The Vancouver International Film Festival Looking Good At 27

Cinema, VIFF 2008

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Iiit’s baaack!

The cinematic juggernaut that is our annual Vancouver International Film Festival rolls into town next week, opening with a full slate of films on Thursday, September 25th, at the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas, the Pacific Cinémathèque, the Ridge Theatre, and the VanCity Theatre.

An ambitious rendition of the best-selling book (of the same title) by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, the opening gala, Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener), offers a thought-
provoking, visually impressive meditation on the fragility of humanity in the face of the apocalypse, as a mysterious pandemic descends upon a city without warning, plunging the entire population into darkness.

The Festival closes 16 days later, on October 10th, with the Canadian première of The Class (Entre les murs), Laurent Cantet’s 2007 classroom drama winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or.

In the days between these two poles, the Festival will showcase 332 films from 58 countries at 575 screenings, with 193 features, including Cannes’ winners: Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (Best Director); Jury Prize winner, Italy’s Il Divo; Germany’s Cloud 9 (Heart Throb Jury Prize), and Britain’s Camera D’Or winner, Hunger.

Sundance winners coming to VIFF include Amin Matalqa’s Captain Abu Raed, World Cinema Audience Award winner; and Best Director award-winner, Lance Hammer’s Ballast. Tribeca award winners arriving at the 2008 VIFF include Let The Right One In (Sweden), by Tomas Alfredson, which won Best Narrative Feature; My Marlon and Brando (Turkey), winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize for Hüseyin Karabey; and, Old Man Bebo (Spain), a film about Cuban music legend Bebo Valdes, which garnered the Best New Documentary Filmmaker prize for Carlos Carcas.

Also coming to VIFF, Berlin Film Festival winners The Song of Sparrows (Iran), by Majid Majidi, Best Actor winner for Reza Najie, and Happy-Go-
Lucky (UK), by Mike Leigh, which netted Best Actress honours for Sally Hawkins. From France, there’s Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long, winner of the Ecumenical Jury Prize, and Boris Despodov’s Corridor #8 (Bulgaria), which won Berlin’s Forum Award.

Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (Austria) took the Femina award at Berlin’s Film Festival, while the Youth Jury gave special mention to Nina Paley’s, Sita Sings The Blues.

Arriving in Vancouver with strong buzz are: Sugar, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s (Half Nelson) new film, which tells the story of a 19-year-old Dominican baseball pitcher trying to break into the big leagues; and, Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s (Old Joy) stripped down, 80-minute drama about a young woman, Wendy (Michelle Williams), who travels from Indiana to Alaska with her dog, Lucy, to find work.

Other films garnering buzz: Tulpan: Russian director Sergey Dvortsevoy’s first “fiction” feature, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes; RR, James Benning’s hypnotic homage to the beauty and importance of the train; and, When It Was Blue, Jennifer Reeves’ eye-popping, superimposed dual projection montage, structured in four parts representing the directions of the compass and the seasons.

Reeves’ film is reviewed on the same page of The Globe and Mail as RR, where there are also four star reviews of Kim Jee-Woon’s (South Korea) The Good The Bad The Weird, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, JVCD, potential Academy Award nominee Rachel Getting Married, and Waltz With Bashir.

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The Federal Tories: The Gang That Can’t Think Straight

Decision Canada, Politics

THE GANG THAT COULDN'T THINK STRAIGHT

No matter how much money the federal Tories have in their coffers heading into the federal election — expected to be called on Sunday — no matter that, over the course of the next six weeks, they’ll outspend the Liberals, the NDP and the Green parties combined, Stephen Harper’s Conservative can’t help themselves.

They just keep shooting themselves in the foot.

Writing in her column in the Toronto Star, Chantal Hebert says that …

The recent Conservative cuts to arts and culture have done what neither the pursuit of the unpopular Afghan war nor the demise of the Kyoto Protocol had accomplished: wake up a sleeping Quebec giant that is now gathering strength for a show of force in the upcoming election campaign …

On Tuesday, a 2,000-strong who’s who of Quebec’s art community gathered in Montreal to decry what has largely come across in the province’s media as an ideologically driven federal disengagement from the front of culture.

In no other province in Canada would the citizens express the ire that Quebeckers do over funding cuts to the arts — thank God that there’s one province in Canada that stands up for Canadian cultural identity.

The Conservatives probably feel that with a weak and inarticulate Stephane Dion leading the federal Liberal party, and a rudderless Bloc Quebecois, they’ll romp to election victory on October 14th. Don’t bet on it.

The Conservatives are so inept (not to mention, mean-spirited) that Harper won’t be able to help himself from putting his foot in his mouth during the 37-day election period. The Conservative party will, VanRamblings predicts, do everything in their power to snatch defeat from the jaws victory.

Hopefully, after October 14th, there will be a responsible and responsive federal government in Ottawa that will be committed to …

  • the creation of affordable housing
  • the development of a national transit strategy
  • the development of a national telecommunications strategy
  • restored funding of the arts, and a recommitment to the CBC
  • the implementation of national daycare
  • the re-establishment of the Canadian armed forces as peacekeepers
  • restoring the economy so that Canadian familes can be provided for

If the Conservatives are re-elected, they’ll be committed to none of those initiatives. What an anti-Canadian government the Tories proved to be.

Come October 14th, it’ll be time to throw the bums out. Good riddance.