Although the 29th annual Vancouver International Film Festival has come to a close, the good folks at VIFF, and the fine folks at the VanCity Theatre, have come up with a way to alleviate the pain of festival’s end, by programming a series of favoured features and Festival highlights, all of which will screen this week, few though the number of those films may be.
Cannes Festival Palme D’or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives screens through Friday, October 22nd. You can catch a screening of Uncle Boonmee on Sunday, Oct. 17th @ at both 6:30pm and 8:45pm; on Monday, Oct. 18th @ 6:30pm; Tuesday, Oct. 19th @ 6:30pm; Wednesday, Oct. 20 @ 6:30pm; and for a final time on Friday, Oct. 22nd @ 9pm.
Other than Uncle Boonmee, Kinshasa Symphony, VIFF’s 2010 Most Popular Nonfiction Film, Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer’s documentary about a Congo orchestra who play European classical music, screens for a final time this Tuesday, October 19th at 6:30pm.
The remaining programme highlights, screening at VIFF’s VanCity Theatre are available here, including the very lovely Snow White.
Lucy Walker’s Waste Land — depicting the rich subculture of Rio de Janeiro’s scavengers who swarm the world’s largest landfill to extract recyclable materials for re-sale and economic sustenance — won the Rogers People’s Choice Award, presented at the closing Gala ceremony of the 29th annual Vancouver International Film Festival on Friday, October 15th.
Meanwhile, Denis Villeneuve’s Canadian Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Incendies, won the Best Canadian Film, while most promising director of a Canadian Short Film, went to Halima Ouardiri, also of Québec, for her short Mokhtar, the moving 15-minute short about a young Moroccan goatherder.
The remaining award winners at the Closing Gala included …
Kinshasa Symphony: Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer’s documentary about a Congo orchestra who play European classical music (often on homemade instruments) emerged as Most Popular Nonfiction Film.
Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie: Sturla Gunnarsson’s doc about Vancouver-based, world-renowned environmentalist, Dr. David Suzuki, won VIFF’s Environmental Film Audience Award.
Leave Them Laughing: Yves Ma, from the National Film Board, presented the NFB Most Popular Canadian Documentary Award to Leave Them Laughing, about performer and terminal ALS patient Carla Zilbersmith. The film was directed by John Zaritsky, winner of more than 30 awards for his past documentary features.
Two Indians Talking: BC-based director Sara McIntyre’s dramedy was named the Most Popular Canadian Film. She accepted the award with her producer and actor Carmen Moore.
Deborah Kara Unger (Crash), one of the Canadian Images jury members — along with Emily Carr University film instructor/director Sandy Wilson (My American Cousin), and Andrea Henning, executive director of B.C. Arts and Culture — made special mention of Denis Côté’s Curling.
“We would like to honour a film that not only distinguished itself for its confidence of vision, but also its philosophical bravery, which indeed has provoked extreme responses, with its brittle Brechtian architecture, and its subtle, unapologetic power, akin to the art of Rothko, in its realization of life beneath the surface of winter.”
Just as an aside, and incidentally, Côté was a juror for the Dragons & Tigers For Young Cinema award that, mid-Festival, presented $10,000 to Hirohara Satoru for his début film, Good Morning to the World!
Dave Hewitt, from the VIFF Board of Directors, provided a guesstimate as to 2010 VIFF attendance, based on estimates of attendance in 2009. Mr. Hewitt suggested that approximately 10,000 people per day attended the 29th annual edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, totaling approximately 140,000 to 150,000 attendees, and tickets sold.
Final figures on attendance will be provided at a later date, as will a list of the titles of the narrative features that found most favour with patrons at VIFF 2010. In our next posting, VanRamblings will provide a list of our favourites, a compendium from Mr. Know-It-All and J.B. ‘Showbiz’ Shayne.
The cities, towns and villages listed directly above represent just a mere handful of the locales within the more than 80 countries that sent cinema from their lands to the 29th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.
This year’s film festival is drawing to a close, Thursday, October 14th the final full day of the 29th edition of our beloved little film festival by the sea.
And what a Festival it’s been: 256 tremendously involving feature-length films, 150 shorts, 87 Canadian films, 30 British Columbia productions, 43 features and 21 shorts from Asia, 32 films from France, 9 films from Africa (Chad, Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, South Africa, Zanzibar), 98 feature-length documentaries, and more, much more. Each autumn for 16 days, those of us who reside in the northwest corridor of our continent are allowed the opportunity not just to visit countries across our far flung globe, but to gain an insight into the values, the wants, the needs, the politics, the education system, the grimy poverty-ridden streets and pristine beaches, and gain too a keen, and deep and abiding insight into the people, the men and woman and children who live in some little town or thriving metropolis located in every corner and landscape of our vast world.
On this last full day of the Festival, we managed to catch three films …
Echoes of the Rainbow (Grade: B): A loving family fable about a mother, father and their two young sons, director Alex Law’s Hong Kong Oscar nominee employs an almost surreal, magical realist construct to tell its romantic story of love and loss. Set in 1969, just before the first landing on the moon, this semi-autobiographical yarn is filled with whimsy, pathos, laughter and the ties that bind us, one and all, together into our family pact of life on this planet. All and all, quite wonderful, and even moreso because VIFF brought Mr. Law to Vancouver for an informative audience Q&A.
Incendies (Grade: B+): Vancouver Observer film critic Volkmar Richter’s favourite film at the Festival, Genie award-winning director Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to Polytechnique goes deep inside the lives of twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), who receive two letters after the death of their mother Nawad (Lubna Azabal) — one to deliver to the father they thought was dead, the other to deliver to a brother they never knew existed. Set amidst the civil war in Lebanon in the late 1950s, between the Christian Phalangists, Fatah (PLO) and Sunni Muslims, Villeneuve offers twisty, turny fare in a film that is evocative, lyrical and sometimes viciously violent on the road to delivering an unexpected ending that, while moving, seems to this writer to be just a little too stagily off-kilter in its cinematic / theatrical resolution. Powerful, though. Incendies recently became Canada’s best foreign language Oscar nominee for 2010.
October (Grade B): A laconic story of redemption with enigmatic, almost verging on mute characters, October fascinates because of its setting amidst the slums of Lima, Peru (after all, how often are we provided with an insight into life among the poor in Lima?), but as to the bittersweet story itself, this 2010 Un Certain Regard Cannes’ winner fails to involve sufficiently as it relates its tale of middle-aged, cold-hearted moneylender Clemente (Bruno Odar) and maternal spinster neighbour Sofia (Gabriela Velasquez), who collaborate to raise a 3-month-old baby girl who has been left at Clemente’s door by a hooker he had made pregnant. Syrupy and perfunctory, with subtle strains of religious imagery throughout, October proved winning enough at the screening, but not necessarily memorable (although, one never knows what impact a film has had until days later).
The 29th annual Vancouver International Film Festival will be over in just a matter of hours and, as usual, we (and the many hundreds of festival- goers who’ve been attending, three, four, five or six films a day) are just a bit tuckered, and ready for the final film to be loaded into the projector. We’ll miss the Festival when it’s gone, but at least we’ve got VIFF’s VanCity Theatre and Pacific Cinémathèque to tide us over until next year.
But, lo and behold, one of the VIFF ‘audience favourites’ (and a VanRamblings’ favourite) opens at Cinemark Tinseltown this Friday. The Man From Nowhere will open at Tinseltown, playing daily at 1:45, 4:30, 7:35 and 10:25 p.m. Another VIFF audience favourite (and Cannes’ award-winner), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, opens for a five-day run at the VanCity Theatre this Saturday. Carlos, which screened at VIFF (all five and a half hours) will also be released in Vancouver later this month.
And, let’s not forget, Waiting for Superman (VIFF’s best documentary feature) opens at Festival Cinemas on Friday. We’ll see Mike Leigh’s Another Year this coming January (likely with projected Oscar nods), and Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe will visit our shores, as well, before too long.
As for VanRamblings’ filmgoing this Wednesday, October 13th …
The Tree (Grade: B+): A lovely wide-awake dreamscape of a film, Julie Bertucelli’s (Since Otar Left) sophomore film offers a meditation on death, grieving and family set amidst the gorgeous, panoramic, wind swept rural landscape of Boonmah, Queensland (Australia), southwest of Brisbane. Bertucelli sets a melancholy tone almost from the outset, the driving force of the film eight-year-old Simone O’Neil (Morgana Davies) who, more than any other member of her family grieves and mourns the loss of her father. That Simone believes she hears the voice of her father in the branches of the huge, sprawling fig tree in her home’s back yard offers a moving and ethereal response to her personal tragedy, one we might all identify with. Screens for a final time Thursday, Oct. 14th @ 3:30 pm, Granville 7, Th7.
Armadillo (Grade: A-): In February 2009 a group of Danish soldiers accompanied by documentary filmmaker Janus Metz arrived at Armadillo, an army base in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. Metz and cameraman Lars Skree spent six months tracking the lives of young soldiers situated less than a kilometre away from Taliban positions. The result? A gripping, gut-wrenching, frontline insight into the war in Afghanistan, a counterpoint to Restrepo, which some critics felt failed to provide context for the war, and this year’s Academy Award winner, The Hurt Locker, which offered an unflinching look at the war. Armadillo shows just how right Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow ‘got’ the war, the boredom, the machismo, the reverie, and the grit. Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Mexico’s prestigious Morelia International Film Festival, Armadillo is a must-see should it return to Vancouver for an engagement.
