Category Archives: Cinema

Arts Friday | VanRamblings’ Annual VIFF Introductory Column

The 41st Annual Vancouver International Film Festival

The Vancouver International Film Festival returns to theatres after two years of a predominantly virtual, COVID-influenced online film festival.

Opening on Thursday, September 29th, the Festival’s Gala Presentation features a celebrated Indigenous film, Bones of Crows — a hit at the Toronto International Film Festival this year — by Métis filmmaker Marie Clements, who tells an epic story of survival during a shameful period in Canadian history, a powerful indictment of the abuse of Indigenous peoples and a stirring story of extraordinary resilience and resistance.

Fearless in its denunciation of centuries of oppressive policies by Canadian governments and institutions, Bones of Crows is also a memorable paean to the resilience and determination of those who survived the residential schools — and those who sought to bring their oppressors’ crimes to light.

The Festival will close 11 days later, on October 9th, with a Gala Presentation of VIFF favourite, South Korea’s Hirokazu Kore-eda, Broker, a sprawling crime story about a baby kidnapping scheme starring Song Kang-ho (Parasite), winner of Best Actor at Cannes earlier this year.

Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters and winner of the Jury Prize five years before that for Like Father Like Son, the writer-director once again displays great empathy for characters who are trying to put their lives in order, examining their predicaments from every possible angle and ultimately guiding them into a position where they can do the right thing.

Unfolding over a truncated 11 days (rather than its pre-pandemic customary length of 16 days), the Festival will again feature a virtual online presence, though not every one of the 135+ feature films and 102+ shorts will be available virtually.

In total, twenty-four films will screen online through VIFF Connect.

In person, meanwhile, as was the practice in the pre-pandemic times, VIFF’s theatres where all 135+ feature films and 102+ shorts will screen, include …

The VIFF digital Festival Guide is now available; click on the preceding link.

The free, glossy printed Festival guide is available across Metro Vancouver, at libraries, coffee shops, and bookstores, and all your favourite local haunts.

Although the Festival is smaller than in past years, the film programme categories will look familiar: Panorama, the main Festival film feature programme curated by Alan Franey and PoChu AuYeung, showcasing 90 carefully curated narrative films arriving from across the globe.

Northern Lights features the next wave of Canadian and Indigenous storytellers; while Insights, the always illuminating documentary programme, this year will incorporate the Spectrum programme, a collection of innovative nonfiction filmmaking; and then there’s Portraits, a kaleidoscope of ground-breaking artists, great performances, and cultural icons; and, Altered States, 8 challenging and  bizarre films the constitute VIFF’s 2022 late night series.

In last week’s, award winning VIFF films in 2022 featuring the work of Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, who brings his latest film, Empire of Light to VIFF; Martin McDonagh’s masterful, surprisingly poignant, and dazzlingly designed and performed, The Banshees of Inisherin; Corsage, Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer’s biopic about late 19th century Empress Elisabeth.

More Special Presentations? How about Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s Best Director Prize winner at Cannes this year, Decision to Leave, which offers a teasing, tantalizing neo-noir genre piece about a homicide detective who falls in love with the widow of an apparent suicide. There’s Mia Hansen-Løve’s quietly miraculous One Fine Morning, a balm of a film and another glorious showcase for the director’s light touch when dealing with complicated emotions.

VIFF’s Director of Programming Curtis Woloschuk told VanRamblings VIFF programmers curated a record number of films that emerged after the pandemic — half of VIFF’s films in  2022 feature first time filmmakers!

“There were over 4,000 films that our programming team watched and considered this year that leave us more educated and illuminated about the world we live in.”

In addition to the many screenings, VIFF Talks boasts visiting artists like Deborah Lynn Scott — responsible for clothing actors in films ranging from Titanic to the new, upcoming Avatar: The Way of Water  — who will present a masterclass on costume design. Kate Byron, who just led production design on Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, will give a masterclass on production design. And, Michael Abels, the composer for director Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope will make a special performance and speaking engagement with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on October 6th.

The VIFF Amp Symposium on Music in Film is set to run October 6th to 9th.

In other new and expanded initiatives, VIFF Executive Director Kyle Fostner told VanRamblings that, for the first time, the Vancouver International Film Festival will offer free memberships for persons 19 to 25 years of age, free access to Indigenous peoples, and more free offerings to community groups.

Individual tickets prices remain what they’ve been for years: $15 for any screening, except Special Presentations, which costs $17 for the award-winning future Oscar contenders, with reduced prices for seniors & youth.

VIFF passes and packages are also available again this year. A full Festival pass costs $350, with a senior rate at $300, and a youth rate of $120. There’s a 6-ticket pack at $84, and a 10-ticket pack available at $135. As was the case in 2020 and 2021, the VIFF Connect virtual online Festival pass will cost $70.

The VIFF Infoline, staffed by volunteers, is available 7 days a week, from noon til 7pm. Simply call (604) 683-3456 to have any question you have answered.

Arts Friday | Vancouver International Film Festival Special Presentations

Here we are, less than two weeks away from the singular cinematic arts event of the autumn season, the much anticipated 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival.

Next Friday, September 23rd, VanRamblings will publish our annual introductory VIFF column, with all the information you’re going to need — ticket and pass prices, and where to secure these valuable items and how much time you should set aside for lining up, the best cafés, bistro, restaurants and bars nearby Festival venues — including the VIFF 41 films that are, quite simply, must-attends.

Talking about must-attends, have we got a treat for you today: the twelve finely curated, award-winning, future Oscar-contending Special Presentations, the celebrated and critically-acclaimed films that will début in Vancouver over the course of the 11-day running time of the 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival.


Empire of Light
6pm, Friday, September 30th
The Centre for the Performing Arts


Decision To Leave
9:15pm, Friday, September 30th
9pm, Thursday, October 6th
The Centre for the Performing Arts


The Grizzlie Truth
2pm, Saturday, October 1st
6pm, Wednesday, October 5th


The Son
6pm, Saturday, October 1st
The Centre for the Performing Arts


The Banshees of Inisherin
9:15pm, Saturday, October 1st
The Centre for the Performing Arts


EO
4pm, Sunday, October 2nd
The Vancouver Playhouse

9:30pm, Saturday, October 8th
The Centre for the Performing Arts


One Fine Morning
9pm, Sunday, October 2nd
6pm, Tuesday, October 4th
The Centre for the Performing Arts


Corsage
6pm, Monday, October 3rd
6pm, Thursday, October 6th
The Centre for the Performing Arts


Triangle of Sadness
9pm, Monday, October 3rd
The Centre for the Performing Arts


Stars at Noon
9pm, Monday, October 3rd
The Playhouse

1pm, Saturday, October 8th
The Centre for the Performing Arts


The Whale
5:45pm, Sunday, October 2nd
The Centre for the Performing Arts


Women Talking
9:15pm, Wednesday, October 5th
The Centre for the Performing Arts

Each of the films titles, italicized and in red, link to the VIFF webpage for the film, which will allow you to read about the film, discover the various awards the films have garnered at Festivals prior to arriving at VIFF, and to purchase tickets, if you’re of a mind to do so — and we hope such is the case.

The VIFF digital Festival Guide is now available; click on the preceding link.

While picking up our Media Pass to VIFF41 on Friday afternoon — at the VIFF Centre on Seymour Street, just north of Davie Street — VanRamblings also secured a hard copy of the 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival film guide.

Arts Friday | Vancouver International Film Festival | Sept. 29 – Oct. 9th 2022

In Vancouver, and across the province of British Columbia, we may find ourselves in the midst of civic elections in villages, towns and cities in every far flung corner of our province, but as you’re no doubt aware, life goes on.

At the end of September each year for the past 41 years (in the early years, VIFF happened in the spring), come rain or come shine, the good folks long associated with the Vancouver International Film Festival — who have spent the past 12 months curating film submissions from thousands of filmmakers, and visiting almost every film festival screening films in almost every country on our, it seems, ever smaller globe — present the best in world cinema to appreciative British Columbia audiences, cinephiles and cinéastes who love film, and those persons in our city who look forward each year to opening a window on this vast world of ours, to gain insight into how folks who live in every country across the planet live their lives, and how their struggles mirror our struggles.


VIFF’s Director of Programming, Curtis Woloschuk, introduces the depth and breadth of the 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival. A must watch.

Vancouver International Film Festival: a humanizing experience like no other.

Each Friday in September, VanRamblings will present  you with insight into the 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival — which films are can’t miss in 2022, and demand to be seen on the big screen (screening at the 1800-seat Centre for the Performing Arts is a Festival must), the tiny gems that are always at the heart of VIFF each year, which films Vancouver is sharing with other film festivals screening simultaneously to Vancouver’s homegrown festival by the ocean, the celebrated award winners, and so very much more.

135+ feature films
102+ shorts
25+ events
11 days

The VIFF 2022 digital guide will be available for download after September 15.

The VIFF printed guide will be available across Metro Vancouver on Sept. 20.

So many films to look forward to, and so many films to move and change you.

Arts Friday | The Undeniably Cinematic Romance of Train Travel

[PROGRAMMING NOTE: VanRamblings won’t publish Saturday, Sept. 3rd thru Monday, Sept. 5. We’ll resume regular posting on Tuesday, Sept. 6th].

As a boy growing up in the 1950s and 60s, a part of each summer was given over to train travel with my mother and sister, to the Calgary Stampede, Edmonton’s Klondike Days, to Saskatoon or Regina, or out to Winnipeg.

There was nothing I cherished more than to arise at sunrise, standing between the trains cars, the summer prairie winds blowing across my face, as I gazed upon mile after mile of blonde fields of bluish green or mustard-yellow flowering and deeply scalloped gently rolling hills of oil-rich rapeseed.

All of which is to say, trains hold much for me in the recall of my life.

Cinema and trains go together like no other form of transport. Equal parts romantic and thrilling, they offer a sense of unequaled escapism.

Whether it’s the tearful goodbyes of Casablanca, the secretive affair of Brief Encounter, the epic crash of The Fugitive, the chase scenes of The General, the fateful encounter in Before Sunrise, the comings and goings of trains have been used to give metaphorical dynamism to countless films.

Trains are so popular that entire stories have been set on them.

This is due to the way they are able to keep action moving forward as its characters are forced to occupy the same physical space. From action thrillers to class commentaries to classic whodunnits, here are a few films set on a train that you’ll want to board should you be afforded the opportunity.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Perhaps the best of all Alfred Hitchcock’s British films, The Lady Vanishes tells the story of a young woman traveling across Europe who suddenly realizes her elderly traveling companion has disappeared. Containing endless twists as well as a pre-WW2 espionage subplot, The Lady Vanishes offers a delightful concoction that doubles as a study of British mannerisms, and the classic 1930s era of train travel.

The Commuter (2018)

Billed as an actioner, there are surprising depths to Jaume Collet-Serra’s train-based thriller The Commuter, starring Liam Neeson as a former police officer turned insurance agent who has just been laid off from his job, the majority of the film taking place on a Manhattan commute. While the thrills are thrilling and the action sequences accomplished, The Commuter has a socioeconomic depth that makes this Neeson’s most profound action film.

Unstoppable (2010)

As fast, loud, and relentless as the train at the centre of the story, Unstoppable is perfect popcorn entertainment — and proved to be director Tony Scott’s best movie in years, the narrative involving an unmanned runaway train carrying a cargo of toxic chemicals, and an engineer (Denzel Washington) and his conductor (Christ Pine) who find themselves in a race against time.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Director Sidney Lumet’s agent called it “the dumb train movie” but the cast — Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, and suspects including Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Martin Balsam, Jacqueline Bissett, John Gielgud, and Ingrid Bergman, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress — gives this mystery the feel of a luxurious chocolate-box with few toffees. “Stylistically it had to be gay in spirit, even though it was about a murder,” Lumet said of the film.

Source Code (2011)

Finding the human story amidst the action, director Duncan Jones and a charming Jake Gyllenhaal craft a smart, satisfying sci-fi thriller about decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens, who wakes up in the body of an unknown man on a commuter train, to discover he’s part of a mission to find a bomber.

Europa (1991)

Director Lars von Trier boxed himself into an expressionistic corner with this hyper-stylized thriller set aboard a German train in 1945. For all its visual razzle-dazzle, this tale of a trainee conductor contending with Nazi terrorists and a collaborationist boss is an oppressively claustrophobic ride. No wonder the lo-fi, wildness of the Dogme 95 revolution was just around the corner.

Before Sunrise (1995)

Richard Linklater’s Before movies span 20 years but it all began unassumingly enough onboard a train from Budapest. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) strikes up a conversation with Céline (Julie Delpy), then persuades her to disembark with him in Vienna to while away the evening and early morning before he catches his flight home to the U.S. Had she not fallen for his charms, audiences would have been deprived of one of films most enchanting trilogies.

Runaway Train (1985)

Jon Voight and Eric Roberts were both Oscar-nominated for playing hard-bitten convicts who steal a locomotive after a prison escape. Directed with an air of existential horror by Andrei Konchalovsky, Runaway Train — based on a 1966 screenplay co-written by Akira Kurosawa — emerged as a first rate genre film, and a hard-boiled action thriller that feels a bit like Speed on a train.

Snowpiercer (2013)

Revolution is in the air in Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic thriller set on a train that endlessly circles  a frozen and inhospitable Earth, carrying the last survivors of humanity — poor folk crammed into squalor at the back, rich ones whooping it up in first class with their own nightclub in front. There was enough fuel in the furnace to keep the idea burning through a Netflix series.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

The murderous “crisscross” trade-off proposed by Robert Walker to Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train may be hatched on a train but it’s telling that the actual climax occurs on an out-of-control carousel — the antithesis of the train, and anathema to any screenwriter, since all it does is go pointlessly round and round.

The General (1926)

Cinema has been coupled to train travel ever since the Lumière brothers screened their 45-second film from 1895 of a train arriving at La Ciotat station. Incredible to think that it was only 30 years later that Buster Keaton set to work on his staggeringly sophisticated silent Civil War action comedy, the story about a doleful train engineer who goes all out to save two objects of his affection — his engine and his sweetheart (Marion Mack).

https://youtu.be/4nj0vEO4Q6s

The Lumière brothers had it right — there is something undeniably cinematic about the locomotive. When it comes to train travel, you never know who might be onboard, and therein lies both its mystery and its thrill.