Thursday evening late, the first (somewhat truncated) day of the 36th annual Vancouver International Film Festival ended, VIFF officially having gotten underway, the lineups of patrons awash with good feeling (“What a lineup – so many strong films this year”), and audiences once seated at The Rio, SFU’s Goldcorp Theatre or The Centre for the Performing Arts (the three opening night venues, with four more venues being added today) wildly enthusiastic, with welcoming hugs all around, and an appreciation that our little festival by the sea has once again returned to our shores to open a humane window on our often troubled, yet still hope-filled, world.

The Centre, VIFF’s Opening Gala venue for Mina Shum’s new film, Meditation Park

VanRamblings was simply swept away by a VIFF opening night film, the Canadian première of Alexandra Dean’s exceptionally fine Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, a film which employs extensive research on Lamarr’s life conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes, published in his book Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, the documentary also relying on first-person accounts from stars who knew Lamarr in her day, including a poignant yet humorous account by comedian Mel Brooks.

VanRamblings asked the permission of VIFF (and VanCity Theatre) programmer, Tom Charity, to publish his list of VIFF 2017 favourites …

“From Germany (and Bulgaria), Western, an observant film about men, without question one of the best films from Cannes this year, Valeska Grisebach’s third feature the long-awaited follow up to VIFF 2016 favourite, Longing. A Season in France (which screens tonight at The Rio, at 8:45pm), the latest film from Chad’s acclaimed auteur Mahamat Saleh Haroun, moving and deeply empathetic, the film’s compelling narrative presented from the too often ignored migrant point of view. Then there’s B.C.’s Never Steady, Never Still (Kathleen Hepburn), one of the strongest Canadian début features I have seen in years, the work of a natural filmmaker. Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name manages to make the first love / coming of age story feel like it’s never been done before.”

So, there you go, a panoply of can’t miss VIFF 2017 films from Vancity Theatre programmer, Tom Charity. I mean, don’t you just love the films Tom programmes year-round at Vancouver’s most welcoming cinema.
Meanwhile, VanRamblings’ very own Mathew Englander — who this year, as he does annually, attended Toronto’s film festival, where he screened 29 films — is over-the-moon enthusiastic about Michael Haneke’s new film, Happy End, his very favourite at TIFF 2017, about which he has written, “Happy End is my favourite movie of 2017 so far. Haneke’s new film is being compared to Amour because it has some of the same cast, but it kept reminding me of Benny’s Video, only updated for the social media era.”

Mathew also highly recommends two more films screening at VIFF 2017:

• Directions (dir. Stephan Komandarev). Six taxi rides in Sofia, each shot in a single take. Komandarev’s previous film, The Judgement, emerged as one of my VIFF 2014 favourites, but whereas that film had wide-open precarious mountain settings, Directions has an urban modern-noir look. The two films do, though, share a sophisticated sense of irony.
• Sami Blood (dir. Amanda Kernell). This is a compelling début feature about a 13-year-old Swedish, indigenous Laplander, Sami (Lene Cecilia Sparrok), an under-the-radar film that met with an enthusiastic reception at TIFF 2017, and should be considered a must-see at VIFF.

VanRamblings’ David House has screened writer / director / star Yilmaz Erdogan’s Sour Apples saying, “Raymond, you are going to love this film from Turkey, not only a visual feast of colours, costumes, light and locations — not to mention, Turkey’s entry for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — but because, well, I mean … just look …

VanRamblings also recommends you keep an eye out for the new film from Agnès Varda (who directed VanRamblings favourite film of all time, Vagabond, starring the exquisite Sandrine Bonnaire, for which she won the Best Actress César) — Faces Places, part of the Spotlight on France series, and a featured film at this year’s prestigious 55th annual New York Film Festival, which kicked off yesterday and runs through Sunday, Oct. 15th.
Today, VanRamblings will catch the 1pm screening of Joachim Trier’s Thelma, at Cineplex International Village (which we also refer to as “Tinseltown”, which it used to be and is a much better name), in Cinema 9, followed by a break for a late lunch before catching Petra Volpe’s The Divine Order, at Tinseltown, Cinema 10 at 4:30pm, after which we intend to wander around town aimlessly bothering people on the street before lining up at The Centre for the 9pm screening of Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Square. Oh yes, VanRamblings has already written about these three films on our blog.
Now, Andrew Poon — VIFF’s Gateway / Dragons & Tigers media co-ordinator (we visited the whole VIFF publicity team yesterday, at the Sutton Place Hotel, and what a fine group of folks they are) — will have our head if we don’t write about the 65+ films from Asia that will screen at VIFF this year. So, we’ll set about to do that very soon. In the meantime …

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

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.