heart-bursting effect.”
And, as we wrote above, BPM (Beats Per Minute) was the Grand Prix winner at Cannes this year, not to mention the Cannes 2017 recipient of the prestigious International Federation of Film Critics FIPRESCI award.
As Peter Bradshaw writes in his five-star review in The Guardian …

Robin Campillo’s passionately acted ensemble movie about ACT UP in France in the late 80s – the confrontational direct-action movement that demanded immediate, large-scale research into AIDS, compellingly combines elegy, tragedy, urgency and a defiant euphoria, ACT UP’s goal to rouse the gay community from fatalism and torpor — and strike back against the hostile complacency of the political and Big Pharma.

The extraordinary power of the ACT UP campaign has assumed in cultural history is that it was something that valued life, but also made people think about death — the last taboo. It made staring into the sun not merely possible but necessary. For most people in their twenties, death is just a rumour. For the gay generation of the 80s and for ACT UP, mortality, illness and bereavement were facts they had to confront, without help from the agencies of the state.

This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life.

BPM (Beat Per Minute) screens twice at VIFF, both times at The Playhouse, Saturday, Sept. 30th at 3:15pm, and Monday, Oct. 2nd, at 6:15pm.

Part of the annual 10-film Spotlight on France VIFF series, the North American première of Léa Mysius’ celebrated La Semaine de la Critique (SACD) award at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Ava tracks 13-year-old Ava in the months following the information that she will lose her sight sooner than expected, and as she confronts the attendant problems in her own idiosyncratic way. Okay, that wasn’t very articulate: let’s try this …

• Jessica Kiang, Variety. Ava’s (Noée Abita) loss of sight perhaps mirrors her loss of innocence and coming of age. Ava is a film that doesn’t simply explore the textural possibilities of 35mm film for the hell of it, it makes thematic use of them, to stunning, evocative effect. Co-screenwriter, along with director Mysius, cinematographer Paul Guilhaume’s visually exquisite storytelling provides a compelling resonance in a story about vision, creating images of a peculiar richness in which the colours are saturated but the lens seems progressively more stopped-down so that even the brightest sunlight can feel portentous. “She’s blonde and sunny, and I’m dark and invisible” says Ava, self-pityingly comparing herself to her fair-haired love rival. But Ava’s darkness is anything but invisible; it has a glowering luminosity in a film that shines darkly.
• Wendy Ide, Screen Daily. A 13-year-old girl fights back against her impending blindness with guns — literally — blazing full bore in this insouciant tale of adolescent rebellion, the arresting visual sense of Léa Mysius’ feature début boasting a robust resistance to the cinematic clichés of the usual portrayal of disability, the film’s cello-infused, brutalized score providing a sense of menace, the film seeded with black: the dog, the police horses & the circles that Ava paints on her bedroom wall evoking both the fear of and fascination with her loss of sight.

That’s it for today. You may expect more previews of award winning (and lauded) films set to play VIFF 2017 this weekend, and next week.
Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2017 is available by clicking here.

Today on VanRamblings, we’ll present three more award-winning films that are set to screen at the 36th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, films without Canadian distributors in place, films you are likely to miss unless you purchase a ticket for an upcoming VIFF screening, worthwhile — even life-changing — cinema that you simply don’t want to miss.
A good example? Renowned Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope, the tale of a Syrian refugee who stows away to Finland, Kaurismäki, as always (and always to good effect), mines the narrative with the deadpan humour for which he is justly famous, all the while refusing to flinch from heartbreak and hardship. Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlinale this year, here’s another VIFF 2017 film that is not to be missed.

Here is how The Telegraph’s Tim Robey begins his 5-star review …

The Other Side of Hope, Aki Kaurismäki’s gorgeous and cuttingly poignant comedy, begins with a young Syrian asylum seeker emerging from a coal pile in Helsinki’s industrial port. He is Khaled (Sherwan Haji), and has wound up here by accident, after escaping violent persecution by jumping aboard a freighter in Eastern Europe.

Coated black, head to toe, he finds his way to a shower and cleans up, before asking a local official where to find the police. “Are you sure?” asks the man, a young black guy, quizzically — a question that’s pure, distilled Kaurismäki, in its loving irreverence, implied empathy, and suggestion of a community that wants to help the down-and-out however it can.

Khaled, though, wants to do things by the book. Handing himself in as an illegal migrant, he checks in to a Reception Centre and is grilled about his journey to Finland from the rubble of Aleppo, which is so laden with aching tragedy and racist abuse that you wonder how on earth Kaurismäki can bring a smile back to our faces, let alone the torrents of laughter, later on, that his film manages to unleash.”

Excerpts from other critics’ review, all of which reviews are laudatory …

• Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage. People like Aki Kaurismäki, Haneke, and von Trier, amongst others, might try, on the surface, to feign a certain resistance to humanism and yet their kind seem to be the only ones capable of delivering something as vital as this. The Other Side of Hope is a film that talks about hope without pretension, while maintaining a defiant faith in human decency — not to mention the faith that cinema itself still has the ability to translate that decency, with humour and clarity, to the screen.
• Jessica Kiang, The Playlist. Kaurismäki’s wonderful new Berlinale Silver Bear winner makes a stonefaced, droll but paradoxically urgent case for a truth that desperately needs to survive these post-truth times: people are people and borders are bullshit. Warmhearted, sad-eyed and straight-faced, a film with a jaunty Finnish-folk-heavy soundtrack, The Other Side of Hope offers granular, tragicomic, personal and often despairing filmmaking, wrapped up in a story that is full of hope.

For the past 21½ years, month in, month out, each and every month (including the months when we were dying of cancer), VanRamblings has submitted a 1,000 word ‘philosophical’ column on some aspect of the film industry — to The Fraser Journal, the baby of my longtime editor Mari Miyasaka, who has not only found a way to put up with me over all those years, but has worked steadfastly to create a Japanese language magazine that while distributing in Metro Vancouver, has found a loyal audience across far-flung locales and countries spanning the globe.
As you might well expect, then, over the years VanRamblings has developed a great affection for Japanese cinema, most particularly those films which screen at VIFF that are often sponsored by The Fraser Journal. Films such as Close Knit, part of VIFF 2017’s Gateway / Dragons and Tiger series, winner of both the Teddy Jury Award, at Berlinale 2017, and recent Audience Award winner at the 2017 New York Asian Film Festival.

The international première of Naoko Ogigami’s magestic film Close-Knit in the Panorama Special section of Berlinale 2017 was met with raucous applause as the ending credits rolled, with an additional enthusiastic two minutes of applause once the lights were up.
One of Berlinale 2017’s triumphs, Close Knit will screen twice at VIFF 2017, both times at the Cineplex International Village in Cinema 10, on Tuesday, Oct. 10th at 6:30pm, and again on Thursday, October 12th at 4:15pm.
Here are excerpts from two reviews of Close-Knit …

• Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage. Combining cinematographer Kozo Shibasaki’s naturalistic aesthetics and attention to texture and detail with a central theme of nurture taking over from nature, Ogigami’s film could quite easily be mistaken for the work of her contemporary Hirokazu Kore-eda, another great director of modern Japanese melodrama. The fact that she has chosen to focus on an LGBT experience, something that has been absent from Kore-eda’s work to this point, might suggest that Close-Knit is somehow a departure from that tradition of filmmaking. Surely the contrary is true: it’s another story of Japanese life, not a different story necessarily, and it’s presented exactly so. Director Naoko Ogigami’s film never feels weighed down by its delicate subject matter, nor does it underplay it or come across as didactic in its delivery. Indeed, with 11-year-old Tomo’s (Rinka Kakihara) future and (for want of a better word) simple goodness in the balance one might find the tremendous emotional swells of Close-Knit so moving at times that one can barely hear the sound of fresh ground being broken in Japanese cinema.
• Guy Lodge, Variety. A nuanced, softly lit family portrait, with compassion and conflict held carefully in balance, Naoko Ogigami’s gentle, sweet-souled celebration of alternative family structures, in which a maternally neglected young girl finds security in the care of her uncle and his transgender partner, Close-Knit offers a warm, practical, pastel-shaded cardigan of a film, with a winning but not too cutely played performance by Rinka Kakihara as 11-year-old Tomo, a young girl who has had to grow up a little faster than her peers, thanks to the fecklessness of her mother (Mimura), an overgrown adolescent who thinks nothing of disappearing on a whim for days on end. Note: Close-Knit is not to be viewed on an empty stomach; much of the film’s key dramatic interaction takes place around lovingly prepared meals.

So, above, we have another standout film to add to your VIFF schedule.

An absolute must-see at VIFF 2017, Sami Blood arrives as a multiple award winner: the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actress (Lene Cecilia Sparrok) winner at last spring’s Seattle Film Festival; Special Jury Prize winner and another Best Actress win for Sparrok at Tokyo’s 2017 Film Festival, with a Best Director of a Début Film win, for Amanda Kernell, in Venice. If the trailer above doesn’t have your heart pounding in anticipation of screening Sami Blood at VIFF 2017, you may want to check your pulse.
There’s no Canadian distributor in place for Sami Blood. See it at VIFF 2017, or miss out entirely on the opportunity to see one of cinema’s most celebrated Scandanavian films to arrive on our shores this decade.
Here are lengthy excerpts from two reviews of Sami Blood …

• Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post. Sami Blood — a beautiful, haunting film, anchored by a startlingly accomplished lead performance by Lene Cecilia Sparrok — relates the story of the Sami people of Scandinavia, an indigenous race that has been the victim of ethnic bigotry and systemic cultural suppression in Norway, Sweden and other Nordic countries. Set mostly in the 1930s, the poignant feature début by filmmaker Amanda Kernell, Sami Blood serves up a slice of that troubled history, with its story of 14-year-old Sami reindeer herder Elle-Marja, a precocious spitfire who, with her little sister Njenna, has been sent from the village where they grew up to a Swedish state-run boarding school for Sami children.

  Played by real-life sisters Lene Cecilia and Mia Erika Sparrok, Elle-Marja and Njenna are delights, but it’s the elder sibling’s performance that is the revelation. With her wide features and darting eyes — half furtive and half curious — the teenage newcomer beautifully embodies the survival instincts and self-loathing of a girl who has internalized the prejudice surrounding her and who uses her brains and moxie not to deflect attacks but to deny her own identity. This lovely, lyrical little film never seeks to hammer its point home with the viewer. Rather, Sami Blood leaves its questions about identity hanging in the air, like the scent of something or someone that passed by long ago, but that still lingers — mysterious and mesmerizing — in the breeze.

• Alan Scherstuhl, The Village Voice. Amanda Kernell’s scrupulously shaped coming-of-rage drama opens with Christina (Maj-Doris Rimpi), an elderly woman wearing sparkling pearls and a pitiless countenance, turning bitterly obstinate when taken back to the Lapland of her birth for her sister’s funeral. She’ll speak to no one, vows not to stay the night, and has zero tolerance for displays of yoik, the local throat singing. Stuck in a hotel despite her protestations, she watches a helicopter lift, the green-humped mountains behind it frosted at the peaks. The world around her is gorgeous, a true pleasure to regard, and she stares at that chopper as if it were her only possible rescue from damnation.

  Then we flash back eight decades. Sami Blood plunges into the origins of that anger, examining with rare anthropological acuity the abuse of the indigenous Sami people of northernmost Europe — ”the filthy Lapps,” we hear a blond boy spit as young Christina (now named Elle-Marja and played by Lene Cecilia Sparrok) troops through the woods with her schoolmates. Writer-director Kernell, making an auspicious début, expertly tracks Elle-Marja’s adolescent development — her longings, the process of growing into her own body — and her realization that, no matter her intelligence or aptitude, Sweden offers nothing to a Sami beyond the plains she was born on.

  A courageous and compelling, yet quietly observant film, even given the matter-of-factness of its scenecraft, Sami Blood is a film about girlhood and racism, passing and escape. It’s also about guilt, about the toll taken on a life of rejecting one’s minority origins in accordance with (and in defiance of) the majority’s unjust prejudice. The finale finds a ninety-year-old Elle-Marja — now Christina — flooded with grief about the family she left behind. It’s overwhelming.

More celebrated, award-winning films that will arrive on our shores in mere days, as part of the humanizing and humane and always tremendously enlightening Vancouver International Film Festival, which kicks off it’s much-looked-forward-to 36th annual edition on Thursday, September 28th.
Today, three more films for you to consider placing on your VIFF calendar.

As VanRamblings wrote last week in our introductory VIFF 2017 column, rising Chilean director Sebastián Lelio (Gloria) in his new, award-winning film A Fantastic Woman, celebrates the endurance of a woman under suspicion of murder in a film that could bring the first major acting award for a transgender performer to Daniela Vega.
Winner of Best Screenplay at February’s Berlinale, in her review in Screen Daily, film critic Wendy Ide writes …

Marina (Daniela Vega) and Orlando (Francisco Reyes) are in love. Despite a twenty-year age gap, they plan to spend their lives together. He left his wife and family for her. But after a birthday celebration in which he promises to take her on a trip to Iguazu Falls, Orlando is taken gravely ill. He dies in hospital. And Marina finds that, as a transgender woman, everything is called into question — their relationship, her role in his death, her right to grieve for the man she loved. Driven by a powerhouse performance by mesmerizing transgender actress Vega, the fifth feature from Lelio combines urgent naturalism with occasional flickers of fantasy to impressive, and wrenchingly emotional effect.

Benjamín Echazarreta’s cinematography makes expressive use of reflections — there is a beautifully composed shot of Marina’s anguished eyes staring through a window which also reflects Orlando in the emergency room. And later, a slyly positioned hand mirror teasingly refers to the crude questions of Orlando’s family about whether or not Marina has had gender reassignment surgery.

The picture is tied together by an orchestral score by Matthew Herbert which is as immediately striking as Alexander Desplat’s for Birth or Mica Levi’s for Jackie. Herbert, best known for his playful, experimental electronic music, crafts a fluttering heartbeat of a flute motif which is achingly lovely. The soundtrack also includes Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, a morale-boosting anthem which prepares Marina for her first encounter with Orlando’s ex-wife. And Marina’s own singing bookends the film, giving the picture its transcendent final scene.

Guy Lodge (one of VanRamblings’ favourite film critics), in his Variety review calls Sebastián Lelio’s new work “transcendent and luminous”, writing in the conclusion to his review …

Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go. At one point in her mortifying police examination, a photographer demands that she drop the towel from her waist. She reluctantly complies, yet the camera respectfully feels no need to lower it gaze: A Fantastic Woman is no less assured than its heroine of her hard-won identity.

Meanwhile, David Rooney in his review in The Hollywood Reporter simply calls A Fantastic Woman “ravishing” and “a bracingly honest work of searing empathy, shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, an emotionally penetrating film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision”.

Kamel El Basha won the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival a week ago, and The Insult is Lebanon’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar this year. Critics are somewhat divided on the film, Eric Kohn (another one of VanRamblings favourite film critics), in his B- review writes …

Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, the Lebanese filmmaker’s followup to his masterful drama The Attack is a fascinating, parable-like exploration of the tension between two facets of Lebanon’s Arab community and the cross-cultural ramifications implied by their ridiculous feud. While it doesn’t quite justify the sprawling courtroom antics or the blunt metaphor they entail, the movie nevertheless provides a profound look at the effect of historical trauma on modern Lebanese society.

In his review in Variety, Jay Weissberg writes, “The Insult is well-made but obvious and too often manipulative dissection of Lebanese political and religious divides that culminates in a standard courtroom drama”
Boyd van Hoeij is somewhat more generous in his review in The Hollywood Reporter, referring to the film as Law and Border, writing of The Insult, “This gripping genre yarn also looks very good. Doueiri, who worked on the early films of Tarantino as a camera assistant, here once more collaborated with The Attack’s cinematographer, Tommaso Fiorilli. Their style is again fluid and sinuous, at once direct and subtly poetic. Subtle isn’t a word that could be applied to Eric Neveux’s driving score, however, with the music accompanying practically all the scenes outside the courtroom.”

Ah yes, Petra Volpe’s rousing Tribeca Best Actress Award winner for Marie Leuenberger, The Divine Order traces the political awakening of young wife and mother taking the fight for women’s suffrage in Switzerland — which ended with victory in … 1971. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser at VIFF, when you consider that the Vancouver International Film Festival is most often synonymous with what is most commonly referred as the cinema of despair ought to mean that The Divine Order will not only prove an antidote to the more dour VIFF offerings, but emerge as the ‘feel good’ film of VIFF 2017.
In his review in Variety, Nick Schager writes …

Thanks to its director Petra Volpe’s sturdy guidance and Leuenberger’s fine lead performance as Nora, whose resolve is coloured by doubt and trepidation, The Divine Order never feels stilted or preachy; rather, it radiates an infectious admiration for the courage shown by its heroines in the face of immense obstacles.

Giorgia del Don, in her review in Cineuropa, seems quite swept away by The Divine Order …

Perhaps (very probably more likely) not everyone knows that calm Switzerland, tucked away in the heart of Europe, was one of the last countries in the world to introduce female suffrage. And indeed it is only since 1971 that women have had the right to vote and the possibility of being elected at federal level. So it is this long-kept “secret” that Petra Volpe decided to bring to the big screen in The Divine Order, continuing the interest in women that she has shown since the beginning of her career.

The Divine Order brings us back to the tragic nature of those opposing the right to vote for Swiss women. Nora (played by the magnificent Marie Leuenberger) embodies a very Swiss sense of discretion that hides an inner volcano just waiting to erupt and let loose a river of slow-moving but relentless lava.

A refreshing cocktail and essential cocktail that brings to light an underhand and sadly still very real discriminatory mechanism (in lots of countries) based on supposed and dangerous “divine” rules. Without ever falling into rhetoric but actually succeeding in making the whole film glide along on an unexpected freshness, Petra Volpe speaks to us about courage, a sentiment that women, and not only Swiss women, have too long ignored the meaning of but actually have plenty of. A jubilant and timeless film with no borders.

Well, that’s it for today’s VanRamblings’ post. Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2017 is available by clicking here.