Category Archives: Film Festivals

#VIFF45: A Festival to Remember — The Films, the Discoveries, and the Magic of Cinema

Arts Friday, Cinema, Film Festivals, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2026, Weblogs, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A three-part VanRamblings wrap-up of the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival | October 1–11, 2026

Part One: A Final Weekend Worth Celebrating

There is something gloriously bittersweet about the final weekend of the Vancouver International Film Festival. For 10 days, Vancouver’s moviegoing community has been living inside a world of discovery, moving from one cinema to another, comparing notes over coffee, arguing about performances, falling hopelessly in love with films we could never have anticipated, and wondering how on earth we are going to fit just one more screening into an already impossibly crowded schedule.

And then, suddenly, the end is in sight.

The 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival has given Vancouver audiences an embarrassment of cinematic riches, with films arriving from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival. The final weekend offers one last opportunity to catch some of the year’s most accomplished international films, several of which have already become personal favourites here at VanRamblings.

Friday, October 9, begins with a particularly tantalizing double bill at the Park Theatre. At 6:15 p.m., Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Look Back offers another opportunity to experience the director’s extraordinary gift for finding tenderness in the everyday. Kore-eda has spent a career exploring the fragile bonds between parents and children, the families we inherit and the families we create. Here, he turns his attention to youth and the nature of storytelling, bringing his customary grace and emotional intelligence to a film that understands how imagination can transform the lives of young people. His work has a way of making the apparently ordinary feel quietly miraculous.

The Friday double bill continues with James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which has attracted considerable attention on the festival circuit. The intimate crime drama features Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, three performers whose contrasting screen personas promise a compelling study in loyalty, ambition and the dangerous entanglements of criminal life. Gray is a filmmaker fascinated by family, betrayal and the moral compromises people make in pursuit of security. With a cast of this calibre, Paper Tiger is a particularly enticing prospect.

The final weekend also brings a remarkable collection of films shared with the prestigious New York Film Festival. Friday’s offerings include Once Upon a Time in Harlem and 9 Temples to Heaven at Fifth Avenue, with Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva at International Village 9 at 8 p.m. and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur at the Lindsay Family Stage on Granville Island at 8:30 p.m. For festivalgoers who relish the experience of discovering a film before it reaches a wider audience, these screenings are precisely what VIFF is all about.

And then there is Lukas Dhont’s Coward, VanRamblings’ favourite film at VIFF 45, screening Friday evening at the Park Theatre. The Belgian filmmaker’s First World War drama, whose stars Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the Best Actor prize at Cannes, is a work of breathtaking emotional delicacy. More about that extraordinary film in Part Two of VanRamblings final column on VIFF 45.

At 9 p.m. Friday, the Vancouver Playhouse welcomes La Bola Negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s ambitious historical melodrama, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Moving between 1932, 1937 and 2017, the film interweaves the lives of three gay protagonists, giving a traditional historical epic a thrillingly contemporary queer sensibility. The filmmakers also shared the Best Director prize at Cannes. It is precisely the sort of ambitious, emotionally expansive storytelling that makes international cinema so rewarding.

Saturday, October 10, brings another remarkable sequence of screenings. At 11 a.m., The Only Living Pickpocket in New York opens the day’s programme at the Vancouver Playhouse. At 1:45 p.m., Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Japan’s Oscar submission, offers a quietly expansive meditation on human connection. Making his French-language debut, Hamaguchi explores the fragile structures that bind us to one another, with luminous, Cannes-recognized performances from Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. This is cinema that understands the expressive power of conversation, observation and silence.

The evening’s centrepiece is Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, VIFF’s Closing Gala, at 6:15 p.m. at the Vancouver Playhouse. With John Malkovich leading the cast, the film arrives amid considerable awards-season anticipation. McDonagh’s gift for combining dark humour, moral unease and unpredictable human behaviour makes this a fittingly provocative way to approach the festival’s conclusion.

And for those determined to make the absolute most of Saturday, there is a 9:15 p.m. screening of NAZA at the Park Theatre. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the investigative documentary examines Israeli military targeting practices in Gaza through interviews with military insiders. The title refers to a reported intelligence euphemism for anticipated civilian deaths in airstrikes. Produced by Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson, the team behind The Zone of Interest, NAZA has become one of the festival’s most controversial and politically urgent films. Its filmmakers argue that the systems used to calculate civilian casualties reveal a devastating process of dehumanization; its claims and implications have provoked fierce debate. The film received the Special Jury Prize at Venice. Whatever one’s response, this is documentary filmmaking that insists audiences confront uncomfortable questions about technology, accountability and the human cost of war.

Sunday, October 11, is the final day of VIFF 45, and the schedule is hardly a gentle winding-down. La Gradiva returns at the Lindsay Family Stage, while Everytime screens at Fifth Avenue. Mina Shum’s Whatcha Want brings a distinctly Vancouver perspective to the final day’s offerings at the Rio Theatre at 3:30 p.m. Meanwhile, Minotaur, Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix winner at Cannes, offers another opportunity to experience the work of a formidable contemporary filmmaker.

At the Park Theatre, Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care screens at 6 p.m., followed by Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas at 9:15 p.m. And at 6:15 p.m., the Rio Theatre screens I Play Rocky, one of VanRamblings’ other personal favourites of the festival.

The beauty of VIFF, of course, is that the festival’s final screening need not be the final opportunity to see a film. Programmer Tom Charity and the VIFF Centre regularly help bring festival discoveries back to Vancouver audiences, while other titles secure conventional theatrical engagements across Metro Vancouver. It is worth keeping an eye on the VIFF Centre’s subsequent programming rather than assuming that missing a festival screening means missing a film forever.

But first, there are two films that deserve a special place in this year’s festival conversation.

Coward: Lukas Dhont’s Most Beautiful Film Yet

VanRamblings’ favourite film of VIFF 45 | Directed by Lukas Dhont | Belgium, France, Netherlands

Some films move you. Others quietly rearrange the furniture of your heart. And then there is Lukas Dhont’s Coward, an achingly beautiful, tenderly observed, emotionally transporting work of cinema that left VanRamblings with the extraordinary conviction that we had just encountered one of the finest films of the year — of any year.

At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Dhont’s First World War drama earned the Best Actor prize for its remarkable young stars, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne. Their performances are the beating heart of a film that could easily have succumbed to the familiar conventions of the tragic queer period drama, yet instead finds something infinitely more generous, more courageous and ultimately more life-affirming.

Set amid the brutal realities of the Belgian trenches, Coward introduces us to Pierre (Macchia), a young soldier arriving at the front eager to prove himself in a world in which courage is measured in blood, obedience and the willingness to march towards almost certain death. But Pierre’s understanding of the world begins to change when he meets Francis (Campagne), a fellow soldier with an unexpected idea: to stage a theatrical performance for their comrades.

It is an audacious proposal in a place where imagination might seem like an unaffordable luxury. Yet the makeshift theatre becomes something extraordinary — a sanctuary of beauty, laughter and human connection amid the machinery of destruction. And between Pierre and Francis, something tender and transformative begins to emerge.

Dhont, whose Girl and Close established him as one of contemporary cinema’s most sensitive observers of adolescent vulnerability, has made his most mature film to date. Here, his storytelling possesses an emotional restraint that makes every fleeting glance, every tentative touch and every moment of physical closeness feel almost unbearably precious.

The chemistry between Macchia and Campagne is simply magnificent. Dhont has a tactile, compassionate understanding of how men — queer men especially — watch other men, the way attraction and affection can reveal themselves in a look held a second too long, or in a gesture whose significance cannot safely be spoken aloud. Coward is, by turns, breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual. Its most intimate moments feel less like conventional romantic scenes than like the discovery of an entirely new language.

And what a relief it is that Dhont refuses to drown that love in tragedy.

Unlike so many period tales of forbidden queer affection, Coward is not interested in dripping its canvas in despair. Dhont wants to leave us with a glimmer of hope. Actually, more than a glimmer: a wry smile of anticipation, a suggestion that all is not lost, that love can find a way even when the world seems determined to extinguish it.

This is a recuperation of queer representation as resilient and hopeful. Happiness — or, perhaps more importantly, contentment — is possible when we seek it and seize it. That assertion feels quietly radical in a film set amid the carnage of the First World War, where tenderness itself becomes an act of resistance.

Dhont does not minimize the horror surrounding his characters. Rather, he understands that the existence of beauty in terrible circumstances does not diminish suffering; it makes the preservation of our humanity all the more urgent. The theatre they create becomes an emblem of what art can accomplish when the world has seemingly abandoned its obligations to the living.

There is something almost miraculous about the film’s tonal balance. The violence is genuinely frightening, the romance achingly delicate, the humour unexpectedly liberating. Dhont allows the film to breathe, trusting his actors and the emotional intelligence of his audience. He never insists that we feel something when a glance or a silence can accomplish so much more.

And when Coward reaches its final passages, its hopefulness feels neither sentimental nor cheaply won. It emerges from everything these men have endured, from the risks they have taken and from the simple, extraordinary recognition that another person can make a life worth living.

This is sensitive storytelling at its most affecting: sweetly played, elegantly mounted, reaching towards hope not in light of war’s horrors, but in spite of them.

For VanRamblings, Coward is the film of VIFF 45. It is a reminder that cinema’s greatest achievement is not always to break our hearts.

Sometimes, it is to show us how beautifully they can mend.

VanRamblings Grade: A+

Fatherland: A Haunted Masterpiece of Memory and Exile

VanRamblings feels strongly Fatherland is the best film to screen at VIFF 45, one of the best films of the year | Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski | Poland, Germany, Italy, France

If Coward is the film that most tenderly captured VanRamblings heart at VIFF 45, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is the film that most completely convinced us of cinema’s extraordinary power to transform history into poetry.

Pawlikowski, the modern master behind Ida and Cold War, has fashioned another immaculate black-and-white work of European cinema, an 82-minute elegy of such precision, intelligence and emotional depth that its brevity feels almost audacious.

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Fatherland is a gorgeous, gripping drama whose resonance extends far beyond its carefully chosen postwar setting.

The film centres on Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), the actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, sixteen years after fleeing Nazi Germany for the safety of the United States, Mann returns to his native country. Accompanied by Erika, he embarks on an emotionally fraught road trip in a black Buick, traveling from American-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar through a Germany devastated by war and divided by ideology.

It is a journey across a shattered nation, but also across the wreckage of a family.

Pawlikowski understands that the aftermath of catastrophe is not merely a matter of rebuilding cities or redrawing borders. It is also about confronting the moral compromises of the past, the things people did, the things they failed to do, and the stories they tell themselves to make those failures bearable.

Mann is a towering literary figure, a man whose opposition to Hitler forced him into exile. Yet the film is not content to celebrate the Nobel laureate as a convenient moral monument. His relationship with Erika reveals a more complicated figure, a father whose public stature and intellectual authority cannot protect him from the consequences of private shortcomings.

Hüller, one of contemporary cinema’s most compelling actors, is extraordinary as Erika. Her performance is a study in intelligence, resentment, wit and barely contained pain. She gives the film its emotional counterweight, suggesting a lifetime of accumulated disappointment beneath the surface of an apparently formidable woman. Zischler is equally compelling, creating a Mann whose authority is unmistakable but whose capacity for self-understanding remains uncertain.

The relationship between them is the film’s beating heart. Every exchange seems to carry the weight of conversations that have never taken place, apologies never offered, affection expressed too late or withheld altogether.

Shot by cinematographer Łukasz Żal in exquisitely chiselled monochrome, Fatherland is a visual marvel. The landscape passes through the car windows like a wounded memory, the ruins and the uneasy coexistence of two political systems rendering history tangible. Pawlikowski’s compositions are austere but never sterile; his camera finds beauty in the contours of a devastated landscape without ever pretending that beauty can erase what happened there.

As the journey progresses eastwards, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with grief and the responsibility of the artist. What does it mean to create art in the aftermath of catastrophe? Can intellectual achievement compensate for emotional failure? And what obligation does a celebrated writer have to the people closest to him, rather than to the abstract ideals he represents?

These questions converge in a beautiful, sad epiphany, delivered with the divine economy that distinguishes Pawlikowski’s finest work.

There are moments when Fatherland feels chilly, even deliberately withholding. But that restraint is part of its achievement. Pawlikowski trusts us to recognize what remains unspoken, to find the sorrow in a pause, the tenderness in an awkward gesture, the devastation in an exchange that appears almost incidental.

The result is a film of haunted, ravaged beauty. Its mournful meditation on national identity, private tragedy and the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times speaks directly to our own fractured moment. The cultural riches that survive catastrophe offer no easy redemption, but they can provide small, crucial forms of solace.

Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing masterpiece, an extraordinarily economical film that leaves behind an emotional echo far greater than its running time might suggest.

If VIFF 45 has offered a reminder of why we go to the movies, Pawlikowski’s film supplies one of the most compelling answers: to experience the past not as a distant abstraction, but as a living, breathing presence in the room.

This is a gorgeous poem of a film, and, for VanRamblings, the best film to screen at this year’s festival.

VanRamblings Grade: A+

Part Three: The Movies, the Memories, and the Promise of What’s Next

What, then, has VIFF 45 achieved?

First, it has reminded us that the Vancouver International Film Festival remains one of this city’s most important cultural institutions. For eleven days, it has created a space in which audiences can encounter stories beyond their own experience, discover filmmakers they might otherwise never have encountered, and engage with works that challenge, provoke, entertain and occasionally change the way we see the world.

Second, this year’s festival has offered compelling evidence that 2026 may be one of the strongest years for cinema in a decade, both domestically and internationally.

From the moral complexities of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord to the exquisite emotional restraint of Coward, from Pawlikowski’s haunted Fatherland to the imaginative daring of films arriving from Japan, Spain and elsewhere, the year’s finest work has demonstrated that ambitious filmmaking is alive and flourishing. Cannes’ awards have been especially revealing, recognizing films that are artistically adventurous while remaining profoundly attentive to the human condition.

And what a year for Canadian cinema, too. Mina Shum’s Whatcha Want is a welcome reminder of the importance of Vancouver filmmakers telling stories that emerge from the communities they know, while the festival’s wider Canadian programme has offered audiences opportunities to encounter the country’s extraordinary range of voices and perspectives. A healthy film culture depends not simply on importing the world’s best work, but on creating the conditions in which our own filmmakers can flourish.

There is, of course, a practical challenge awaiting us after the closing credits roll. How do we sustain the excitement? How do we ensure that these films find audiences beyond the festival’s eleven-day window?

The work of VIFF Centre programmer Tom Charity, and the subsequent theatrical engagements that some festival titles will secure across Metro Vancouver, is essential. A festival should be a beginning, not an ending. The conversation that starts in a crowded cinema ought to continue over dinner, in the pages of publications such as VanRamblings, and in the choices we make when deciding what to watch next.

Most importantly, VIFF reminds us that watching movies together is an act of community. We sit in the darkness beside strangers, laughing at the same unexpected joke, holding our breath through the same moment of suspense, or emerging into the Vancouver night with tears in our eyes and the sudden urge to talk to someone about what we have just experienced. For a few precious hours, another person’s story becomes part of our own.

That is the enduring magic of cinema. It allows us to inhabit lives we have never lived, to recognize ourselves in people whose circumstances are utterly unlike our own, and to discover that tenderness, courage, grief, longing and hope are not the possessions of any one nation or culture. They belong to all of us.

As VIFF 45 draws to a close, VanRamblings find ourselves thinking again about Coward, about those young soldiers who discover a measure of beauty in a world consumed by violence, and about Fatherland, with its wounded landscapes and its insistence that the past must be confronted if we are to make sense of the present. These films are very different, yet both understand that art can preserve something precious when the world seems determined to destroy it.

And perhaps that is the most hopeful thing we can take away from this year’s festival.

In a time of political division, technological upheaval and genuine uncertainty about the future, filmmakers continue to make works of astonishing beauty, intelligence and compassion. Audiences continue to seek them out. Cinemas continue to fill with people willing to give themselves over to a story.

For eleven days, Vancouver has been a city of movie lovers, united by curiosity and the shared pleasure of discovery. The festival ends, but the films remain with us, becoming part of our private histories, our conversations and our understanding of one another.

Here’s to VIFF 46. Here’s to the filmmakers who will surprise us, the performances that will break our hearts, and the stories that will remind us what we share.

And here’s to the simple, extraordinary miracle of sitting in a darkened cinema, surrounded by strangers, and discovering that, for a little while, we are all watching the world together.

#VIFF45 | #NYFF65 | When New York Comes to Vancouver For 11 Days

A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Film Festivals, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2026, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is a certain romance to New York in the fall.

The leaves begin to turn. The evenings come earlier. The city seems to acquire an extra layer of electricity. Manhattan becomes, for a few glorious weeks, the cinematic capital of the world as filmmakers, critics, actors, programmers, cineastes and assorted movie obsessives descend upon Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival.

And then there is Vancouver.

Which, if you are lucky enough to be here during the Vancouver International Film Festival, is not such a bad place to be.

In fact, this year, it may be one of the best places in the world.

For 45 years — essentially from the beginning of VIFF in 1981 — Vancouver and New York have shared films, creating an extraordinary transcontinental cinematic conversation. The relationship was once considerably more complicated than it is today. In the 1990s, when movies arrived in enormous metal film cans, a shared NYFF/VIFF title could become a logistical ballet worthy of its own documentary.

A film might screen in New York on Sunday evening. Almost before the audience had left the theatre, its precious reels would be hustled away for shipment north. Victoria Shipping, then deeply involved in distributing film cans to cinemas throughout British Columbia, would get the reels moving toward Vancouver. By Monday evening, the same movie might be flickering on a VIFF screen.

And then, remarkably, the process would reverse.

The reels would be rushed back to New York for a Tuesday screening.

For VIFF staffers such as the late Cathy Evans and Selina Crammond —the latter who would later become director of Vancouver’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival — this was not romantic at all. It was a logistical nightmare.

Today, thankfully, the movies travel rather more elegantly.

The film can has largely disappeared, replaced by the Digital Cinema Package — those encrypted files residing on a CRU hard drive — and, increasingly, by the instantaneous movement of cinema through high-speed fibre or satellite transmission.

But something more important has remained.

The connection.

And this year, the connection is extraordinary.

A small correction before we begin: the 2026 New York Film Festival is the 64th edition, not the 65th; VIFF 2026 is indeed celebrating its 45th anniversary edition. And what a 45th it is. New York and Vancouver are sharing 23 films, an unusually rich cross-border exchange that makes VIFF 45 feel, in a very real sense, like a West Coast extension of the great New York cinematic conversation.

So, cinéastes of Vancouver, take note.

You don’t have to fly to New York.

This year, New York is coming to you.

THE LONELIEST MAN IN TOWN

Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s quietly devastating portrait of Austrian blues musician Al Cook is one of those films that seems to have wandered into the festival from another, more tactile age of cinema. Cook, playing a fictionalized version of himself, faces eviction from the apartment that has become an archive of his life — VHS tapes, records, photographs, newspapers, memories. The filmmakers turn the threatened demolition of a building into something larger: a meditation on disappearing cultures, ageing and the terrifying realization that the physical world we knew is being erased around us. The film won the Giuseppe Becce Award and a Special Mention from the Guild of German Arthouse Cinemas at Berlin.

PAPER TIGER

James Gray returns to New York — his spiritual home as a filmmaker — with an atmospheric crime drama starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson. Set in 1986 Queens and Brooklyn, it begins with an apparently ordinary middle-class family becoming entangled with Russian criminals through an ill-advised business scheme. But Gray, as always, is less interested in crime than in family, loyalty, ambition and the terrible consequences of wanting a better life. NYFF chose it as its Opening Night film, and the festival calls it a “brilliant New York thriller.” Vancouver gets to see why.

ALL OF A SUDDEN

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the Oscar-winning director of Drive My Car, has made a 196-minute film about care, mortality, friendship and the strange intimacy that develops between people who might otherwise never have met. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes, playing an eldercare director and a terminally ill Japanese playwright. Hamaguchi’s great gift is making conversation feel like action and silence feel like dialogue. All of a Sudden is patient, humane and quietly immense — exactly the kind of film for which festivals were invented.

BEHEMOTH!

Tony Gilroy, director of Michael Clayton and creator of Andor, steps away from political espionage for a surprisingly personal drama about music. Pedro Pascal plays Alex, a brilliant cellist whose career and personal life have come apart, forcing him back toward family, memory and the unfinished business of his past. NYFF selected Behemoth! as its Centerpiece and describes Pascal’s performance as the best of his career. The film’s nine-composer musical collective gives the picture an unusually rich sonic architecture. It is a movie about music that understands something crucial: sometimes the score isn’t accompanying the emotion. The score is the emotion.

MINOTAUR

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s return is one of the major events of the festival year. The Russian master — now living in exile — won the Grand Prix at Cannes for this dark, mordantly funny tale of corruption, patriarchy and political power. Set in Russia in 2022, Minotaur follows a wealthy businessman whose suspicion that his wife is having an affair collides with an increasingly ominous political reality. Zvyagintsev invokes Claude Chabrol, but the film’s moral atmosphere is unmistakably his own: chilly, elegant, furious. After Leviathan and Loveless, this is another devastating anatomy of a society eating itself alive.

EVERYTIME

Sandra Wollner’s Everytime won the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, and it is one of those films whose description cannot prepare you for its emotional effect. Following a mother, younger daughter and boyfriend after a shocking accident, Wollner creates a suspended world in which grief seems to dissolve the boundaries between memory, reality and dream. The film eventually travels to Tenerife, where the past and present become almost indistinguishable. Gregory Oke’s cinematography is breathtaking, but the real achievement is tonal: Everytime feels like grief itself — beautiful, disorienting, tender and impossible to escape.

POSSIBLE LOVE

Lee Chang-dong’s first film since Burning is already one of the year’s essential Korean films. Two couples from radically different economic circumstances become connected when a wealthy documentary filmmaker turns her camera toward a working-class couple whose lives have been shattered by a factory layoff. The result is part relationship drama, part class critique, part inquiry into the ethics of documentary filmmaking. It won the Silver Lion at Venice and is South Korea’s submission for the 2027 Academy Awards. Lee has always understood that social inequality becomes most powerful when it enters the bedroom, the dining room and the intimate spaces of ordinary lives.

CLUB KID

Jordan Firstman’s feature début is one of the year’s great surprises: a wildly funny, sometimes outrageous New York comedy that gradually reveals a surprisingly tender heart. Firstman plays Peter, a washed-up thirtysomething club promoter whose hedonistic existence is interrupted by the arrival of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had. Suddenly, the professional party boy is responsible for another human being. NYFF calls it “wildly funny and remarkably assured,” and that seems exactly right. Club Kid begins as satire and ends somewhere much more affecting: as a story about the possibility that growing up can happen very, very late.

FATHERLAND

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is one of those films that makes black-and-white cinematography feel less like a stylistic choice than a moral necessity. Set in 1949, it follows Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika traveling through a Germany still physically and morally shattered by the war. Sandra Hüller is extraordinary as Erika, simultaneously daughter, conscience and prosecutor. Pawlikowski won Best Director at Cannes, while Łukasz Żal’s austere images recall Ida and Cold War. Poland’s Oscar submission, Fatherland is a miniature — just 82 minutes — that somehow contains an entire country’s struggle with memory and guilt.

DAO

Alain Gomis’ Dao is cinema as ritual. Two ceremonies — a mourning gathering in Guinea-Bissau and a wedding in Paris — become intertwined in a formally adventurous film that moves between documentary and fiction, memory and performance, grief and celebration. Gomis’ camera observes Black French women speaking about identity and history before plunging us into ceremonies where life and death, tradition and modernity, performance and reality become inseparable. At 192 minutes, Dao asks for patience, but rewards it with something increasingly rare: the sensation of discovering a cinematic language rather than merely watching a movie.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM

This may be the most precious piece of cinema in the entire 23-film exchange. In 1972, legendary filmmaker William Greaves assembled luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s townhouse and filmed their extraordinary conversation. More than half a century later, his son David Greaves has transformed that footage into a living archive of Black American intellectual and artistic life. The film has already won the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, worth $200,000. It is not simply a documentary. It is time travel — an invitation to sit in a room with people history has taught us to revere.

ROSE

Sandra Hüller is having one of those years actors dream about. In Rose, she plays a 17th-century woman who disguises herself as a male soldier after the Thirty Years’ War and attempts to build an entirely new life. Markus Schleinzer’s austere, beautifully composed historical fable won Hüller the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at Berlin and became Austria’s Oscar submission. The film is about gender, faith and intolerance, but also about the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone society has told you that you cannot be. Hüller gives the role an extraordinary mixture of severity, vulnerability and defiance.

CLARISSA

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway travels to contemporary Nigeria in this ambitious, tender adaptation from twin filmmakers Arie and Chuko Esiri. Sophie Okonedo plays Clarissa, preparing for an elaborate party while memories of old loves and unresolved emotions rise to the surface. The parallel story of a traumatized soldier brings Woolf’s exploration of interiority into the contemporary realities of Nigeria. It is an audacious transplantation: rather than treating Woolf as sacred literary property, the Esiris discover the universality underneath the geography. The result is intimate, political and unexpectedly moving.

FJORD

Cristian Mungiu has done it again. The Romanian master won his second Palme d’Or at Cannes for this searing drama about a Romanian family who immigrates to Norway and finds itself under suspicion after an allegation of child abuse. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve give performances of remarkable restraint as parents trapped between cultures, religious belief and the increasingly judgmental gaze of their adopted community. Mungiu refuses easy answers. What begins as a question of parental responsibility becomes a much more disturbing examination of prejudice, cultural difference and the moment when care becomes control. This is precisely the kind of morally uncomfortable cinema that stays with you long after the lights come up.

THE DREAMED ADVENTURE

Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure won the Jury Prize at Cannes and begins like one kind of film before quietly becoming another. An archaeologist returns to a Bulgarian border town searching for a vanished former lover. Gradually, the story slides into the territory of crime, masculinity and violence. Grisebach’s great achievement is the way she combines vérité observation with genre filmmaking. Like her acclaimed Western, the movie understands that borders are never simply geographical. They are emotional, cultural and psychological. At 170 minutes, it is deliberately immersive — a film that asks you to cross the border with it.

TENDER LOVING CARE

Mike Leigh may be approaching the end of his extraordinary filmmaking career, but Tender Loving Care suggests that his gaze remains as humane and penetrating as ever. Set in post-Brexit England, the film follows social workers Amy and Rosie as they struggle to care for people abandoned by increasingly fragile institutions. Leigh avoids easy political preaching, instead constructing a mosaic of lives — funny, desperate, stubborn, loving. The performances are superb, the humour wonderfully dry, and the compassion never sentimental. It is, perhaps, a fitting film for a filmmaker who has spent decades insisting that ordinary people are every bit as worthy of our attention as kings, politicians and movie stars.

BITTER CHRISTMAS

Pedro Almodóvar turns the cinema of autofiction inside out in Bitter Christmas, a deliciously complicated hall of mirrors about artists stealing from life — and then discovering that life may have been stealing from them all along. Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia play filmmakers whose work becomes increasingly entangled with the lives of their friends and collaborators. The result is simultaneously comedy, melodrama, self-parody and confession. NYFF describes it as a meditation on the artist’s relationship with fiction and reality; VIFF calls it a “mischievously meta mea culpa.” Both are right. Almodóvar has spent five decades turning emotional chaos into cinematic colour, and he remains magnificently himself.

THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK

There could scarcely be a more New York movie in this collection. John Turturro plays Harry Lehman, an ageing Bronx pickpocket whose profession has become almost obsolete in a cashless, digital city. When a theft goes wrong, Harry finds himself racing through the boroughs trying to repair the damage. Noah Segan’s film is both crime story and elegy — for an older New York, an older kind of movie and an older kind of human connection. NYFF calls it an “elegant love letter to New York.” RogerEbert.com calls it a film attempting to conjure the spirit of an era. It succeeds beautifully.

THE DEBUT

Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut — VIFF 45’s Opening Gala — gives Julianne Moore the kind of role actors live for. She plays Mona, an overlooked middle-aged housewife who impulsively auditions for a community musical and finds herself transformed by the stage. Paul Giamatti plays the theatre director who may be mentor, bully, genius or all three. Eisenberg walks a remarkable line between satire and genuine affection, skewering community theatre while celebrating the strange liberation that can happen when ordinary people suddenly find themselves illuminated by a spotlight. The result is funny, uncomfortable, unexpectedly moving — and a terrific way to open a festival.

NOWHERE TO LAY MY EYES

Hong Sangsoo’s 35th feature is another of those deceptively simple films in which almost nothing happens — and everything happens. A filmmaker returns to Jeju Island to visit her estranged mother, encountering a new stepfamily and the uncomfortable emotional geography of old wounds. Hong’s stripped-down visual style allows the smallest shifts in conversation to become revelations. The film won Best Direction at Locarno, while Kim Min-hee took the festival’s Best Performance prize. At only 72 minutes, it is a miniature Hong Sangsoo masterpiece: awkward, funny, melancholy and quietly profound.

9 TEMPLES TO HEAVEN

Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s feature début takes a simple premise and turns it into a spiritual road movie. After a fortune teller warns that his elderly mother may soon die, Sakol gathers his family and sets out on a pilgrimage to nine Buddhist temples in a single day. The film combines family squabbling, Thai architecture, ritual and mortality with the patient observational style associated with the filmmaker’s mentor, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Selected for Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and Thailand’s Oscar submission, it is less a conventional narrative than a journey into the sacred and the everyday. A film about death that is, paradoxically, deeply alive.

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID

Radu Jude’s modern reimagining of Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid is quintessential Jude: political, mischievous, self-aware and quietly furious. Ana Dumitrașcu plays Gianina, a young Romanian woman working for a wealthy French family while yearning to return to her daughter in Romania. The great twist is that Gianina is also rehearsing the role of a chambermaid in an amateur theatrical adaptation of the very novel whose world she inhabits. Jude turns class resentment into comedy, then lets the comedy curdle. With a 94% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is among his more warmly received recent films.

LA GRADIVA

Marine Atlan’s feature debut is one of the great discoveries of Cannes 2026. A school trip takes a group of French teenagers to Naples and Pompeii, where the ancient landscape becomes the backdrop for a contemporary eruption of desire, jealousy, class anxiety and adolescent cruelty. Atlan, working as her own cinematographer, won the Grand Prize at Critics’ Week, and the film’s precision is astonishing. Every glance, gesture and silence seems deliberately placed. What begins as a school trip becomes something closer to a coming-of-age fever dream, in which the ruins of Pompeii become a metaphor for young people discovering that desire can be as dangerous as Vesuvius.

TWO CITIES. ONE CINEMA.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about this relationship between New York and Vancouver.

Before streaming. Before the infinite libraries of films available at the touch of a button. Before a movie could cross an ocean without anybody physically touching a film can. There was simply the movie, the screen, the audience — and the people desperately trying to get the movie from one city to another.

New York would see something first.

Vancouver would wait.

Then the reels would arrive, battered and precious, carrying with them the faint romance of another city: Manhattan streets after midnight, Lincoln Center reflected in rain, the conversations in Greenwich Village cafés, the arguments among critics outside a theatre, the whispered conviction that this movie — this particular movie — might be the one everyone remembers.

And now, 45 years after VIFF began, the miracle is that we don’t need to cross the continent to experience that feeling.

The cinema comes here.

It arrives at the Vancouver Playhouse, the Park, the Rio, International Village, the Fifth Avenue, SFU Woodwards, the VIFF Centre. It arrives in the darkness, carried not in steel canisters but in streams of data, transformed once again by the oldest technology of all: a room full of strangers staring together at a rectangle of light.

That is the real romance of VIFF.

New York may have the skyline.

It may have Lincoln Center.

It may have the autumn leaves and the taxis and the midnight screenings and the feeling that somewhere around the corner, Martin Scorsese or Paul Schrader or some impossibly elegant European filmmaker might be sitting at the next table.

But Vancouver has the mountains.

Vancouver has the rain.

And, for eleven days in October, Vancouver has New York.

More precisely, it has the cinema that New York has chosen to embrace.

Twenty-three films crossing the continent. Twenty-three little acts of cinematic diplomacy. Twenty-three reminders that movies have always been travelers, moving from country to country, festival to festival, audience to audience — carrying stories with them like passports.

Once upon a time, those stories traveled in film cans.

Today they travel through fibre-optic cables.

But when the lights go down, nothing has really changed.

There is still a screen.

There is still darkness.

There is still the extraordinary hush that falls over an audience just before the first image appears.

And somewhere, thousands of kilometres away, another audience may be watching the very same image.

New York.

Vancouver.

Two cities separated by a continent, joined by a beam of light.

And for a few glorious weeks each autumn, if you listen carefully enough, you can almost hear Manhattan breathing through the speakers of a Vancouver cinema.

You don’t have to go to New York.

New York has already come to you.

 

#VIFF2026 | Two More Oustanding, Must-See Films Screening at the 45th Annual Vancouver International Film Festival

Film Festivals, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2026, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur

Minotaur: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Chilling Russian Masterpiece

There are filmmakers who make movies. And then there are filmmakers who seem to stare directly into the soul of a country and, with an almost unbearable patience, wait for its darkest secrets to reveal themselves.

Andrey Zvyagintsev is one of the latter.

With Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Russian master has created another unmistakably political, bleak and methodical work — a film that holds you in its grip from beginning to end.

At first glance, Minotaur appears to be a domestic thriller.

Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a wealthy logistics-company owner living in provincial Russia, is under mounting professional pressure as the war in Ukraine reaches into every corner of civilian life. Local authorities demand that he provide 14 employees for military service. Unwilling to sacrifice his existing workforce, Gleb recruits unsuspecting truck drivers with promises of lucrative employment, knowing full well that they will soon be sent to war.

At the same time, Gleb discovers — or believes he has discovered — that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair. Suddenly, the pressures of business, marriage, family and war collide.

And that is where Zvyagintsev’s genius becomes apparent.

Because Minotaur is not really about choosing between a political thriller and an erotic thriller. It is about recognizing that, in a morally diseased society, there is no such choice. The personal is political. The political is personal. And, most damningly, we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

Mazurov is extraordinary as Gleb, a man whose outward confidence masks an almost bottomless moral vacancy. Lebedeva is equally remarkable as Galina, giving the film a quietly devastating emotional centre. Together they inhabit a marriage that feels less like a relationship than a sealed chamber in which privilege, resentment, desire and fear have been slowly accumulating for years.

Zvyagintsev’s filmmaking is icily exacting. His camera waits. And waits. And waits some more. Minotaur is morbidly humorous at times, but its humour only makes the surrounding dread more unsettling. Shot with extraordinary patience, the film allows latent anxieties to creep gradually to the surface.

The film’s midway turning point is especially bracing. What initially appears to be one more ugly consequence of Gleb’s private predicament suddenly becomes something much larger — an eruption of violence that propels the narrative forward while exposing the corruption at the heart of the Russian state.

This is an urgent film, yet remarkably restrained.

Searingly political yet controlled and understated, Minotaur is a denunciation of the Russian state that is never spelled out in so many words, but expressed through intricate layers of irony. Russia under Vladimir Putin is not merely criticized; it is rendered as an amoral ecosystem in which ordinary people have learned to accommodate corruption, violence and complicity.

Zvyagintsev had to make the film outside Russia. Unable to shoot in his homeland, he filmed in Latvia, using a Latvian town to stand in for provincial Russia. Given the film’s subject matter and its uncompromising portrait of Putin-era Russia, it is difficult to imagine the Kremlin permitting such a production to be made there.

The audacity of Minotaur lies in its oscillating sprawl.

Against the backdrop of a war that has blotted out almost everything else, Zvyagintsev somehow makes room for a bourgeois love triangle, corporate venality, family dysfunction, murder and the machinery of state violence.

The result is a thriller about corruption that becomes a thriller about corruption of the soul.

Zvyagintsev sets his own deliciously ink-black stamp on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle, the 1969 erotic thriller on which the film is loosely based. Yet he deliberately flattens both the eroticism and the thrills for much of Minotaur, a carefully judged gambit that makes the eventual nudity and violence land with considerably greater force.

This is Zvyagintsev at his most devastating: patient, furious, darkly funny and morally clear.

Minotaur doesn’t roar.

It waits.

And then it strikes.

VanRamblings Grade: A. A quietly devastating and lacerating look inside Putin’s corrupt Russian state, told as a personal — yet still political —  story of betrayal.

There are two more scheduled screenings of Minotaur at VIFF 45, this upcoming Friday at 8:30 PM, at the Lindsay Family Stage at Granville Island.

And, Sunday October 11th, 2:30 PM, at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky

 

Sometimes you walk out of a movie knowing you have just seen a good film.

And sometimes you walk out knowing you have just seen a hit.

I Play Rocky is a hit.

Not merely a respectable little biographical drama about the making of Rocky, not simply another Hollywood movie about Hollywood, but the kind of genuine crowd-pleaser that sends audiences out of the theatre grinning, talking, arguing over their favourite scenes — and, inevitably, telling everyone they know that they absolutely have to see it.

Word of mouth is going to send I Play Rocky into the stratosphere!

Directed by Oscar-winner Peter Farrelly (Green Book), this wonderfully entertaining film tells the improbable story behind the making of Rocky: how a struggling young actor named Sylvester Stallone, repeatedly told no by Hollywood, refuses to surrender either his screenplay or his insistence that he play Rocky Balboa himself.

It is, in other words, the ultimate underdog story about the making of the ultimate underdog movie.

And Farrelly knows exactly what he has.

The brilliance of I Play Rocky is that we already know the ending. We know Rocky will get made. We know Stallone will become a star. We know the movie will become a cultural landmark. We know what is coming.

And yet Farrelly makes us care desperately about every seemingly impossible obstacle along the way.

Anthony Ippolito is sensational as Stallone. This is a career-defining performance — not an impersonation, but an extraordinarily charismatic recreation of a young man possessed by the belief that his life is waiting for him on the other side of one more locked door. Ippolito captures Stallone’s physicality, voice, vulnerability and sheer stubbornness with astonishing precision.

AnnaSophia Robb is superb as Sasha, Stallone’s girlfriend and eventual wife, giving the movie its emotional heartbeat. Sasha believes in him with all her heart, even when almost everyone else believes he is deluding himself. Robb brings warmth, intelligence and genuine emotional force to a role that could easily have been reduced to supportive-girlfriend shorthand.

Then there is Matt Dillon, almost unrecognizable as Stallone’s father, Frank Sr., whose crazed, unsupportive presence gives the film another layer of tension. Tracy Letts, meanwhile, is once again terrific as the kind of obstacle — half villain, half immovable force of Hollywood reality — that every great underdog movie requires.

And Canadian actor Stephan James as Carl Weathers? Fantastic.

There is palpable magic here.

I Play Rocky captures the chaos, setbacks and unlikely collaborations behind an independent production that somehow became one of the defining movies of the 20th century. But more importantly, it understands what made Rocky so beloved in the first place: hope, ingenuity, persistence and the almost irrational belief that you might just be able to change your life if you refuse to give up.

Stallone is a man battling homelessness, rejection and obscurity, a man who finds love and writes his way into a cultural phenomenon. The parallels are almost too perfect. Yet Farrelly never allows the story to become syrupy. There is a ton of wit and charm here, along with an infectious sense of movie-loving joy.

This is the feel-good film of the year.

And yes, I am going to go out on a limb: come January, when the Academy announces its Oscar nominations, don’t be surprised if I Play Rocky is sitting there with multiple nominations — Best Picture, perhaps Best Original Screenplay, potentially Best Director for Farrelly, and acting recognition for Robb, Dillon, Ippolito and James.

The film has that has that rare quality audiences recognize immediately.

It makes you feel good about movies.

Little wonder its November theatrical release is positioned to carry the film into the holiday season, when word of mouth can turn a sleeper into a phenomenon. The film already finished as first runner-up for the 2026 TIFF People’s Choice Award, an encouraging sign of exactly the audience affection it is likely to generate.

I Play Rocky is a resounding success — funny, touching, exuberant and enormously entertaining.

It doesn’t just tell us how Rocky was made.

It reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place.

And that, in a year desperately in need of a little cinematic optimism, may be the most wonderful thing of all.

VanRamblings Grade: A+. The feel good film of 2026 that is not a cheat, but a genuinely inspirational story that reminds us: we can create the conditions of our own lives.

There in one final screening of I Play Rocky, this upcoming Sunday, October 11th, 6:15 PM, at The Rio Theatre. You are going to want to arrive early.

#VIFF2026 | Two Outstanding Films That Took Cannes by Storm, Now Screening at VIFF

Arts Friday, Cinema, Film Festivals, VIFF 2026, Weblogs, , , , , , , , ,

Fjord

Fjord — A Moral Avalanche at the End of the World

There are films that win the Palme d’Or, and then there are films like Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, movies that seem almost preordained to carry the weight of such a prize.

This is filmmaking of extraordinary moral ambition: riveting, nuanced, cathartic and profoundly unsettling, a slow-burning epic that burrows beneath the skin until its questions become our questions, its anxieties our anxieties, its moral dilemmas impossible to shake.

Set in a remote Norwegian fjord, Fjord follows a devout Romanian Norwegian couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, who relocate to a small community where their children form a friendship with the children of their neighbours. When adolescent Elia arrives at school bearing bruises, however, the community begins asking increasingly uncomfortable questions about the Gheorghius’ parenting, their religious beliefs and the boundaries between cultural difference and unacceptable behaviour.

And Mungiu — whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days remains one of the great Palme d’Or winners of the modern era — is having none of the easy answers.

Instead, Fjord becomes a gripping moral and social quandary, a film that refuses to tell us where sympathy should end and judgment begin. What constitutes good parenting? When does intervention become persecution? How much cultural difference can a liberal society accommodate before its commitment to tolerance begins colliding with its responsibility to protect children? And who gets to decide?

These are thorny questions, and Mungiu grapples with them with an almost unnerving patience.

Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty — and terrifying avalanches — of Norwegian precipices, Fjord is a brilliant epic of landscape and conscience. The mountains are magnificent, but they are hardly comforting. They loom over the characters like indifferent gods while Mungiu meticulously piles one ethical complication upon another. The film sustains nail-biting tension across its 146-minute running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.

The central performances by an outstanding Sebastian Stan and an absolutely riveting and revelatory Renate Reinsve  are extraordinary precisely because nobody is reduced to a position in an argument.

Mungiu allows everyone their humanity, their contradictions, their fears and their blind spots. Variety called the result “riveting,” praising the ensemble’s careworn nuance, while The Telegraph described the film as a “slow-burn provocation” that confronts the contradictions of multiculturalism and public-sector institutions with unflinching seriousness.

What makes Fjord so powerful is that it never settles for the obvious culture-war narrative. It becomes a richly compelling and provocative culture war drama precisely because it understands that real culture wars are rarely about heroes and villains. They are about frightened people, competing obligations, incompatible understandings of responsibility and the terrifying possibility that everybody involved may believe they are doing the right thing.

There is something almost spiritual about the film, too.

Fjord is a triumphant work that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us — regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three. Its tragic examination of the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, and of caregiving itself, unfolds as a meditation on what happens when private belief collides with public responsibility.

This is cinema that refuses complacency.

It watches. It waits. It tightens the screws.

And then, like an avalanche descending from those magnificent Norwegian heights, it leaves you wondering whether society can ever distinguish between protecting the vulnerable and protecting itself.

Fjord is not merely a Palme d’Or winner.

It is a moral earthquake.

Grade: A | A harrowing, provocative and controversial — yet always humane and moving — epic for the modern age, this Palme d’Or winner delivers in spades.

Fjord has one more screening at VIFF, on Wednesday, October 7th at 9 PM, at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Club Kid

Club Kid — Jordan Firstman Finds the Heart Beneath the Glitter

Jordan Firstman has spent years cultivating an online persona built on irony, provocation, bitchiness and the gleeful absurdity of internet culture. Then he went to Cannes with Club Kid and did something genuinely unexpected: he grew a heart.

Written, directed by and starring Firstman, Club Kid is a crowdpleasing queer family drama that somehow transforms the debris of New York’s hedonistic gay nightlife — drugs, parties, bad decisions, emotional wreckage and spectacularly questionable behaviour — into something earnest, heartwarming and surprisingly moving.

Firstman plays Peter, a washed-up New York party promoter whose carefully constructed life of perpetual nightlife is detonated by the arrival of a 10-year-old son he never knew he had. What follows is Peter’s fumbling, frequently hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking journey toward fatherhood.

And somehow, it works.

Indeed, it works gloriously.

Club Kid is an acidic, spikily funny portrait of the city’s hedonistic gay scene, but beneath all the bitchy humour is a celebration of empathy, community and the unconditional love between a father and his son. Firstman finally shirks the ironic pose he has taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humour. IndieWire specifically praised this transformation, describing a filmmaker who moves beyond his online persona to reveal himself as a storyteller of genuine sincerity.

The movie promises — and absolutely delivers — scenes of copious drug taking, gross-out comedy, chaotic nightlife and the sort of behaviour that makes responsible parenting manuals spontaneously combust. Yet Firstman understands the most important trick in the cinematic playbook: make us laugh first, then make us care.

By the third act, the emotional payoff is both well-earned and devastating.

Firstman’s performance is particularly bracing. There are moments when the armour falls away and Peter becomes vulnerable, frightened and utterly human. That vulnerability gives Club Kid its emotional force. AwardsWatch praised Firstman’s ability to strip away his persona for moments of “bracing vulnerability,” while The Film Stage singled out the film’s third-act payoff as devastating.

The supporting cast adds further pleasure. Cara Delevingne, used sparingly and effectively, plays Peter’s cutting business partner, while The Night Manager’s Diego Calva is wonderfully sympathetic as an extremely obliging social worker. Together with Firstman’s wonderfully chaotic ensemble, they make Club Kid nothing if not easy to like.

And then there is the film’s unabashed sweetness.

That may be Club Kid’s greatest surprise.

This is a bracing, vulnerable, redemptive movie alive with warmth. It is a celebration of unconventional lifestyles without pretending that unconventional lives are uncomplicated. It offers a vivacious look at the realities of parenting — especially parenting when you have absolutely no idea what you are doing — while insisting that love can arrive late, messily and from the least expected direction.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about its emotional generosity.

Club Kid wants us to believe people can change.

More importantly, it wants us to believe that they can love one another while they are changing.

And by the time Peter finally begins to understand what being a father might mean, Firstman has pulled off something considerably more difficult than a joke.

He has made us feel.

VanRamblings’ Grade: A– | A moving, tender drama set in New York’s trans & queer community, unprecedented in scope. A film that surprises while warming the heart.

Club Kid has one more screening at VIFF, this upcoming Monday, October 5th, 9:15 PM, at The Park Theatre on Cambie Street.