Category Archives: VIFF 2020

VIFF 2020 | Vancouver International Film Festival Draws to a Close

October 7, 2020Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

The pandemic, virtual 39th edition of our city’s — and this year, province-wide — annual Vancouver International Film Festival ends tonight, just before the stroke of midnight, at precisely 11:59pm. Fourteen days, 100+ films from across the globe, available for you to stream at home through the VIFF Connect app, or service, has allowed you to stream the world’s most acclaimed films. As always, VIFF 2020 was a celebration of the best in world cinema. A hearty thank you is due to #VIFF programmers and staff.
Just a few hours left to stream Thomas Vinterberg’s furious and sad, utterly humane and insightful drama, Another Round, a VIFF 2020 standout, and must-see. If you’ve not already screened Another Round, we’re here to tell you that it would be the perfect film to end the bacchanalia of cinema that has visited our shores and invaded your home these past fourteen days.

So what now, you ask? As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic gains force, fully prepared to keep all of us in its grip through the end of 2021 — and as we continue our regimen of remaining at home to keep ourselves safe — where are we going to turn to envelop ourselves in our crying need for humane cinema? VanRamblings has heartening news.

Last evening, year-round VIFF programmer Tom Charity wrote this to us:

“Our hope at VIFF is to offer as many films as possible, simultaneously at the Vancity Theatre, and available to stream through VIFF Connect, an extension of what VIFF has achieved over the past 14 days. In some cases, that won’t be possible, as with Aaron Sorkin’s future Best Picture Oscar nominee, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which will open tomorrow (October 8th) at the Vancity Theatre before making its début on Netflix, on October 16th. All of the other films programmed into the Vancity Theatre will be available both as an In-Cinema, and a VIFF Connect home theatre experience. For the foreseeable future, we at VIFF believe this circumstance will be the “new normal”, throughout our COVID times.”

A full list of upcoming Vancity Theatre screenings is available here. Patrons should familiarize themselves with the VIFF Centre Health and Safety Protocols before booking, and attending a Vancity Theatre screening.

Well, that’s it folks. Only hours to go before VIFF 2020 draws to a close. You know what to do. Close the blinds, pull the curtains, and join with thousands of other British Columbians who will tonight let the light of international cinema shine bright for one last, glorious evening of cinema.
Thank you VIFF for once again opening a window on this world of ours.

VIFF 2020 | Vancouver’s Premiere Film Festival Wending to a Close

October 5, 2020Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

The newly-renovated Vancouver International Film Festival Centre | Vancity Theatre

Here we are fewer than 54 hours until the 39th annual Vancouver International Film Festival wends its way to a close fourteen days on, at 11:59pm precisely, this upcoming late evening, Wednesday, October 7th.

This past weekend, VIFF 2020 awarded nine outstanding films, including …
The Reason I Jump | VIFF Impact Award

Call Me Human | VIFF Best Canadian Documentary Award

Cake Day | Best British Columbia short

Nuxalk Radio | Sea to Sky Award

Brother, I Cry | Jessie Anthony, B.C. Emerging Filmmaker Award

The Hidden Life of Trees | Rob Stewart Eco Warrior Award

Bad Omen | VIFF Short Forum: Programme 4

At 6pm Tuesday, VIFF passholders will be able to go online to gain insight into the making of Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan’s hard-hitting The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel, and their insight into how all of us can come together to engage in the fight to limit the power of corporations & engage in the struggle to respond to our climate emergency.

The Pencil. Recommended by VanRamblings friend and longtime VIFF aficionado, Joseph Jones, awarded both best director & Special Jury Prize at Japan’s Skip City Film Festival, and Russian Film Festival Grand Jury Prize & Best Actress winner, The Pencil emerges as yet another VIFF 2020 knockout, Russian director /writer /actress Natalya Nazarova’s heartwrenching tale of redemption framed by shots of a town’s pencil factory machinery, the film tracking Atonina — a young woman from St. Petersburg, who uproots to a cold, forbidding region of rural northern Russia where her artist husband is being held as a political prisoner — as she takes on a job as an art teacher at the local school. Confronted by a violent thuggish element who torment her and bully the children, as determined as she is to transform the lives of the children she engages, she soon becomes aware that she, and she alone, is the only one in the town willing to tackle the cruel realities of corruption in her new home.
Note of perspective: at the start of the film, Nazarova shows a pencil factory making millions of yellow pencils, the pencils emerging as both a metaphor and a symbol for the children in the town, who the adults see as both fragile and dispensable. At one point in the film, a bully easily snaps a pencil in half, as easily broken as the spirits of the children Atonina has set about to rescue. A hopeful note: at film’s end, Nazarova shows the factory again, except now the pencils are green, a symbol perhaps for the inspiring possibility of change Atonina has wrought in the lives of the children.

Full VanRamblings coverage of VIFF 2020 may be found here.

VIFF 2020 | You Have Less Than One Week to Stream VIFF Films

October 2, 2020Arts Friday, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblings, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

Tracey Deer's new film on 1991's OKA crisis, Beans, awarded Best Canadian Film at the 2020 Vancouver International Film Festival

Click or tap on the picture above to access the trailer for Tracey Deer’s new film, Beans

Flat out VanRamblings’ favourite film at VIFF 2020 — along with Jennifer Abbott’s new documentary, The Magnitude of All Things — writer-director Tracey Deer’s new film, Beans, is a poignant, wrenching, heartrending, gut-punch of a film, the first narrative feature to focus on 1991’s Oka Crisis on Québec’s Kahnawake reserve, the story told through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl (the ‘Beans’ of the title) whose family, friends and neighbours lived through the violent 78-day conflict on Mohawk land, with young Kiawentiio embodying, with beyond-her-years wisdom, and forceful determination, director Deer’s own experience as a young girl. An absolute knock-out of a film that had me in tears throughout, and as I say above, a must-see.
VanRamblings’ review of The Magnitude of All Things may be found here.

Another film that has emerged as one of VanRamblings’ favourites is the Serbia/Croatia/Slovenia/Bosnia and Herzegovina co-production, Father, about which Taste of Cinema’s David House writes …

“unsettling, a bleak and heartbreaking tale of the struggle of a father, Nikola, to regain custody of his children from a corrupt Serbian bureaucracy determined to separate the children from their family. With a powerful, quiet, understated, award-worthy performance from Goran Bogdan as Nikola, whose love and devotion to his family emerges as a drama of tender devastation, that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity redolent of the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.

In addition, Father offers a damning critique of an uncaring Eastern European government, as well as a rallying cry for those who fall through the cracks. A film filled with gentle humanity, and an unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance, Father is a spare, unadorned film, with as touching a story as you’ll see at VIFF 2020. Recommended.
More Taste of Cinema VIFF 2020 reviews may be found by clicking here.

Finally for today, a few VIFF 2020 reviews written by Kinetoscope film critics, the acclaimed Jason Chen and Robert Snow.

My Salinger Year | Opening night film Berlinale 2020 | Kinetoscope review by Jason Chen

My Prince Edward | Best New Director Hong Kong 20 | Kinetoscope review by Jason Chen

The Reason I Jump | Audience Award, World Documentary Competition, Sundance 2020 | Kinetoscope review by Robert Snow

A Life Turned Upside Down: My Dad’s an Alcoholic | Kinetoscope review by Jason Chen

VIFF 2020 | Creating Quite the Stir at Vancouver’s Film Festival

September 30, 2020A & E, Cinema, Media, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

There’s a new online arts & culture magazine in Vancouver that’s creating quite the stir. Staffed mostly by former (and recent) arts staff at The Georgia Straight — said the weekly’s new owners, MediaCentral (a condition of employment: management must show their horns at all times) “Nah, we’re not cutting arts coverage. We’re just rationalizing it, by dumping a whole lotta staff, and refocusing editorial categories by eliminating any focus whatsoever on venues and the arts”) — the glorious new Stir is the illustrious new home for arts & culture coverage in our city.
Where to find beloved Straight arts & entertainment editor, the kindly but tough Janet Smith, or bon vivant, Adrian Mack, and acclaimed journalist, Gail Johnson? Vancouver’s nascent Stir magazine is the place where you’ll find Janet, Adrian and Gail, as well as a number of other former Straight staffers, and first-rate British Columbia-based arts & culture journalists, who in Stir have created the place to be for arts coverage in our city.
And isn’t that what makes a city, culture? Otherwise, what are we but an amalgam of greenhouse gas spewing towers, and windy roads laden with too many carbon emitting vehicles. Vancouver’s many and varied arts & culture institutions breathe life and meaning into our paradise by the ocean.

In 2020, at the virtual Vancouver International Film Festival, Stir has emerged as the place for coverage of VIFF 2020.
For instance, in her enthusiastic review of Jimmy Carter: Roll and Roll President (which VanRamblings just loved when we screened it at 3 a.m. yesterday morning), Ms. Smith writes …

Jimmy Carter was cooler than you ever knew — even more so when he’s put up against the presidential candidates for the 2020 U.S. election. Turns out the man once derided as the Peanut Farmer was besties with the likes of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, both of whom sing his praises here. He also hosted regular concerts, first at the guv’nah’s mansion in Georgia, and later at the White House, after the Allmann Brothers helped propel him to election. In her fun, well-researched, and zippily edited documentary, director Mary Wharton connects Carter’s open-minded approach to music to his political achievements.

The review above is just one of many VIFF 2020 reviews you’ll find on the Stir Vancouver online website, from Janet Smith, Adrian Mack and Gail Johnson, in 2020, your go-to website for Vancouver’s finest VIFF coverage.
Here’s hoping Stir thrives long, long into the future, that Ottawa’s modernized Canadian Periodical Fund provides sustaining monies to aid Stir in its necessary endeavours, and that readers (and advertisers) flock by the thousands to Stir Vancouver, such that Stir becomes a west coast institution, a Canadian version of New York Magazine’s Vulture website.