VanRamblings is just a bit tuckered and overwhelmed by our five-plus film a day pace, set since the opening day of the Festival on September 30th. So, we’re gonna take a bit of a break from posting (Thanksgiving weekend / family / work also come into play), but we’ll be back reviewing on Tuesday.
While we’re away, we’ll direct your attention to fellow reviewers, including …

• Nurse Bob. We were introduced to ‘Nurse Bob’ (works as a nurse in Vancouver, loves film) by our friend John Skibinski. Nurse Bob has attended VIFF for years and offers a differing take on the films VanRamblings has seen or intends to see. A site worth checking out.
  

• The esteemed Dr. David Bordwell, a fixture at VIFF lo these many years, his coverage of our Festival thoughtful and well-considered.
  

• Jason Whyte: The efilmcritic founder (soon to expand to more online publications) has emerged, in recent years, as the hardest working journalist covering VIFF (the folks in the media department must be thrilled). Have a look at the various links on his website, and enjoy.
  

• Kathie Smith: About whom we know little, other than that she’s covering the 29th annual VIFF, that she writes well, seems to know and love cinema, and whose capsule reviews are well worth reading.
  

• Quiet Earth: Marina Antunes seems to be doing a darn fine job of covering our Festival.
  

• The Straight: Janet Smith, Ken Eisner, Mark Harris and Craig Takeuchi, among others, have really committed themselves to VIFF this year, with some very fine (and comprehensive) coverage of our little Festival by the sea. Definitely worth checking out, at least daily.
  

• Volkmar Richter: The retired (and esteemed) CBC radio producer now covers film for the online publication, The Vancouver Observer. Day in, day out, Mr. Richter has provided insight into the best VIFF has on offer. Betcha he’s grateful that we dragged him to the Festival lo these many years ago. Now he, too, has become a VIFF fixture.

We’ll see you back here in a couple of days. In the meantime, enjoy your holiday Thanksgiving weekend (and save a bit of turkey for us, won’t ya?).

The 29th annual Vancouver Film Festival continues into it’s second week (and second, and final, weekend) with much more world cinema débuting during the next seven days, including this Thanksgiving weekend.
The folks on the programming team at the Vancouver International Film Festival — through a series of press releases — are pointing filmgoers towards the following noteworthy films in particular …

• Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, screening for a final time at 1 p.m. on Sunday, at the Park Theatre. The NY Times’ lead critic, A.O. Scott calls the film, “”a short, late minor gem from (the) French master of long-form cinema … transporting and graceful …”
  

• Director Benjamin Heisenberg’s Bourne-like thriller The Robber, a hit at both the New York and Chicago Film Festivals, both currently underway. The Robber screens on Sunday, Oct 10th @ 7:00pm GR2; Tues., Oct 12th @ 3 pm @ GR4, and Fri., Oct 15th @ 11 am, GR7.
  

• Charles-Olivier Michaud’s 2010 Slamdance winner, Snow and Ashes. Writing form the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival, critic Elliot V. Kotek called Snow and Ashes, “a formidable first effort by (the Québec-based) 30-year-old writer-director.” Snow and Ashes screens for a final time on Sunday, October 10th @ 10:45am, Pacific Cinémathèque.

As to a film VanRamblings loved, we took in a screening of Sophie Letourneur smashing début film, Chicks (which should have more appropriately been titled Life at the Ranch, the name for the communal house shared by the film’s outré female protagonists).

An entirely fetching anthropological examination tracking the lives of a half-dozen twenty-something young women, La Vie Au Ranch (Chicks ) offers an entirely fresh and authentic take on GenY culture, the sex, the sensuality, the drinking, the drugs, the dancing and clubbing, amour (and falling out of love), and the general joie de vivre with which most twenty-somethings approach life. Chicks is a wonderful, life affirming film, and definitely worth catching this holiday weekend, the film screening for a final time on Thanksgiving Monday, Oct 11th @ 7 pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

After seven consecutive 20-hour days, VanRamblings hit a wall last night (we’re talking figuratively here, but with VanRamblings you never know). We stayed home during the day on Thursday, attending only two evening films, the Chinese blockbuster, Aftershock (which, truth to tell, we found kind of cheesy in a Michael Bay sorta way, although we liked lead actress Jingchu Zhang, who we fell in love with last year in the film Night and Fog), and the quite extraordinary Spanish documentary, Garbo the Spy.
Prior to the screening of Aftershock on Thursday evening, the folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival announced Good Morning to the World! (Sekai, Good Morning!), directed by Hirohara Satoru of Japan, as the winner of the 17th annual Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema. It’d be safe to say that Mr. Satoru was excited about his win, as can be seen in Ariane Colenbrander’s photo of the award’s event.
This year, the Dragons and Tigers jury was comprised of Bong Joon Ho (The Host, Mother), Quebec-based producer-director Denis Côté and Jia Zhangke, whose 1998 film Xiao Wu was a Dragons & Tigers winner. Mr. Côté presented the award, along with a cash prize of $10,000.

We’ll likely post more later on today.
In the meantime, though, if you’re looking for something to see on Friday, you couldn’t possibly go wrong with a 2:30 p.m. screening of the captivating Polish film Reverse, or a 4:15 p.m. screening of Cell 211, one of the most powerful films we’ve seen at this year’s Festival.

As for ourselves, we’ll be taking in an 11:40 a.m. screening of Chicks (see picture above), and a 9 p.m. screening of Thomas Arslan’s In The Shadows, one of the buzz films at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Although we intend to catch a couple of screenings early in the day on Saturday, VanRamblings will be returning to our ‘regular work’ later on Saturday through until late Monday night, to return to the Festival first thing on Tuesday morning (probably even more tuckered than we are now but, hey, somebody’s gotta dedicate their life to film … hmmm).

Coming out of a screening of The Man From Nowhere late on Wednesday evening — that this was our second screening of the film should tell you how highly we regard Jeong-beom Lee’s well-wrought South Korean film — J.B. ‘Showbiz’ Shayne commented that “The three best films we’ve seen at this year’s Festival all involve young girls in the lead role.” And so it is.
In today’s posting we’ll focus on the film that is at the top of our list of young distaff cinema, Italian director Giorgio Diritti’s sophomore film …
The Man Who Will Come: With pensive power, director Giorgio Diritti crafts a heartwrenching historical tragedy that places Greta Zuccheri Montanari, the eight-year-old girl who plays lead character, Martina, as the axis of the film’s portrait of a rural Italian provincial life rattled by war, the feeling of danger and impending dread at odds with the bucolic lives lead by the people of the Bolognese rural commune in which she and her family reside. Bambini neorealist cinema (based on true events), we observe Martina wandering freely between civilians and warriors, partisans and invaders, in 1944 war torn Italy, even as the brutal struggle between Italian partisans and German soldiers takes place in the forest just outside her village.
We watch, too, as the film’s pocket-sized heroine moves from passivity into desperate action, as marauding Nazi patrols pierce the commune’s shield leading to the climactic massacre which claimed the lives of almost 800 Italian civilians, mostly women and children. That Martina is mute, not having spoken since the death of her little brother (in her arms), allows us to see the child’s dawn-fresh perception of the world and the horrors descended upon it by war. Martina emerges as the film’s rooting interest, as she gravely ponders her father’s (Claudio Casadio) diligent toil, and her mother’s (Maya Sansa) developing pregnancy. The Man Who Will Come is all the stronger for placing the pint-sized Ms. Montanari at its centre.
Given how natural, sympathetic and irresistible Ms. Montanari proves to be during the running time of the film, one cannot imagine how else helmsman Diritti could have as effectively portrayed the events the film depicts.

Continue reading VIFF 2010, Day 7: The Irresistible Pocket-Sized Female Heroine →