One month from today, the always spectacular and utterly humane Vancouver International Film Festival commences, unspooling 375 films from 70 countries spanning our globe, each one political in its own way, exploring the politics of personal discovery as well as personal tragedy, and the politics of how life is lived in every far flung country across our planet, the single most enlightening arts event of the calendar year, sure to remove the dimness or blindness from one’s eyes or heart, and a must attend event for any person of conscience concerned for the state of our world.
Screening at the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival this year: acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, a quietly devastating portrait of family and theft in contemporary Japan, resonant, compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda, and a film that stole the hearts of the Cannes jury and even the most cynical of film journalists attending Cannes this year, a film made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles, a heartbreaker that draws our empathy, and yet another charming, funny and affecting example of Kore-eda’s very special brand of tough-but-tender humanism.
Another Cannes favourite headed to VIFF 2018, Capernaum, Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s politically-charged fable about a child who launches a lawsuit against his parents, a staggering heart-in-mouth social-realist blockbuster teeming with sorrow, yet strewn with diamond-shards of beauty, wit and hope, at once quietly absorbing and fitfully shocking as we experience the sights, sounds and smells of the streets where a one-year-old child can wander around alone without anyone stopping to wonder why, and a film that while choosing dramatic power over narrative finesse makes a powerful statement on human misery and grotesque inequality while tackling its subject with intelligence, heart and furious compassion.
Another acclaimed film set to arrive at VIFF 2018, the much-looked-forward-to Cannes FIPRESCI Prize winner, South Korean director LEE Changdong’s Burning, starring Hollywood actor Steven Yuen (Okja, The Walking Dead). Here’s what Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang had to say about Burning …
At 2½ hours, Burning is a character study that morphs, with masterly patience, subtlety and nary a single wasted minute, into a teasing mystery and eventually a full-blown thriller. To reveal more would ruin the story’s slow-building pleasures, which are less about the haunting final destination than the subtle, razor-sharp microcurrents of class rage, family-inherited pain, everyday ennui and youthful despair that build in scene after scene, even when nothing more seems to be happening than a simple or not-so-simple conversation.
Defying expectations throughout, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries wondrous in their complexity and inscrutability, Burning, with its jazzy score, gorgeously immaculate camerawork, shifting moods and carefully calibrated minimalism emerges as a genre-bending murder-mystery that torches genre clichés, in one of the most scorching and beautifully unforgettable films of the year. Yet another VIFF 2018 must-see.
The full VIFF 2018 programme will be available across Metro Vancouver, in libraries, coffee shops and book stores late next week.
Weekday Matinée Passes, probably the best deal at VIFF (as is the case every year) — at only $160, allowing you to see all films Monday to Friday screening between 10am and 5:59pm (that’s as many as 50 films that would be available to you, not to mention Sandy Gow’s always can’t miss afternoon international shorts programmes) — are available by clicking here. Ticket pack information is available by clicking here.