Miyazaki Aoi and Matsuda Ryuhei, in The Great Passage, VanRamblings’ favourite VIFF film

On Monday, VanRamblings saw our first ‘knocked it out of the park’ Cinema of Our Time feature, The Great Passage, a masterwork from acclaimed Japanese director Ishii Yuya, as tremendously accomplished and moving a film as you’ll see this year. We are awarding the film a rare unreserved and enthusiastic “A+”, and recommend you do all in your power to arrange to take in VIFF’s final screening of the film on Sunday, October 6th, at 2pm, at The Cinematheque. You’ll want to purchase your tickets now — easy to do on VIFF’s web page for the film — just click on the film’s title link above.
Initially set in 1995, The Great Passage tells the winning and affectionate story of Mitsuya Majime, a socially awkward linguists post-graduate who lands his dream job — as a lexicographer hired to research for The Great Passage, a new ‘living language’ dictionary planned by a Tokyo publisher. In residence at the Sou-Un-Sou Rooming House, Mitsuya’s only palpably human contact comes in the form of his elderly landlady, his only other association of consequence that of a ginger cat named Tora-san. Upon the arrival of his landlady’s granddaughter, Kaguya Hayashi (Aoi Miyazaki), Mitsuya’s world is turned upside down, his affection for her unbound.
Yuya’s gently old-fashioned romantic comedy offers random bits of loveliness throughout. Early on, Kaguya — who as a chef is as obsessive in her love for cooking as Mitsuya is with the etymology of language — takes her undeclared suitor shopping, and when finding the knives she’s traveled to find offers up the most tremendous explanation on the construction, composition and utility of knives. VanRamblings proceeded directly to Ming-Wo’s to buy ourselves new knives following the screening, so impactful was Kaguya’s presentation on the history and utility of knives.
VanRamblings cannot recommend The Great Passage highly enough — the whimsical screenplay, tremendously engaging performances, the movie’s beguiling character arcs, as well as its warmly lambent cinematography, painterly shot composition, gently seductive pacing, and transcendently well-executed direction, makes Yuya’s follow-up to his winning VIFF 2011 entry, Mitsuko Delivers — one of VanRamblings’ favourite films that year — all the more welcome, extraordinary and rewarding an accomplishment.

Tuesday looks to offer yet another salutary day at the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival. As we did yesterday, we’ll point you to the films that are screening today that are worthy of your attention …

Just click on this pdf for today’s VIFF screening schedule for …

• Honeymoon (Grade: B+). An audience favourite at this year’s Festival, with its insinuating score, impending threat of violence and operatic theme of regret told within a Hitchcockian thriller construct, master Czech filmmaker Jan Hřebejk’s elegantly intimate thriller weaves welcoming darkness into a nuanced story of repressed secrets and the possibility of forgiveness, all set over the two days of a bourgeois wedding celebration. Recommended. 11:10am, Cineplex, Cinema 9.
• Heli. Winner of Best Director at Cannes for Amat Escalantes, the wildly controversial Heli — a gritty Mexican drugs and guns saga — screens today for the first time at VIFF 2013, at 4pm in The Playhouse.
• Desert Runners (Grade: A-). Jennifer Steinman’s fascinating, entirely alive documentary feature tracks a phalanx of desert marathon runners on the grueling 4 Deserts race series — encompassing Chile’s Atacama Desert, a thousand kilometre strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains, the driest hot desert in the world; the 1600 km stretch of China’s inhospitable palearctic Gobi Desert; the world’s largest and hottest desert, Africa’s Sahara; and Earth’s southernmost and coldest desert, the Antarctic — while introducing us to the film’s four main protagonists (ex-pro baseball player Ricky, now relocated from the U.S. to London; law-student Samantha, from Australia; British bodyguard Tremaine, who recently lost his wife to cancer; and 56 year-old Irish businessman Dave), the attendant trauma of their lives, and the transformation each undergoes throughout an ultramarathon year of physical, psychological, and emotional endurance. Recommended. 6:30pm today, and 4pm Thursday, at The Playhouse.
• Youth. Another buzz film and audience Festival favourite, about which Variety says, “a hauntingly observational Israeli kidnapping story with riveting performances, a bold and disturbing adventure sure to trouble many in the audience.” Screens today at 6:30pm, at Cineplex, Cinema 9, and again on Thursday, 4pm at SFU Woodwards.
• From Neurons to Nirvana (Grade: B+). Oliver Hockenhull’s thoughtful and rousing defense of psychotropic drugs as medication, and the role politicians play in denying us access to needed therapies, co-executive produced by Mark Achbar (The Corporation) and Betsy Carson, compels throughout in a film that is challenging for the senses and the mind. Recommended. Screens 4pm today, at the Vancity, and again on Wednesday, October 9th, 2pm, at The Rio.
• The Past. If the trailer above doesn’t catch your interest, maybe the fact that Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) picked up the Best Actress prize at Cannes this year will move you to catch the new film by Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi (last year’s, A Separation) that all the critics at Cannes loved this year. Screens tonight at 9pm, at The Centre.

Apropos of nothing in particular, we’ll leave you today with the following video by Rhye — VanRamblings’ music find of autumn 2013 — with Toronto-born singer/songwriter Mike Milosh on vocals, and Danish instrumentalist, composer and arranger Robin Hannibal producing, their wildly nostalgic and romantic video below redolent of our youth, the video, one of our favourites of the year. We’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2013 is available by clicking here, replete with reviews, previews, Festival logistics, buzz and much more.
Here’s VanRamblings’ October 1st programming schedule update (pdf).

Sunday was a sodden day at the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival, which fit perfectly, of course, with the underlying theme of the Festival: the Cinema of Despair. In 2013, VanRamblings seems to have internalized that despair and processed it in such a way as to prejudice our ability to write (in the short form poetic manner of years past) about the films we screened pre-Festival, and since VIFF32’s opening day.
Today, we’ll attempt to rectify the circumstance of previous days’ lack of writing on things cinematic, and offer readers a quick, pungent take on three VIFF films which have most impressed us in 2013, as well as a guide to what-not-to-miss on this overcast and inclement last day of September.
VanRamblings has already written about the three films we’ve found most rewarding, gut-wrenching in their own idiosyncratic way, and authentic and truthful in their exposition. Those films are: Oil Sands Karaoke (VanRamblings cannot imagine that this doc will not emerge as our favourite VIFF32 doc), the spectacularly engaging Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, and Felix, the film which pulled us in and threw us around more than any other film we’ve seen at the film festival this year.

A Bag of Flour (Grade: B+): With a wildly sympathetic, stubborn and strong-minded heroine at film’s centre (played to wrenching affect by newcomer Hafsia Herzi), director Kadija Leclere’s powerful indictment of women’s subjugation in the Moroccan state, with its undercurrent of insurrection and social change, has emerged early in VIFF 2013 as a subtle, elegantly shot favourite among VIFF cinephiles, including this writer. As we wrote previously, A Bag of Flour — the story of a young kidnapped girl growing up a stranger in her own land, deep within a repressive rural, Muslim Middle East state — offers a thoughtful reflection on female identity in contemporary Arab society, the film destined to become one of VIFF 2013’s most memorable films.

La jaula de oro (Grade: A-): Humanist filmmaking of the first order, the best Latin American émigr&eacute drama to play at the Vancouver International Film Festival in several years, directory Diego Quemada-Diez’s powerful, absorbing and suspenseful drama about four teenagers on their 3800km journey from Guatemala to the U.S. border by train offers impactful, seat-of-your-pants viewing as the foursome experience cruelty and violence at almost every turn in a series of brutal encounters with corrupt cops, ruthless bandits, kidnappers, and sharpshooting U.S. border guards. Not an easy sit, but gripping and unforgettable, with touching characters at film’s centre.

Our Sunhi (Grade: B+): A piffle, a delight, and an entirely engaging film of some wit and intelligence and well-realized directorial ambition, Our Sunhi is another in the feminist contingent of films we’ve taken in a VIFF 2013, with (as is the case in A Bag of Flour) the heroine at film’s centre presenting as an ambitious take no guff, strong-willed — and at all times sympathetic — on screen presence. A film filled with romantic frustration and confusion, this is Korean off-kilter comedy at its very best. Entirely winning, and absolutely worth attending.

Today — Monday, Sept. 30th — you don’t want to miss the buzz films that’ll be screening throughout the day, as is the case with …

• Stray Dogs: Currently screening at the New York Film Festival, Tsai Ming-liang’s new film relates the story of a middle-aged father, and his young son and daughter, who during the day work as human billboards. Bleakly funny and absolutely terrifying film fare. Not to be missed.
• The Great Passage: A quirky tug of love drama involving a nerdy dictionary maker and a sexy chef, Japan’s foreign-language Oscar nominee offers quiet, gentle audience-friendly film fare.
• A Time in Quchi: One of this year’s buzz films, Taiwanese director Chang Tso-ch’s new film offers delicate and poetic film fare full of offbeat humour, this warmly conventional coming-of-ager emerging as an inviting meditation on transience.
• Matterhorn: The pick of the day, with very strong strong buzz emerging from its first Festival screening. We wrote about about the film last Wednesday.

That pretty much wraps the post for the day. We’ll leave you with this VIFF film search advice: as searching for films on the VIFF website is an exercise in frustration, disappointment and near calumny, there is a way around the dilemma of finding information on VIFF 2013 films: whoever “spidered” the VIFF site for Google has done a spectacular job. To access information on the VIFF website for any film playing at VIFF 2013, simply place the title of the film and the word VIFF in the Google search box, and voilà … VIFF 2013’s web page for the film title on which you’re seeking information.

VanRamblings’ pre-and-early coverage of the Festival was expansive. If you haven’t glanced through this past week’s posts, here are some links …

• For those of you who did not catch last Monday’s introductory VIFF 2013 post, just click here.
• Parts 1, 2 and 3 of our ‘best bets” posts are here, here and here.
• The titles, and more, of the 15 films shared by the New York and Vancouver Film Festivals may be found here.
• The VIFF’s calendar schedule is located here (you’ll need to put in the correct date).
• The search engine for VIFF 2013 films may be found here.

Enjoy your Festival, keep rested, and c’mon back to VanRamblings for more of our 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival buzz each day.

Audiences at the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival — much to the surprise and delight of Festival staff — have arrived in large and salutary numbers in the early days of VIFF 2013, with most VIFF screenings either selling out or coming close to doing so. Going into VIFF32, the Festival administration and Board was concerned — after VIFF reported a loss last year — that given the Fest’s move to Crosstown, crowds and ticket sales would be down. Not so, as it happens, making everyone happy.

In conversation on Saturday, with a beaming Festival Director, Alan Franey, he had this to say about audience participation at VIFF 2013 …

In 2012, VIFF experienced day after day of sunny, late summer weather conditions, which occurred throughout almost the entire duration of the Festival, keeping many patrons out in the sun and not in a darkened VIFF cinema. Not so this year, which has brought seasonal autumn rains to our city. Despite the encouragement of weather forecasters who’ve been advising Vancouverites to stay at home and out of the elements, instead loyal VIFF patrons are turning out in the early days of the Festival in record numbers at all seven venues, contributing to a circumstance where VIFF finds itself above initial revenue projection.

Which is not to say that VIFF is out of the woods financially, or that you should stop advising your friends and family to make sure they purchase a raft of tickets for VIFF in 2013. It’s just that early on, the financial picture looks promising, as do the many films that will screen at VIFF this year.
While we had Alan’s attention, we queried him about logistical aspects of the operation of the Festival at the Cineplex International Village …

We regrettably lost the services of John Peterson, our Cineplex International Village VIFF manager and 45-year Cineplex exhibitions manager, on Friday, due to a back injury. Of course, experienced VIFF exhibitions manager Iulia Manolescu remains on hand as a senior VIFF manager at International Village, but it was clear that Iulia would require support in the early days of the Festival, as systems are fine-tuned to best serve the interests of our patrons. Support for Iulia became even more of an issue over the weekend when when one of our other VIFF management staff at the Cineplex site called in sick on Saturday.

The resolution to the challenging early days logistical operation of VIFF’s Cineplex venue? Alan himself stepped into the breach, and working closely with Ms. Manolescu, has set about to create a logistical circumstance that will best serve the many thousands of VIFF patrons who will visit the Cineplex International Village (Tinseltown) venue over the coming week.
Needless to say, VanRamblings was thrilled (read: over-the-moon) to see Iulia Manolescu and Alan Franey working together on Saturday at VIFF’S Cineplex venue, two of the keenest minds within the Festival administration, both individuals possessed of a logistics acumen that knows no peer.

VanRamblings wrote about Iulia Manolescu during the course of VIFF 2010. Quite simply, then, now and over the years, we have found there to be no temporary VIFF management staff person with a firmer understanding of what is required to keep the interests of VIFF patrons at the forefront in all venue decision-making, or a better communicator, than Iulia Manolescu.
Iulia is a veritable Wayne Gretky of theatre exhibition management, with a global view of all that is going on, and able to respond and act to resolve whatever “crises” arises quickly and efficiently, keeping the lines of communication open with VIFF patrons throughout. Only Alan Franey is her match in skill set, a Festival administrator — to extend the metaphor — with the combined skill of Mario Lemieux, Pavel Bure, Gordie Howe, Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, Jean Beliveau and Bobby Orr at their peak.

(In respect of the “beaming” comment at the outset of this posting, VanRamblings suspects that the source of the “beam” arose from the task that Alan had taken on as “temporary VIFF senior manager” at Cineplex International Village. Rarely have we seen Alan so animated, with a bounce in his step, and a grin ear-to-ear. There really is something to be said for challenging, hands-on work. Alan is always friendly, welcoming and forthcoming, and over the years has established a supportive management style within VIFF that deserves recognition — which is to say, in the annals of arts management, Alan has brought an equanimity and humanity to the daily tasks at hand with VIFF admin that has served to create one of the healthiest work environments at any arts organization within the city, and perhaps the province.)

Note should be made that Alan is the final arbiter of all decision-making at VIFF - the buck stops at his door. Alan has proved over the years to be the best listener of any person of VanRamblings’ acquaintance, an individual who readily accepts (informed) commentary and criticism on Festival theatre exhibition operations, and a person able to respond and put into action change that is required, in a more thorough and thoughtful manner than any senior administrator we’ve worked with or witnessed.
In the days leading up to the start of the Festival, Alan had advised calm, as Festival staff grappled with establishing effective systems operations at the “new” venues and set about in the early days of VIFF 2013 to “work out the kinks.” VanRamblings’ initial concerns about Festival “logistics” have been largely alleviated, as we witness the most efficient early operation of our Vancouver International Film Festival that we’ve been privy to in years.
One final note from Alan, on an important aspect of the operation of the VIFF Cineplex site (a cheering development for VIFF patron Len Diner) …

International Village administration recognizes that from Friday, September 27th through Sunday, October 6th, hundreds of VIFF patrons will require parking throughout the day and evening at International Village. The Vancouver Film Festival and International Village have arrived at an agreement where VIFF patrons may park on site, during the day and evening, at no charge for the duration of the Festival, that cars will neither be ticketed nor towed. Should there be a break down in communication, and a VIFF patron be ticketed, all that need be done is for the patron to approach the VIFF box office in the corridor within the Cineplex site, and staff will work to ensure that the ticket is cancelled.

All is well, or on its way to being well, at VIFF operations this year.

Our personal viewing schedule changes from day to day. On Saturday, we sacrificed evening screenings of Termitaria (The Youngest) and Good Vibrations, about which the VIFF’s “generally given to understatement” Ellie O’Day had raved — which we’ve now rescheduled for October 6th at 4:15pm at The Rio — instead taking in the buzz film of the Festival, acclaimed Czech director Jan Hřebejk’s award-winner, Honeymoon.
Here’s the latest edition of VanRamblings’ VIFF programming schedule (pdf).

And based on early film festival patron buzz, VanRamblings has added the following films to our personal viewing schedule: Dormant Beauty, Paradise: Hope, The Gardener, and Under The Rainbow, adding 3X3D today, to fill an open spot on our schedule today, and on the advice of a friend.

Apart from the films listed above, what are the other buzz films to have emerged the first three days of VIFF 2013 audience viewing? VIFF patron response has proved overwhelmingly positive for: The Patience Stone, Matterhorn, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, A Story of Children and Film, Miss Violence, and Blue Is the Warmest Colour.

Tomorrow, come on back to VanRamblings, when we’ll expand on our reporting on the films listed above, and write about even more tremendously engaging films that demand your attention, and are emerging in these early Festival days as the must-see films at VIFF 2013.

VanRamblings’ pre-and-early coverage of the Festival was expansive. If you haven’t glanced through this past week’s posts, here are some links …

• For those of you who did not catch our Monday introductory VIFF 2013 post, just click here.
• Parts 1, 2 and 3 of our ‘best bets” posts are here, here and here.
• The titles, and more, of the 15 films shared by the New York and Vancouver Film Festivals may be found here.
• The VIFF’s calendar schedule is located here (you’ll need to put in the correct date).
• The search engine for VIFF 2013 films may be found here.

Enjoy your Festival, keep rested, and c’mon back to VanRamblings for more of our 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival buzz each day.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860
The anthropology of childhood is a relatively new field for anthropological study that has, in recent years, set about to explore the questions of whether childhood is a cultural universal, the role of children in society, their perspectives on, and participation in, the social world, and the degree to which family and community is structured around them.
In The Story of Children and Film, highly-regarded Irish documentarian Mark Cousins employs his own family as a construct within which to explore the history of children in film — their stroppiness and authentic natures, as well as their reticence, reserve and innate inner strength, his anthropological cine-essay offering an entirely captivating, incredibly well-researched and insight-filled perspective on the history of children in cinema, with Cousins - in his role of interpreter and narrator of the events unfolding on screen - acting throughout as a noble evangelist for the cause of humanist cinema.
Among the 53 films from 25 nations Cousins excerpts, the standouts are Jafar Panahi’s 1995 The White Balloon from Iran, Danish director Astrid Henning-Jensen’s 1949 short Pelle Alone in the World, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Russian Sergei Bodrov’s 1989 Freedom Is Paradise, J. Lee Thompson’s London-set 1953 film The Yellow Balloon, Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, although there is this one extended scene in a film the title of which eludes me, with a close-up on a young boy’s face, that is absolutely heart-wrenching.
Even at this early point in the Festival, VanRamblings believes that The Story of Children and Film will prove to be among the strongest documentaries to screen at VIFF 2013 — the audience with whom we experienced the film were completely in thrall, the film all but guaranteed a spot in the top five docs to screen in 2013 edition of our Festival by the sea. VanRamblings is awarding the film an A grade, and enthusiastically recommends you take in one of the two final screenings of the film, both times at The Cinematheque, on either Saturday, October 5th at 4:45pm, or on the following Wednesday, October 9th, at 7pm.
Perhaps the only misstep in Cousins’ erudite anthropological analysis arises when he suggests that literature has failed to capture the experience of childhood, when in fact George Eliot, some 150 years ago, did so with keen and often heart-rending insight, as is revealed in this moving passage …

Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves and broken friendships, but it was not less bitter to Maggie - perhaps it was even more bitter - than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. ‘Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by’ is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment till we weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace and lives in us still, but such traces have blended themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then – when it was so long from one Midsummer to another? - what he felt when his schoolfellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays when he didn’t know how to amuse himself and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that ‘half,’ although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Book One, Chapter 7

VanRamblings will conclude today’s VIFF 2013 post by offering recent video of luminous screen performances by children, first from Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, whose role as Sophie in the first season of HBO’s In Treatment represents one of the most incandescent childhood performances captured on screen this past decade.

Next, Canada’s 2011 Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Monsieur Lazhar …

And, finally, arising from her Genie award-winning Best Actress performance, the expressive heart of Monsieur Lazhar, Sophie Nélisse, who this November will star in this - still, as yet - under the radar Fox Studios adaptation of Markus Zusak’s international best-seller, The Book Thief (note: as the narration in the trailer is terrible, you’ll have to look beyond to Sophie Nélisse’s tough, strong-minded performance) …

The Book Thief: something to look forward to this mid-November.

VanRamblings’ pre-and-early coverage of the Festival was expansive. If you haven’t glanced through this past week’s posts, here are some links …

• For those of you who did not catch our Monday introductory VIFF 2013 post, just click here.
• Parts 1, 2 and 3 of our ‘best bets” posts are here, here and here.
• The titles, and more, of the 15 films shared by the New York and Vancouver Film Festivals may be found here.
• The VIFF’s calendar schedule is located here (you’ll need to put in the correct date).
• The search engine for VIFF 2013 films may be found here.

Enjoy your Festival, keep rested, and c’mon back to VanRamblings for more of our 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival buzz each day.