Well, here we are in the final days of the 34th annual Vancouver International Film Festival as VIFF regulars (also known as VIFF cinephiles) prepare for the end of this year’s glorious cinematic wonderment, awaiting the announcement as to what films are available for holdover at the Vancity Theatre following Friday’s fest end. All in due time, dear & constant reader.
In this final week there are two more must-see films to be screened over the course of the next four days — one from Lithuania, one from Iceland — both unlikely to return to our shores, tremendous films that are more than worthy of your limited time, and given your wearied state, your attention.
The Summer of Sangailé | Dir. Alanté Kavaïté | Julija Steponaitytė, Aistė Diržiūtė | Lithuania
The Summer of Sangailé (Grade: A): Achingly beautiful and intoxicating, director Alanté Kavaïté won Best Director at Sundance earlier this year for her erotic and lyrical depiction of a young girl’s sexual awakening, an at times roiling coming of age tale that explores the wounded psychology of the main lead (a voluptuously enchanting Julija Steponaitytė, her character a provocative mix of naivete and ripe, unbridled sexuality), in one of the most dreamily tender yet near terrifying depictions of first love ever captured on screen. Gorgeously lensed, sun-kissed, alluring, intimate, affecting, memorable, beautifully universal, hypnotic and at times blazingly intense, the film’s dreamlike mood is set through music, and the rapturous soundtrack written by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one of the lead members of Air. Skilfully melding gesture, poetry and innocence into the slow-burning emotional and physical realms of romantic love, The Summer of Sangailé emerges as one of the year’s best films, and another VIFF 2015 must-see. Final screening: Wednesday, October 7th, 6:30pm, in Cineplex’s Cinema 9.

Sparrows (Grade: A): Breathtakingly intense, Rúnar Rúnarsson’s sad, delicate Icelandic coming-of-age tale quietly observes a lanky teenage boy, Avi (Atli Oskar Fjalarsson) who we first meet singing counter-tenor in a boy’s choir in Rekjavik. When Avi’s mother is hired to supervise a research project in Africa, the boy is sent to live with his estranged father in the distant western fjords of the country, where the locals medicate the ills of a declining economy with alcohol; small town life proves anything but charming. Avi’s potential love interest, young Lara, carries the fatalism of a girl who settles for the local bully, while Kjeld, Avi’s kindly grandmother, is the exceptional figure who lives with a simple dignity. As Guy Lodge writes in his Variety review, ” this outwardly conventional coming-of-ager rewards viewers’ patience, delivering a late narrative jolt that is bound to stir heated post-screening conversation in its chilly wake.” Fortunately, the film saves a tiny dose of sentiment & redemptive humanity for the film’s final moments. Final screening: Thursday, October 8th at 2:30pm, in the Vancity Theatre.
Additional VIFF Must-Sees Before The Festival Wends To Its End
The double bill of VIFF 2015: Wednesday afternoon you’ll want to take in a screening of VIFF 2015’s best feature film, Sylvia’s Chang’s Taiwanese stunner Murmur of the Hearts, 4:15pm in Cineplex’s Cinema 10, followed by VIFF’s best documentary, Albert Maysles’ In Transit, also in Cinema 10.

Upcoming must-sees: Son of Saul, One Million Dubliners, there’s good buzz on Zinia Flower and The Measure of a Man, I am Nojoom, Age 10 and Divorced is a must-see, while there’s good buzz on The Competition, folks have been raving about Accused, and James White. Schneider vs Bax also has quite a following, as does Peruvian director Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes, which screens for a final time Tuesday at 3:30pm in Cinema 9 at Cineplex’s International Village. Lots to see as VIFF 2015 wends to a close.

VanRamblings feels that it is necessary for all concerned that we “revive” our annual column on why it is that the cinephiles who each year attend 50+ VIFF films (and there are a whole bunch of us) feel so passionate about wanting to hear every sound, burrow into every picture, experience the every emotion of the characters on screen before us, at Vancouver’s annual splendid, glorious and enchanting little film festival by the sea.
Worshipping at the Church of Cinema
Imagine yourself on a Sunday morning at the 34th annual Vancouver International Film Festival. You’ve just walked into The Centre, where you’ve been greeted by one of the church members, and are then ushered into a dark room with seats all facing forward. You feel reverent.
You are about to worship at the ‘church of cinema‘.
One hundred years on, global cinema has arrived as a form of transcendence, for many replacing the once venerated position held by the institutional church. Think about the similarities: churches and the cinema are both large buildings built in the public space. Both have signage out front indicating what is about to occur inside.
As physical structures, the church and the cinema create a sense of sacred space with their high ceilings, long aisles running the length of the darkened rooms inside, the use of dim lighting, the sweeping curvature of the walls, and the use of curtains to enhance the sacredness of the experience.
In the church of cinema we take communion not with bread and wine, but with the ritualistic consumption of our favourite snack.
Consider if you will, the memorable moment when you enter the auditorium to find your perfect viewing angle, allowing you to sit back, relax and enjoy. Although you may not receive absolution at the cinema, there is the two-hour reprieve from the burden of your daily life.
As the lights are dimmed, the service begins: The seating, and the opening introduction constitute a liturgy for one and all, not dissimilar to the welcoming ritual that occurs in a church service prior to the sermon. If you are like most people, you obey an unwritten rule that requires you to be in place in time for either the singing (if you’re in church) or the introduction of a film by a Vancouver Film Festival theatre manager. And, you remain silent while in the theatre, focused on all that unfolds before you.
There is, too, the notion that as the film limns your unconscious mind you are being transported, elevated in some meaningful way, left in awe in the presence of a work of film art.
What we want from church is often, these days, more of what we receive from the cinema on offer at the Vancouver International Film Festival: the vague, unshakable notion that the eternal and invisible world is all around us, transporting us as we sit in rapt attention. We experience the progress and acceleration of time, as we see life begin, progress, and find redemption. All within two hours. The films at the Vancouver International Film Festival constitute much more than entertainment; each film is a thoughtful meditation on our place in society and our purpose in life.
As a film draws to a close, just as is the case following a sermon we might hear in church, our desire is to set about to discuss with friends that which we have just experienced. Phrases and moments, transcending current frustrations with a new resolve, all in response to a line of dialogue or an image on the screen that we have now incorporated into how we will lead our life going forward.
In the holy trinity of meaning, cinema reigns supreme, the personal altar of our home theatres placing a distant second place, the city providing the physical proof of the reality the other two point to, oriented towards the satisfaction of the devout cinemagoer’s theology.
Throughout the centuries we have sought to find meaning through manifest ritual and symbolism. As in the scene from American Beauty - a plastic bag sailing in the breeze as an intimation of immortality - there is, perhaps, something for us to consider respecting the difference between art as diversion and art in our lives as a symbolic representation of an awakened mindfulness, allowing us to transcend the troubles of our lives.
For those who attend the Vancouver International Film Festival, cinema has emerged as that place where we might experience life in the form of parable, within a safe and welcoming environment, that place where we are able to become vulnerable and open, hungry to make sense of our lives. Cinema delivers for many of us access to the new spiritualism, the place where we experience not merely film, but language, memory, art, love, death and, perhaps even, spiritual transcendence.

The sensuously hypnotic Isabella Leong & Joseph Chang in a scene from Murmur of the Hearts

Murmur of the Hearts (Grade: A+): A fable given over to exposition tempered by forays into the realm of magical realism, elegiac, a film that adopts time not just as an elastic concept but with a spiritual sense previously unexplored in the cinematic realm, gifted with gorgeously lustrous and moodily hypnotic cinematography, utterly sublime and original, epic and tour-de-force filmmaking of the first order, quietly introspective, subtle, moving, whimsical, enchanting, resonant, ethereal, wildly and sensuously ambitious, poignant, mesmerizing, rapturous, poetic and surprisingly affecting, the memories of the film’s four protagonists woven into the most lyrically beautiful film you’ll see this or any other year. The 34th Vancouver International Film Festival’s one must, must, must-see. Two upcoming must-see VIFF screenings: on Sunday, October 4th, at 8:30pm at Cineplex International Village, in Cinema 9; and on Wednesday, October 7th at 4:15pm, at Cineplex International Village, in Cinema 10.

Brooklyn | Dir. John Crowley | Saoirse Ronan | 105 min. | Mon., Oct. 5, 12:30pm, The Centre

Brooklyn (Grade: A): Everything you’ve heard about Brooklyn is true: Saoirse Ronan will emerge as Best Actress at the 88th Academy Awards ceremony on February 28th, 2016, Brooklyn will win the Best Picture Oscar (and a well-deserved win it will be, too), and when you take in the final VIFF screening of Brooklyn this coming week, you’ll be glad you did, you’ll cry your eyes out from beginning to end (not to worry, there are humorous bits, as well), and you’ll leave Cineplex’s Tinseltown Cinema 10 knowing that you’ve just seen the most powerful film to reach our shores in 2015. Final VIFF 2015 screening: Monday, October 5th, at 12:30pm, in The Centre.

Sparrows | Dir. Rúnar Rúnarsson | Iceland | Oct 3, 8:45pm, Cin 8; Oct 8, 2:30pm, Vancity

Note should be made that there is immense positive buzz from VIFF passholders and patrons about the following must-see films …

• Sparrows. Tonight, at 9:15pm, Cineplex International Village, Cinema 10; and Thursday, October 8th, at 2:30pm in the Vancity Theatre;
• Accused. On Friday, October 9th at 6pm, at The Cinematheque;
• Magallanes. On Tuesday, October 6th, at 3:30pm, Cineplex Cinema 9;
• Marshland. On Monday, October 5th at 6pm, in the Rio Theatre; and
• James White. On Friday, October 9th, 1:30pm, at SFU Woodwards

Not to mention, this upcoming week there are three must-see screenings of VanRamblings’ favourite documentary, Albert Maysles’ final film, In Transit, and the incredibly wonderful Quebeçois film, Ville-Marie, and the deeply affecting and entirely wondrous Iranian documentary, No Land’s Song, all of which we wrote about last Sunday; and then there’s VIFF Director of Programming Alan Franey’s favourites, which we wrote about earlier (scroll down the page — it’s a pretty skookum list of can’t miss VIFF films).

Representing the best work of nascent film talent from across our planet, the International Shorts series curated by veteran VIFF programmer Sandy Gow each year reflects, as we’ve written in the past, the work of an “honest and forthright, humane and caring VIFF staffperson of unparalleled integrity, as well as an abiding warmth of spirit, an individual who prioritizes films not just as ‘craft’, but of immense heart and cinematic intelligence.”
As VanRamblings wrote in Part One of this two-post series on VIFF 2015’s International Shorts programme, Sandy recommends all 37 films in the shorts series, winnowed down from the 500 short films Sandy screened, to the 37 gems you’ll see screened at this, our beloved, glorious and life-changing 34th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.
Without further ado, let’s get to what’s most important: the films …

Coffee to Go | Dir. Patricia Font | Actors. Alexandra Jiménez, Daniel Grao | Spain | 13 min.

Love, Pain and the Whole Damn Thing
A programme of short films about love, from romantic to tragic, its intoxication and heartbreak, its consequences and, oh yes, its responsibilities.
Monday, October 5th, at 1pm, International Village, Cinema 8
“This is a programme that is close to my heart as I’ve come to terms with my aged and deteriorating mom. As is the case with many of us of our age, our parents are not in great shape. Love, Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is about all the factors that come into play when you love somebody, everything from the infatuation of love when you meet someone to the responsibilities of love. Of the four International Shorts programmes this year, this is the one with the most cohesive theme, although each film is distinct within the theme in approach and subject matter.”
“We’ve got everything from Coffee to Go, such a wonderful film, it could easily have been in the Great Performances programme, the story about a couple who have broken up and meet two years later, and it’s not only really awkward, it’s really painful.”