As has been the case lo these many years, the heavily-juried, very well attended and extremely popular, not to mention oh-so-prestigiousNew York Film Festival, now in its 51st year, not only occurs simultaneously with VIFF but share a raft of screenings — Kathy Evans and Selina Crammond, the fine, hard-working folks in VIFF Print Traffic, on the phone and posting frantic e-mails to the programming folks at NYFF51 to ensure that the one existing “print” of the film that New York has in its possession makes its salutary way to our shores for your edification and screening pleasure.
Day Two of VIFF 32, then, is Day One of NYFF 51.
If you’re confused, as is the case with many VIFF 2013 supporters, as to which films to attend, and are seeking some early direction in that regard (VanRamblings, of course, offered early insight in the days leading up to Fest commencement), and would love to have attended NYFF51 but time or circumstance prevent such (or you’re just over-the-moon supporters of VIFF, and good for you for that), please find below the list of 15 films — a few of which we will highlight — that our very own and very special VIFF 2013 (or VIFF32, if you will), and NYFF51, will share this autumn (note: the titles of the NYFF films listed below link to the VIFF website, so as to provide you with scheduling info, and the opportunity to purchase tickets).
All is Lost. Robert Redford, as you’ve never seen him before, stars in this riveting survival story in which a lone sailor finds his yacht sinking after a collision with a discarded shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. As the days pass and his options steadily dwindle, the luckless and nameless protagonist - identified in the credits as “Our Man” - takes every step possible in a struggle for self-preservation that puts his intelligence and practicality to the ultimate test. Focusing on a sole individual contending with the forces of nature who speaks only a handful of words throughout, this remarkable second effort by director J.C. Chandor is a genuine technical feat, all the more impressive for being the diametrical opposite of his debut Margin Call, with its ensemble cast, interior locations, and intricate dialogue-driven action. The film belongs to Redford’s fearless performance, alone onscreen from start to finish, facing the prospect of death with quiet determination. A Touch of Sin. Jia Zhangke’s bloody, bitter film finds the great Chinese filmmaker entering new genre territory, but retaining his commitment to the marginalized and oppressed — this time by way of four overlapping parallel stories, each inspired by real-life acts of violence. A miner (Jiang Wu) struggles with corrupt village leaders. A migrant worker (Wang Baoqiang), returning home, gets his hands on a firearm. A sauna hostess (Jia’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao) endures a series of humiliations over the course of an affair with a married man. A young man (Luo Lanshan) moves to a new town only to find himself trading one thankless, demoralizing job for another. The cumulative portrait, filled with despair and rage, is of a modern-day China undergoing rapid, convulsive changes and creeping cultural amnesia. Blue is the Warmest Colour. Abdellatif Kechiche’s newest film, based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, was the sensation of this year’s Cannes Film Festival even before it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Adèle Exarchopoulos is Adèle, a young woman whose longings and ecstasies and losses are charted across a span of several years. Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris) is the older woman who excites her desire and becomes the love of her life. Kechiche’s movie is, like the films of John Cassavetes, an epic of emotional transformation. Blue pulses with gestures, embraces, furtive exchanges, and arias of joy and devastation, some verbal and some physical (including the film’s now celebrated sexual encounters between the two actresses).
Well, the most august day in VanRamblings’ calendar year has finally arrived — the official commencement of Vancouver’s annual international film festival, offering each and every one of us a window on this vast, changing world of ours, and an affecting and often deeply moving insight into the lives of people who, just like us, across every country on Earth, have in common the struggle that defines us all, where collectively (whatever our circumstance) we seek social justice and peace, and a change in the economic conditions necessary to make this a fairer and more just world.
If you’re arriving to VanRamblings for the first time, you’ll want to apprise yourself of our extensive coverage of VIFF 2013 that was begun this Monday past. All of VanRamblings’ film festival postings may be found under the VIFF 2013 category to right (you’ll have to scroll down a bit). Thanks to some able assistance and much-appreciated direction from our friend Michael Klassen, we have for the first time this year a facility that will allow readers the opportunity to keep apprised of VanRamblings’ timely, and we hope informative, Twitter feed, replete with links of interest, and up-to-minute reflections on films we’ve just seen, as well as bumpf of one sort or another that readers may find of passing, or more, interest.
Before we settle down to providing you with Part 3 of our postings on VIFF 2013 “best bets”, those films which have garnered the most buzz at festivals from distant shores, we’ll provide you with VanRamblings’ VIFF 2013 programme schedule (pdf)
(well, at least the most recent edition, anyway), a partial list of the films that, at least at this point in time, we have every intention of taking in over the course of the next 16 days of the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival. And, for your further enjoyment and edification, here’s the full VIFF MiniGuide Schedule (pdf). Part 3, Films to Consider, VanRamblings’ “Best Bets” at VIFF 2013
The Playlist’s Oliver Lyttelton has this to say about Stray Dogs …
Every shot feels perfectly composed, the filmmaking almost impossibly well-realized, right down to the evocative sound design, adding up to an unforgettable experience, a film that demands a second viewing, there’s so much to unpack. In the end, you’re left with a masterclass in directing, and a film that anyone who’s serious about cinema needs to make the time to see.
In his five-star review, The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin is even more effusive in his praise for the film, writing …
In a small concrete room, with black mould climbing up its crumbling walls, a woman is watching two children sleep. She runs a brush through her hair, and the gentle scruff-scruff-scruff noise of the bristles mixes with the sound of falling rain. One of the children starts breathing heavily, in little half-sighs, half-snores, and as time passes, you realise that your own breath, and the breath of the audience, has synchronised with his. The mongrels of the title are a middle-aged father, and his young son and daughter, who during the day work as a ‘human billboards’, the children and he bedding down each night in a ruined tower block. By turns sad, bleakly funny and absolutely terrifying, every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery, every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip; the film, it seems at times, to have been beamed from another planet.
Viewers should be warned that this is Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang’s sumptuous brand of slow cinema, which perhaps means it is not for everyone. Tsai has long had the ability to create moments of great power from the seemingly most insignificant of events; in Stray Dogs, he reportedly outdoes himself, which, for VanRamblings, is all to the good.
Hotell: A couple of years ago, VanRamblings was absolutely blown away (we saw it four times at VIFF 2011) by Lisa Langseth’s début film, the thriller Pure, which also introduced the transportingly affecting Alicia Vikander (by far, the best thing about Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina this past Christmas), who holds the screen and the viewer’s attention like no other actress working today (although, one has to admit that Elle Fanning and Mia Wasikowska have their moments). And now Langseth and Vikander reunite, with Vikander starring in yet another, reportedly, astonishing performance, as a young mother suffering from severe postpartum depression.
Perhaps Hotell isn’t as strong a film as Pure (which is on our list of top 10 films of the millennium), but VanRamblings will attend a screening of Hotell for the sheer joy of experiencing the magic of Alicia Vikander on screen.
Tracks: One of the most acclaimed films at the Telluride, Venice and Toronto film festivals earlier this month, and starring the luminous and incandescent Mia Wasikowska, David Rooney, in The Hollywood Reporter, says of Tracks, “A journey of arduous physical challenges and incalculable spiritual rewards, Tracks is evocatively rendered in this superb adaptation of real-life adventurer Robyn Davidson’s epic journey across the Australian desert.” Says Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, who comments on Wasikowska’s “revelatory performance” …
In the wilderness, tracks are the things we follow, but also the things we leave behind: a trail of beaten earth that leads to the horizon in front of us; a line of footprints that tails off towards the one behind. John Curran’s achingly beautiful new film, which screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival, is about a woman who feels most alive in that place between starting point and destination. As such, she undertakes a journey that entails more betweenness than seems physically possible: a 1,700-mile solo trek across the Australian desert, on foot. A simple and beautiful journey undertaken purely for its own sake, and approached in that spirit, Tracks will lead you to a place of quiet wonder.
Kate Erbland, at Film School Rejects, weighs in with this: “Tracks is never anything less than intensely human and, quite often, deeply moving, the film a true unexpected pleasure.” Nuff said. We’ll be attending a screening.
Wadjda: Saudi Arabia’s first-ever Best Foreign Language Oscar entry, with over-the-moon reviews from a raft of estimable film critics, we’ll start of with Robbie Collins’ take in The Telegraph …
Like one of the great Italian neorealist films, Wadjda centres on a child and a bicycle. All Wadjda wants is a bike so she can race against the little boy who lives next door, but her mother (Reem Abdullah) refuses to buy her one: in Saudi Arabia, little girls do not ride bicycles. Modest as it may look, this is boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear those boundaries creak.
The Guardian’s Xan Brooks says of this bittersweet film about a 10-year-old girl finding her feet in Riyadh society, “You’d need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall.” Most enthusiastic, though, is The Playlist’s Oliver Lyttelton who, while awarding the film an “A“, writes …
In a world where an independent-minded 14-year-old girl can be shot by the Taliban, Wadjda’s enormous warmth and comedy, and fine observational eye introduces a world alien to Western audiences, the film never sugarcoating the situation in Saudi Arabia, but by the end making it clear that in the likes of Wadjda, there are real hopes for progress and change in years to come. That it manages to do so in such a technically adept way (much of the production team are German), with such clarity of storytelling, and is able to do with humour, emotion and smarts, is something close to a miracle.
Well, that wraps up VanRamblings’ Day One post on the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival — and our fourth consecutive VIFF 2013 post of the week. C’mon back tomorrow, and each of the 16 Festival days, for reviews, buzz, and more. For now, we’ll leave you with this …
For those of you who did not catch our Monday introductory VIFF 2013 post, just click here.
Parts 1 and 2 of our ‘best bets” posts may be found here and here.
The search engine for VIFF 2013 films may be found here.
Enjoy your Festival, keep yourself hydrated, try to get some rest, c’mon back to VanRamblings for more Fest buzz each day, and over the course of the next 16 days, we’ll very much look forward to sharing a transcendently lovely VIFF screening with you in a warm, inviting and darkened cinema.
Before getting underway with the subject matter of today’s column on the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival, we’ll start off by recommending three of the strongest films VanRamblings has seen in preview over the past three weeks, about which we will write at some greater length during the course of the Festival, which kicks off tomorrow, to run for 16 fun-filled (if challenging) days, through Friday, October 11th.
Oil Sands Karaoke: We were knocked out by Charles Wilkinson’s stunningly well-realized and incredibly moving documentary, non-fiction film fare that digs deep into the experience of the film’s protagonists, while offering abiding insight into the devastatingly broken lives of five Fort McMurray oilpatch workers. The result: one of the most humane, truth-telling docs you’re likely to see at VIFF 2013, as harrowing a time inside a darkened theatre as you’re likely to have this year, yet a document that is filled with hope and the possibility of redemption.
Felix: The feel-good film of this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, an absolute must-see, a humble, deeply affecting, cross-cultural coming-of-age story set in South Africa that left the audience verklempt but heartened, with nary a dry eye in the house. Everything in Felix works: the cinematography, the production values, performances, screenwriting, and directorial ambition. Quite simply, a moving and accomplished film that is not to be missed at VIFF 2013.
Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia: Despairing, melancholy, screamingly funny at times, and filled with more wit and perspicacity than any film you’ll see this year, here’s another doc that is not-to-be-missed. Quite simply, doc director Nicholas Wrathall, while offering a document on the nature of the 21st century state, has outdone himself. Which is all to the good, in a film that VanRamblings is awarding an A+. Just yesterday, we were suggesting to Festival Director Alan Franey that he’s got a hit on his hands, that once word gets out on the Gore Vidal doc, The Cinematheque is likely to prove inadequate as a venue to meet the demand of an audience that is going to rush out in large numbers to see what could very well prove to be the strongest non-fiction film to be screened at VIFF 2013.
The titles of the films above are linked to the VIFF web page for the film, where you can purchase your ticket online. Once word gets out on these films, tickets are going to be hard to come by, so you’re going to want to act immediately to schedule each of these films, and purchase your tickets.
Now we get down to the initial task at hand in offering you more “best bets” for VIFF films to screen over the next 16 days.
Each year, in the weeks leading up to the commencement of our annual autumnal film festival by the sea, friends and associates turn to VanRamblings for insight into the titles of those films arriving on our shores which have garnered the most buzz, and represent the best odds-on favourites for a transporting time in the dark. If we hold true to form from years past, we’ll be proved right about 80% of the time in our predictions.
Thus today, amidst the 341 films (208 of which are feature length) from 75 countries, the 92 Canadian films, and the 85 non-fiction films which will screen some 500 times at seven venues over the 16-day running time of the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival, we offer Part 1 of VanRamblings’ trusty guide to “What to watch” at VIFF 2013, those films which rank as “best bets” for those impecunious of time or circumstance.
(Note: the titles of the films named below are linked to the VIFF website, which will provide you with information on screening times and venues. Most of the other links are to reviews from a wide variety of publications — ranging from trade magazines like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, to Screen Daily, The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star’s Grid magazine, and many other august publications, and great online resources like IndieWire and Twitchfilm. Where they’re available, we’ll link to trailers for the films being written about, as well).
First up today on our list of recommended films to screen at VIFF 2013 …
A Story of Children and Film: Awarded a whopping four stars by the often hard-to-please Globe and Mail, The Hollywood Reporter is equally impressed with this quirky, deeply researched exploration of how kids have been portrayed in the cinema. Variety calls the film captivating, while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, when reviewing the film at Cannes earlier this year, awarded the film a can’t-be-toppedfive stars, saying …
A Story of Children and Film has to be one of the most beguiling events at Cannes, Mark Cousins’ cine-essay about children on film entirely distinctive and always brilliant: a mosaic of clips, images and moments chosen with flair and grace, from familiar sources and the neglected riches of cinema around the world. Cousins offers us his own humanist idealism, the truth of the complex over the luminosity of beribonned purity, a film that while exploring the nature of childhood offers us light flashes of insight.
The history of children in film. For teachers, for parents, for lovers of the cinema, for cinéastes of every description. Guess which film we’re gonna be taking in this coming Thursday, the opening day of VIFF 2013?
The Invisible Woman: Meredith Brody, writing in Thompson on Hollywood, seems quite smitten with Ralph Fiennes’ sophomore directorial feature …
The Invisible Woman, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens, about the love affair Dickens carried on with actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), begun when she was 17 and the long-married (and father of ten) Dickens was 45, the film surprised and delighted me: the unsentimental, original conceptions of the many nicely delineated characters, the witty script by Avi Morgan, the lavish settings and costumes. From the first long shot of the older Nelly striding along a beach, which looked like a Caillebotte (still thinking in painterly terms, a holdover from Tim’s Vermeer), I was completely enthralled.
Scott Foundas writes that Felicity Jones is “revelatory”, also calling the film “brilliantly acted, vibrantly alive and pulsing with subtle eroticism as it charts the little-known affair of Charles Dickens and the 18-year-old Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan.” The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin seems thrilled with The Invisible Woman, as well, as is film critic Catherine Shoard writing in The Guardian.
Blue is the Warmest Colour: Here’s what we wrote to a young woman of our acquaintance this past week about this Cannes’ Palme D’or winner …
Blue is the Warmest Colour is the film taking the screens of the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival that you absolutely want to see, Abdellatif Kechiche’s uncompromising story of a paint-blisteringly intense love affair, a devastating coming-of-age tale that mixes eroticism and sadness, poignancy, loveliness and and passionate young love, as transportative, truthful and sublime a movie experience as you’ll have this year.
The film was a smash at Cannes, Telluride and TIFF, and not only won the top prize at Cannes this year, it won the critics’ prize, as well. Five stars from Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, and another five-star review from one of our favourite critics, Guy Lodge, writing this time for Time Out London. Jessica Kiang, writing for The Playlist, gives the film an “A“, while the always reliable Indiewire critic Eric Kohn is not so generous, awarding Blue is the Warmest Colour only an “A-“. Aahhh.
A gently powerful real-life story, Kadija Leclere’s feature début Bag Of Flour (Le sac de farine) is an elegantly shot film tracing the unusual life of a young woman from her early years in Belgium through to her times as an adult in a remote Moroccan town, featuring impressive performances from Hafsia Herzi and the always reliable Hiam Abbass.
Deborah Young, in The Hollywood Reporter, says of this tale of a kidnapped child growing up a stranger in her own land …
While Leclere has little good to say about village life, its hunger, poverty and stifling social conventions, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for the horrified, helpless girl who, instead of continuing her studies of history, geography and math, is taught to sew, knit and embroider, the film tracking Sarah from the time she is drugged in a car - only to wake up to find herself in a remote village deep in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, a virtual prisoner at 8 - through her life as a teenager.
Offering a thoughtful reflection on female identity in Arab society, The Bag of Flour seems destined to be one of VIFF 2013’s more memorable films.
Gloria: High on my list of films to screen at VIFF 2013, Chilean actress Paulina García won Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for her portrayal of a divorced woman taking a shot at mid-life love, a film The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney calls “an engaging character study, and a funny, melancholy and ultimately uplifting tale that offers the viewer an enormously satisfying spell inside the head and heart of a middle-aged woman never puts a foot wrong.” Meanwhile, Guy Lodge (this time writing for Hitfix) gives the film an “A“, while readers award Gloria an A+.
Nebraska: The opening film of VIFF 2013, and winner of Best Actor at Cannes for Bruce Dern, Alexander Payne’s sixth feature relates a melancholy comedic tale that while capturing a life of Midwestern reserve, within the construct of a bittersweet father-son road trip - through an emotionally & economically parched homeland - offers another low-concept, finely etched study of flawed characters stuck in life’s well-worn grooves.
A Touch of Sin: Saving the best for last? Perhaps. Here’s what Toronto Star film critic Jason Anderson wrote in his 10/10 review in The Grid …
Jia Zhangke’s highly volatile and often exhilarating Cannes prizewinner draws closely on four true stories of tragedy and retribution among China’s less privileged. The result blends the spare social realism of the director’s justly acclaimed early efforts, a ruthless strain of satire, and several stylized scenes of extreme violence that wouldn’t be out of place in the yakuza movies of Takeshi Kitano (his production company helped make it). These audacious instances of bloody nastiness are likely to be jarring to admirers of Jia’s more placid previous work but they’re in line with the director’s strategic use of these tales of rage and vengeance to reveal societal fault lines.
David Rooney, in The Hollywood Reporter, while writing about “the widening chasm of social inequality separating the moneyed powerbrokers from the struggling masses — not to mention the despair and violence bred by that disparity,” and taking the “too-diffuse examination of escalating violence in a recklessly modernized society” finds A Touch of Sin compelling, although his overall take on the film is less than enthusiastic. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw is more generous in his four star review of the film, writing …
This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. “Why would I?” he replies. “Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now.” Jia Zhang-ke’s movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.
Gosh, sounds like perfect film festival fare. C’mon back tomorrow for Part 2 of our 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival “best bets”.
VanRamblings’ opening column on the 32nd annual Vancouver International Film Festival, may be found here.
A Touch of Sin. Jia Zhangke’s bloody, bitter film finds the great Chinese filmmaker entering new genre territory, but retaining his commitment to the marginalized and oppressed — this time by way of four overlapping parallel stories, each inspired by real-life acts of violence. A miner (Jiang Wu) struggles with corrupt village leaders. A migrant worker (Wang Baoqiang), returning home, gets his hands on a firearm. A sauna hostess (Jia’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao) endures a series of humiliations over the course of an affair with a married man. A young man (Luo Lanshan) moves to a new town only to find himself trading one thankless, demoralizing job for another. The cumulative portrait, filled with despair and rage, is of a modern-day China undergoing rapid, convulsive changes and creeping cultural amnesia.
Blue is the Warmest Colour. Abdellatif Kechiche’s newest film, based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, was the sensation of this year’s Cannes Film Festival even before it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Adèle Exarchopoulos is Adèle, a young woman whose longings and ecstasies and losses are charted across a span of several years. Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris) is the older woman who excites her desire and becomes the love of her life. Kechiche’s movie is, like the films of John Cassavetes, an epic of emotional transformation. Blue pulses with gestures, embraces, furtive exchanges, and arias of joy and devastation, some verbal and some physical (including the film’s now celebrated sexual encounters between the two actresses).
