There are many reasons the 160,000 or so patrons attend the Vancouver International Film Festival each year.
First and foremost, there are the diehard festival attendees who, each year, live to see cinema from across the globe, obscure but heart-rending films of immense humanity from Niger, Lebanon, Malawi, Georgia, Ecuador, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Cape Verdi or Nigeria — all of which countries will have films screening at this year’s 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival. Sometimes these films are sparsely attended, but they nonetheless represent not only the raison d’être of the festival, but its beating heart.
The second group of patrons represent the financial heart of the festival. These patrons are most interested in gaining early insight and entrée into the Oscar awards season, purchasing tickets for films VanRamblings is writing about this weekend (our first ‘Oscar Derby’ column was published yesterday). These patrons not only want to screen the Oscar worthy films months before they’ll be released to multiplexes, but also want to be acknowledged as having engaged in the cultural cachet that comes with being able to say to their friends, “Oh yes, we attended the film festival this year, as we do every year, and were blown away by (name of film).”

Patrons attending screenings of the Oscar worthy films do so at the 1800 seat Centre for the Performing Arts on Homer Street, just across the street from the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. Twenty films times 1800 patrons times $15 equals a substantial amount of money contributing to the success and bottom line of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Needless to say, the VIFF administration is more than grateful to these patrons for their interest in the film festival, as are all festival devotees.

Today, VanRamblings will present five more Oscar worthy films that will screen at VIFF 2019 that are guaranteed both critical acclaim and the Oscar nominations they are so richly due, come 5am, Monday, January 13, 2020.

Representing the first film in a knockout, must-see double bill at The Centre on Saturday, September 28th, as part of the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse took Cannes by storm (pun intended) at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring, winning the prestigious FIPRESCI International Film Critics Prize, and going on to win the Grand Special Prize at the French Deauville Film Festival.
The Guardian’s chief film critic, Peter Bradshaw, raves about The Lighthouse in his five-star review …

Robert Eggers’ gripping nightmare shows two lighthouse-keepers in 19th-century Maine going melancholy mad together: a toxic marriage, a dance of death. It is explosively scary and captivatingly beautiful in cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s fierce monochrome, like a daguerreotype of fear. And the performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson have a sledgehammer punch — Pattinson, in particular, just gets better and better.

What is so exhilarating and refreshing about The Lighthouse is that it declines to reveal whether or not it is a horror film as such, though an early reference to Salem, Massachusetts gives us a flashback to Eggers’ previous film, The Witch (2015).

It is not a question of a normal-realist set-up pivoting to supernatural scariness with reliably positioned jump-scares etc. The ostensible normality persists; perhaps something ghostly is going on, or perhaps this is a psychological thriller about delusion. But generic ambiguity is not the point: The Lighthouse keeps hold of us with the sheer muscular intelligence and even theatricality of the performances and the first-class writing. Even Sir Donald Wolfit or Robert Newton could not have got more out of the role of Tom than Willem Dafoe does and Pattinson is mesmeric in his bewilderment and uncertainty.

The Lighthouse screens at The Centre at 6pm, on day three of the festival, Saturday, September 28th, followed by the must-see screening of …

On Friday, September 6th, the first full day of the 44th annual Toronto International Film Festival director Destin Daniel Cretton’s true life civil rights drama, Just Mercy, catapulted itself into Oscar contention, placing Michael B. Jordan firmly into the Best Actor sweeps, and both Jamie Foxx and Rob Morgan into Best Supporting Actor contention.
Here’s what the critics had to say about Just Mercy …

Full-blooded performances from Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx add weight to the powerful fact-based Just Mercy, a retelling of one of influential lawyer and social justice and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson’s most enraging cases, presented in a film that will shake you to your soul. It’s the late 1980s, and Stevenson (Jordan), a young Harvard-educated African-American lawyer in crisp gray suits and neckties, has come to stay in Monroe County, Alabama, to take on the cases of death-row inmates who are innocent.

Death row as a morbid extension of slavery is what Just Mercy is about. “You’re guilty from the moment you’re born,” says Walter McMillian (Foxx), clarifying the rage that percolates throughout the movie. “It’s just another excuse to lynch a black man,” one of his peers concludes.

A celebration of what it takes to eke out justice in a broken system, Just Mercy builds throughout to its gripping resolution, based on the certainty that hatred, in all its terrible power, will never be as powerful as justice.”

Just Mercy screens at The Centre at 9pm on Saturday, September 28th.

A searing exploration of the consequences of upholding one’s convictions in a time of terrifying upheaval, the latest work from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) mines the themes of spirituality and engagement with the natural world that have permeated so much of the American auteur’s late-period renaissance. Set in Austria during the rise of the Third Reich, A Hidden Life movingly relays this little-known true story of quiet heroism.
A Hidden Life screens at The Centre, 8:45pm, Sunday, September 29th.

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-1800s, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada, reaching Canada by boat across Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, settling in Ontario and Nova Scotia, aided by abolitionists and others sympathetic to their cause.
Nova Scotia’s African American population was first settled by Black Loyalists during the American Revolution and then by Black Refugees in the War of 1812, with important black settlements developed across Canada, both in Québec and on Vancouver Island, where Governor James Douglas encouraged black immigration arising from his opposition to slavery.
Directed and co-written by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), Harriet relates the story of abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman (who, up until President Donald Trump intervened, was to bear her image on the $20 bill) who, following her escape from slavery in 1849, helped free hundreds of slaves from the American South, risking her life to lead others to freedom through the network of safehouses that came to be known as the Underground Railroad.
Lifting the heroic icon from the pages of history and into an epic, timeless tale, Harriet brings to the big screen the surge of faith, principle, and raw courage that drove diminutive Araminta Ross (who changed her name to Harriet Tubman) to greatness. The film’s star, Tony-winning Broadway actor Cynthia Erivo, was a discovery for many in Steve McQueen’s Widows. In Harriet, Erivo is riveting in every scene, giving her portrayal of Harriet Tubman the scale and depth appropriate to a legendary American leader.
Harriet screens once, at 3pm at The Centre, on Saturday, October 5th.

Taika Waititi directs a riotous cast — including Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Rebel Wilson, Thomasin McKenzie, and newcomer Roman Griffin Davis — in this daring, touching, and comedic satire about a young German boy who discovers a Jewish girl hiding in his home and consults with his imaginary best friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi).
In a series of deft, groundbreaking comedies, Taika Waititi took sharp left turns into coming-of-age stories (Boy), vampire movies (What We Do in the Shadows), and sacred superheroes (Thor: Ragnarok). Now he brings his half-Maori, half-Jewish, fully skewed sensibilities to his most daring film yet. A dazzling takedown of fascist thinking and the violence it fuels, Jojo Rabbit begins in biting satire but delivers surprising emotional impact.
Jojo Rabbit screens at 6:15pm at The Centre, on Wednesday, October 2nd.

Part 3 of VanRamblings’ Oscar Derby series will conclude on Sunday with an exploration of the potential and probable Best International Films Oscar nominees (it used to be called Best Foreign Film, but the Academy changed that designation to International earlier this year) that will screen this year at the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.

At the Wednesday opening press conference, the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Associate Director of Programming, Curtis Woloschuk, announced the late addition of four Oscar-bound films that, although they didn’t make the printed Festival guide (which is available everywhere across Metro Vancouver today, and a mighty gorgeous work of art it is) will screen, nonetheless, at this year’s spectacular 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival (the schedule, and film information, is now available online).
And, oh yes, VIFF 2019 ticket (and pack) sales are now available online.
Although VanRamblings has written about and previously presented trailers for the four late addition films, to save you the work of searching through the previous columns, here are the four Oscar-bound films just added to the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival’s film schedule.

Noah Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, wowed ’em at both the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, and at this point is the odds on favourite to win Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, among other probable Oscar wins, tracks the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple — played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson — negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. It’s as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving. Marriage Story will screen at The Centre, 8:45pm, Thursday, October 10th.

Perhaps not the best reviewed film coming out of the Telluride Film Festival, writer-director-producer Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel, Motherless Brooklyn, transplants Lionel, the main character of the novel, from modern Brooklyn into an entirely new, richly woven neo-noir narrative: a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide, set in 1950s New York.
Here’s what IndieWire’s chief film critic, Eric Kohn, has to say about Motherless Brooklyn in his review …

Visually, Motherless Brooklyn doesn’t pull many exciting tricks, but veteran cinematographer Dick Pope manages to give New York City the L.A. Confidential treatment with evocative grey tones and shadowy street corners that deepen the mysterious atmosphere at every turn.

Some of Lionel’s encounters with various gruff characters hold more interest than others, but the movie really comes alive once he connects with Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, in a delicate turn), an activist fighting the city’s racist housing policies. As he follows her all the way up to Harlem, Lionel connects with an affable jazz musician (a terrifically assertive Michael K. Williams) and finds some measure of kinship in his quest for answers in a broken world. The movie’s finest moment finds Lionel unable to contain his stream of Tourette’s tics in the midst of a jazz performance that seems to commiserate with the stream-of-consciousness he struggles to control. It’s a cogent illustration of the movie’s most alluring trait — a character searching for meaning in a messy world, and lost in a sea of words at every turn.

Motherless Brooklyn screens at The Centre, 8:45pm, Monday, Sept. 30th.

While it’s true that Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Laundromat, will début on Netflix at some point in the fall season, do you really want to watch this big screen entertainment with the all star cast on your TV at home, no matter what kind of home theatre you have? No, I didn’t think so.
Bitterly funny and, at times, amusingly droll, The Laundromat emerged as a knock it out of the park favourite at the Venice Film Festival, a galvanizing, entertaining yet wistful Big Short style narrative about the 2016 Panama Papers scandal and how the wealthy elite across the globe are, daily, ripping us off and making our existences that much more challenging, through the use of tax havens, shell companies and money laundering (and, yes, as is becoming increasingly clear, Vancouver has a significant role to play), among other feats of dastardly financial derring do.
The Laundromat screens at 3pm at The Centre on Sunday, October 6th.

Clearly, Christian Bale and Matt Damon have Oscar nominations in the bag, in James Mangold’s propulsive new film, Ford v Ferrari, as fine an example of big Hollywood studio filmmaking as we’ve seen in many a year. The film crackles with dry humour throughout, an exhilarating re-telling of Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles’ (Christian Bale, in a transformative performance) years of racing cars at Daytona, Le Mans and on a makeshift LAX racetrack. Ford v Ferrari is about much more, though: it’s about friendship, the love of a father and his son, it’s about American ingenuity (although less than you’d expect) and, most unexpectedly, the evils of corporate marketing. Anyone who refers to it as the “perfect Dad movie” is simply not giving the filmmakers involved enough credit. You can detest auto racing and still be swept away with the events on screen.
Ford v Ferrari screens at The Playhouse as the VIFF 2019 closing film, on the last day of the festival, the screening at 6pm on Friday, October 11th.

Parts 2 & 3 of VanRamblings’ VIFF 2019 Oscar Derby coverage will be published on Saturday and Sunday, with insight (and trailers) as well as scheduling information on the films that are set to pick up a slew of critics’ awards this autumn season, and in January: Academy Award nominations.

In the 11½ months between the annual Vancouver film festivals, festival programming staff spend their year attending film festivals across the globe identifying for patrons the best in world cinema to bring to our shores, the vast majority of scheduled films set to screen each year only two or three times in Vancouver, never to be seen again in local cinemas. The Vancouver International Film Festival, then, affords appreciative audiences with the singular opportunity to participate in a venture that, during the 16-day running time of the festival, provides viewers with an utterly unique and gently humane window on the world, a not-to-be-missed artistic endeavour.

VIFF 2019’s Contemporary World Cinema programme this year is composed of 47 films from 28 countries, and as the programme suggests, represents:

” … a sprawling collection of award winners, new discoveries, and noteworthy premières, be they offbeat comedies, deeply humane dramas or progressive cinema that pushes both boundaries & buttons, this series is a showcase of the best new work from international filmmmakers.”

Today, four award-winning films worthy of your consideration, films that will screen at the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival in 2019, sometime between Thursday September 26th and Friday, October 11th …

Rigorously charting the fracturing of a grieving former police detective’s world as he comes to suspect that his late wife, who died in a strange car accident, was having an affair with a younger colleague, this deeply unsettling and grimly hypnotic second feature by Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Palmason, A White White Day won both the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award and Critics’ Week prize at Cannes 2019.
As Lisa Nesselson writes in her review of the film in Screen Daily …

A White White Day is an exquisite, complex, visually arresting and emotionally rewarding film, the tug of the splendidly varied landscape in this film both internal and external in a manner that would be hard to pull off in a dense urban setting, the pleasingly off-kilter string score a plus, and the trajectory of the film percolating from tender — the protagonist’s relationship with his granddaughter — to robustly no-nonsense, offering the viewer throughout with a flesh and blood catalogue of ways to be masculine, to be human, and how to grieve.

The film’s title refers to an Icelandic proverb suggesting that on days so “white” that the earth meets the sky, the dead can communicate with those still living.

Winner of the Golden Bear (the top prize) as well as the FIPRESCI Prize (the critics prize) at Berlinale 2019, in early February of this year …

Nadav Lapid’s third feature, Synonyms, emerged (as critics wrote) as …

… deliriously unpredictable, brilliant, maddening, enthrallingly impenetrable and breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning, the film an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this nakedly hypnotic and astonishingly audacious début, which sees Mercier often naked, clothes only a superfluity, his raw physicality the only pure expression of control as he see-saws the imbalance between power and helplessness.

A sui generis work of tormented genius, Synonyms is not to be missed.

This year’s Cannes’ prestigious Un Certain Regard winner, here’s what VIFF 2019’s programme has to say about The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão:

Karim Aïnouz’s (Madame Satã) stylish, colour-saturated “tropical melodrama” tells the story of two sisters, proper Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and freedom-loving Guida (Julia Stockler), in 1950s Rio de Janeiro who are divided by their father’s duplicitous misogyny. Pure pleasure for the eyes and told from a decidedly feminist slant, this is a tale of “high emotion articulated with utmost sincerity and heady stylistic excess, all in the perspiring environs of midcentury Rio de Janeiro.”

Thus far, then, contemporary, award winning cinema from Iceland, Brazil and France / Israel. Let’s now take a look at Queen of Hearts, the Denmark / Sweden co-production that won the Audience Award in the World Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Director and co-writer May el-Toukhy offers a master class in how to shoot a blossoming physical attraction. From shy touching while trying to find the perfect spot for the “world’s smallest tattoo”, to the frankly explicit sex that actually seems sexy … to confuse matters, though, Queen of Hearts explores the inappropriate relationship involving a middle-aged lawyer’s twisting, highly-charged sexual tryst with her troubled teenage stepson, the film on the one hand an impossibly glamorous, sexually charged and immoral melodrama and on the other a subtle Sirkian, almost Hitchcockian tragedy that explores the wages of familial sin and deceit, all while peeling back the veneer of ultra-civilized Scandinavian society. Not to be missed.

VIFF 2019 | Late Summer Early Autumn Film Festival Season

IndieWire coverage of the Telluride Film Festival, with Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson, and chief film critic and deputy editor, Eric Kohn.