Well, that’s it — almost. The 36th edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival wraps late on Friday evening, October 13th with the “gory as f*ck” screening of Turkish director Can Evrenol’s Housewife, at The Rio.

VIFF Repeats

Of course, as has been the case for many, many years the fine folks at VIFF have planned, and now released information on, their VIFF Repeats programme, which kicks off on Saturday, October 14th with Bosch: The Garden of Dreams at 11:45am, followed by Meet Beau Dick: Maker of Monsters at 1:45pm, The Farthest at 4:15pm, and two more festival favourites, Loving Vincent at 6:45pm, and the final screening of the first VIFF Repeats day, Indian Horse, at 8:45pm. All screenings will occur at the 175-seat Vancity Theatre. Tickets must be purchased, either online or at the door, for each screening (VIFF passes do not apply to the VIFF Repeats programme). VIFF Repeats run through until Thursday, October 19th.

Still and all, during the course of the final two days of VIFF 2017 there are some very fine films that will screen for a final time, films VIFF patrons and critics alike have simply raved about, and are certainly worthy of your time and consideration — as is the case with Janus Metz’s Borg vs McEnroe, perhaps the finest sports-related drama since Bennett Miller’s entirely tremendous Moneyball. Borg vs McEnroe screens for a final time at VIFF at 3:30pm at the Vancouver Playhouse on VIFF’s last day, Friday, Oct. 13th.
On VIFF 2017’s second-to-last day (Thursday, October 12th), you might want to turn your attention to the following VIFF patron favourites …

• Sami Blood (Grade: A). Knocked our socks off. Little wonder that Lene Cecilia Sparrok won a raft of Best Actress awards, and Danish director Amanda Kernell an equal number of Best First Feature and Best Director awards. A compelling and heart-wrenching watch from beginning to end. A must-see. Screens at 11:15am, Tinseltown, Cinema 10.
• Call Me by Your Name, (Grade: A). A friend wrote to us at 2am, “If you haven’t already, please go see Call Me by Your Name. It was exceptional. I watered up 3 times in that movie, each one more soul crushing than the last. Left the theatre with a heavy but full heart.” Yep, yep, yep. Couldn’t agree more. Screens for a final time at 3:15pm at The Centre.
• Close Knit. According to Screen Daily’s Wendy Ide, Close Knit is “gentle, empathetic and deliberately non-confrontational, taking a mild-mannered approach to transgender issues. Having lived in the U.S., director Naoko Ogigami upon returning to Japan found herself struck by the invisibility of the trans community in her home country. Close Knit’s narrative revolves around 11-year-old Tomo (Rinka Kakihara) who finds herself adopted by her Uncle Makio (Kenta Kiritani) when her mother abandons her. Makio cautions that he is now living with someone. Someone unusual. Rinko (Toma Ikuta) is a transgender woman. Tomo’s initial reserve is soon won over by Rinko’s warm and nurturing nature, and the fact that Rinko keeps a spotless home, and creates cute bento boxes full of rice pandas and sausages sculpted into various sea creatures, which Tomo loves. A nuanced, softly lit family portrait, with compassion and conflict held carefully in balance, Close Knit screens for a final time at 4:15pm, Cineplex International Village, Cinema 10.
• The King’s Choice. Dramatizing a celebrated moment in the Norway’s constitutional monarchy, when King Haakon VII (Jesper Christensen) refused to surrender to the Nazis’ invasion, director Erik Poppe’s filming of the blistering climactic encounter between the King and the German envoy makes for one of the most compelling cinematic scenes of the year. Screens for a final time tonight, 9:30pm, at Cineplex International Village, Cinema 10.

And now onto the final day of VIFF 2017 …
Friday, October 13th

• Borg vs McEnroe, (Grade: A). Janus Metz’s powerful, nuanced biopic while telling the story of one of the great tennis rivalries of all time creates a compelling and oft-times thrilling piece of entertainment. A must-see. Screens at 3:30pm, at the Vancouver Playhouse.
• The Party. With a dream ensemble cast (at least to those of us that love indie filmmaking) and one of the big hits at VIFF this year, a film about which absolutely no one has anything negative to say (no mean feat, that), the new movie from director Sally Potter had Variety critic Guy Lodge writing in his review from Berlin, “Gleefully nasty, zinger-packed this deliciously heightened, caviar-black comedy sets up its brittle, bourgeois characters like bowling pins and gleefully knocks them down in 71 minutes flat, Potter’s dark drawing-room comedy her zestiest work in ages.” Screens for a final time at 5pm at The Centre.
• Wonderstruck, the Closing Gala film, 7:30pm at The Centre, and 9:15pm at The Playhouse. Todd Haynes new film that took Cannes by storm. Stars Julianne Moore (who’s been brilliant in every film she’s ever starred in), about which critic Wendy Ide wrote in Screen Daily, “With first rate work from cinematographer Edward Lachman, costume designer / executive producer Sandy Powell, production designer Mark Friedberg and — particularly — composer Carter Burwell will ensure Wonderstruck, with its gradual swell of emotion that builds to a belter of a tear jerking climax, will emerge as a significant awards season contender.”

And that will wrap the Vancouver International Film Festival for 2017.
Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2017 is available by clicking here.

Today on VanRamblings, the must-see films screening in the final week of VIFF 2017, those films lauded by VIFF patrons, films with critical acclaim extraordinaire, films which will either provide you with early insight into what movies will be recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Oscars ceremony on Sunday, March 4th, 2018, or provide you with the opportunity to see outstanding cinema for the final time at VIFF 2017, cuz these films ain’t a-gonna be making their way back to our shores any time soon, or (in fact) ever again. So, you know what to do …

Playing once and only once at the 2017 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, a last-minute addition to the VIFF lineup, the most talked about American début feature of the year, having taken both the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals by storm, and set for a raft of Oscar nominations come Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018 — including a Best Actress nod for Saoirse Ronan, and long overdue Best Supporting Actress recognition for Laurie Metcalf, not to mention Best Screenplay and Best Director nominations for — indie actress Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird … Screens today, Monday, October 9th at 4pm at The Centre. See ya there!

Don’t forget: Aki Kaurismäki’s VanRamblings-recommended The Other Side of Hope screens directly after Lady Bird, 6:30pm at The Centre. At 9:15pm, VanRamblings’ favourite film of 2017, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s magnificent Loveless screens at the Vancouver Playhouse, on Hamilton Street.

On Tuesday, 6:15pm at the Vancouver Playhouse, you simply don’t want to miss the single most buzzed about film at VIFF 2017, director Amanda Kernell’s powerful multiple award winner, Sami Blood — 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 at this year’s prestigious Venice Film Festival.

Nor do you want to miss Alain Gomis’ Grand Jury Prize winner at the Berlinale this year, Félicité, a raw, near documentary-style music-infused reverie, an often dreamlike portrait of Félicité, a singer who is just barely scraping by in modern-day Kinshasa, a dirty, hardscrabble, lawless but irrepressibly energetic city. Screens twice at Cineplex International Village, both times in Cinema 10, on Tuesday, October 10th at 9:30pm, and the next day, Wednesday, October 11th at 4:30pm.

On Wednesday, October 11th there’s a veritable cornucopia of fine cinema that will screen at VIFF 2017 on its third to last day …

• Ismael’s Ghosts, VIFF fave Arnaud Desplechin’s most daring film yet, a tour-de-force of mise-en-scène and a prismatic portrait of a filmmaker haunted by his past, starring Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard and Louis Garrel, which screens for the final time at 10:45am at Cineplex, Cinema 9;
• Or, at 11:30am at Cineplex Cinema 9, you could take in British writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable, award-winning accomplished first feature, God’s Own Country, about which VIFF patrons and critics alike have been raving, the story of a troubled, taciturn and volatile young man living on a remote Yorkshire farm that although it didn’t court Brokeback Mountain comparisons directly enough with its tale of two young sheep farmers finding love in a hopeless place nonetheless seals the deal. Says VanRamblings critic favourite Guy Lodge in his review in Variety, “By the time the tightly controlled soundscape blooms into the widescreen baroque pop of Patrick Wolf for the closing credits, the resulting heart-swell feels thoroughly earned”;
• And let us take pains to remind you of how much we loved Alexandra Dean’s kickass documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, which screens for a final time at 3:45pm at the Vancouver Playhouse.

And then there are entirely remarkable evening screenings on Wednesday, October 11th that are not-to-be-missed …

• Sour Apples, VanRamblings’ own David House’s favourite VIFF film (and a VIFF cineaste favourite, too), writer, director and star Yilmaz Erdogan’s boisterous and engaging Turkish epic, which spans decades as it recounts the story of Aziz Özay and his three beautiful daughters, as warm-hearted and inclusively crowd-pleasing a film as you could wish for, a perfect palliative and counterpoint to VIFF’s usual Cinema of Despair programming (VanRamblings will find ourselves at 6:15pm at the Vancouver Playhouse to take in the final screening of Sour Apples);
• Or, how about Phillippa Lowthorpe’s Swallows and Amazons, Youth Jury Award and Best Feature winner at the Seattle Film Festival, an absolutely perfect film to take the kids to, incredibly engaging family fare, which will screen for a final time at VIFF, at 6:45pm at Cineplex’s Cinema 9;
• Or, Janus Metz’s Borg vs McEnroe, at 6:30pm at The Centre, a compelling drama that has you in its grip from beginning to end, and a film that just knocked our socks off, easily 1000x better than Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ failed Battle of the Sexes, and a must-see if you possess any love at all for remarkable humanistic sports films;
• Or at 6:15pm at The Rio, the final screening of Mina Shum’s love letter to Asian mothers, Meditation Park, a small but significant picture, and a film about quiet, dignified resignation that will resonate with anyone who cherishes their family life.

And, heck, those are just the early evening screenings on Wednesday.

Indian Horse. A quintessentially Canadian story, adapted from Richard Wagamese’s award-winning novel, Stephen Campanelli’s moving drama sheds light on the dark history of Canada’s residential schools and the resolute spirit of our nation’s Indigenous peoples, focusing on the story of Saul Indian Horse of Manitoba’s Ojibwe nation who, as a child, is separated from his family by Canada’s reprehensible residential school system, where he and fellow Indigenous students suffer routine physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Teachers do their best to destroy the children’s identities, in the name of the Christian god and the Canadian state.Then, Saul discovers hockey, where his talent helps him escape the school, on his journey to becoming a professional player. Only through his passion for the game and his rapidly improving skills does he glimpse a path beyond the horrors that have confined him. But is hockey enough to save him, or will his struggles to come to terms with the traumatic experiences of his past continue to haunt him? One of the buzz films at VIFF 2017, Indian Horse screens for a final time at VIFF, 9pm at the Vancouver Playhouse.

A Fantastic Woman, (Grade: A). Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s follow up to VIFF 2014’s Gloria offers a sensitive, expressive melodrama about grief and the cost of being authentic in a world that too often fails to acknowledge gender variance and the lived, non-binary experience. A working of searing empathy, A Fantastic Woman traces the emergence from devastating grief of Marina (Daniela Vega), the film’s young transgender protagonist, who is treated like a criminal in the wake of her older partner’s sudden death from an aneurysm. A certain Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, there’s even talk that Vega — who dominates virtually every mesmerizing frame of the film — will emerge as the first transgender woman to secure a Best Actress Oscar nomination, or as Guy Lodge writes in his review for Variety …

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.

There are a great many films that will screen on Thursday and Friday, the final two days of VIFF, that we’ll write about later in the week. We are looking forward to VIFF 2017’s final screening, Todd Haynes’ transcendent:

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

Only seven days to go, including today, before the glorious 36th annual Vancouver International Film Festival fades into warm memory.
There are a great many VIFF films that will make their début this coming week, as well as VIFF films that will screen for a final time — films all that are deserving of your time, attention, dollars and the inevitable ‘you’ve got to arrive an hour early’ interminable (yet, friendly, warm and welcoming) ticketholder and passholder line-ups outside the various VIFF venues.
For instance …

Loveless, (Grade: A+): The new masterwork from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) was both the critical favourite at Cannes this year (there was a broad critical consensus that Loveless would win the Palme d’Or, which it didn’t do — instead, the execrable The Square garnered that undeserved honour), and the winner of Cannes’ Grand Prix award.
A withering, pitiless and devastating indictment of contemporary Russia (who knows why Russia has chosen Loveless as their Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee), as potent a cinematic exploration of anomie as you’re ever likely to witness on screen, Zvyagintsev’s Loveless emerges as nothing short of a masterpiece, not simply an apocalyptic study of a failed marriage and a failed system of justice involving the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy — about which not one character on screen cares a wit — set in the midst of a loveless modern Russia where residents exist at the mercy of implacable forces, Loveless’ pristine, punishing and purgatorial narrative offers with crystalline perfection viscerally intelligent and merciless filmmaking, every shot chosen with care, the bitter stillness of the near black-and-white cinematography capturing lives in disintegration, as harrowing a film as will be released in 2017. All of which makes Loveless a VIFF 2017 must-see. There’s one final VIFF screening of Loveless: Monday, Oct. 9th, 9:15pm, Vancouver Playhouse.

3-year-old Paula Robles & 6-year-old Laia Artiga, star in Carla Simón’s Summer 1993