At a screening of Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints late last evening, while waiting for the projectionist to spool the film in preparation for the upcoming screening, Granville 7 theatre manager Ira Hannen asked the assembled audience of about 300 for a show of hands for …
Those who had attended more than 5 films. Almost everyone’s hand went up. Next: how many had attended 10 films, or more … about half the hands in the audience went up. More than 15, 20, 25, 30, 40 … and so on. The average number of films audience members had attended in the Festival’s first week was near 20, or some 3 films a day in the first six days.
This year, the Vancouver Sun is running a daily feature where dedicated film aficionados are asked why the Vancouver International Film Festival plays such an important role in their lives. For, in fact, there is a coterie of film-goers, numbering over 100, who each year plan their “vacation” — not to mention, their lives — around Vancouver’s august 17-day Film Festival.
In recent days, while waiting in the passholders line-up, VanRamblings has spoken with film-goers who have travelled to visit the VIFF — arriving from the South Pacific (“we do this every year, and have for more than 15 years”), Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, northern British Columbia and northern Vancouver Island, Idaho, the southern United States, western and Eastern Europe, Japan, China and Korea, Argentina and Bolivia, and even Australia and New Zealand, and other far flung provinces across the globe.
In addition, there are an equal number of veteran passholders who have taken two weeks of their annual vacation time to coincide with the VIFF, taking time off from BC Hydro, Telus, school districts (teachers who have delayed the beginning of their school year til mid-October, as VanRamblings did for years), the provincial and federal governments, Worksafe BC, Translink, their CGA firm, and more — just so they could participate in as many screenings as possible between September 28th and October 13th.
Why?

Continue reading VIFF2006: Same Planet. Different Worlds. →

Dan Ireland is a homegrown boy, a producer and filmmaker of some renown (more in the United States — where he has resided for more than a quarter century — than in Canada), the person who “discovered” Renée Zellweger when he cast her in his award-winning directorial début, The Whole Wide World, and the director of the accomplished and very lovely Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which will make its auspicious, if somewhat unheralded (as you might expect, we’re attempting to change that with this posting), Canadian début this coming Friday at 7 p.m. at the Granville 7, Cinema 7.
Now, whether Mr. Ireland makes it to these shores from Arizona — where he is filming his latest, with Dermot Mulroney and Donald Sutherland, among others (but try to find mention of either Mr. Sutherland’s or Mulroney’s participation in the film on the Internet Movie Database) — seems a bit iffy at this writing. (Update: in fact, Mr. Ireland will arrive in town very late Friday night, in time for a 7 p.m., invitation only, screening of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, to be shown at the VanCity Theatre on Saturday night). But whether you meet Dan at a screening, or not (at least he’ll make it to Vancouver to visit his mother, who lives just down the street from where VanRamblings resides, twice this year), VanRamblings whole-heartedly recommends that you catch a screening of the film.
VanRamblings believes that Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (starring Joan Plowright) will likely emerge as one of your favourites at this year’s Fest, and perhaps one of your favourite films of the year, as it is ours.
And, if you don’t catch Dan Ireland’s charming and completely satisfying film at one of its two screenings at the Festival, you are very likely indeed to miss Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont entirely. And that would be a pity.

Continue reading VIFF2006: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont →

Yes, it was just another day at the Film Fest on Sunday, when the inimitable Mr. Shayne and your humble agent caught three screenings: a South Korean monster flick, an unsettling true life German horror film (depending on your definition of ‘horror’), and a quiet, meditative drama about blowing up central Manhattan’s ever-so-decorous Times Square.
So far, Mr. Shayne and your scribe are nine for nine: 9 screenings, 9 great films … our best average yet, in some 32 years of Festival going (this dating back to the Vancouver Film Festival that Don Barnes held at the now-defunct Varsity Theatre on West 10th Avenue) in Vancouver.
After having taken the first part of the day to compose yesterday’s piece, do a wash in order to have something to wear to work today, as well as go out for a coffee and a perusal of the local newspapers, it was off to the first screening of the day, in line by 3 p.m. for a 4 p.m. screening of …
Requiem: Winner of the Best Actress Award for lead Sandra Hüller at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival (the young actress making her big screen début), Requiem is compelling every moment Hüller is on screen, her character a 21-year-old college student who while living with epilepsy becomes convinced that she is possessed by the devil. Not a happy film by any means, director Hans-Christian Schmid’s naturalistic approach to the subject matter turns what might have been a second-rate horror film into a first rate family drama. With fine performances all around.
Next up, after a brief break for “dinner” at the Salad Loop (very good, actually), Mr. Shayne and your scribe lined up for the 7 p.m. screening of …

Continue reading VIFF2006: Scary Monsters, Religion and Terrorism →

One of the more salutary aspects of attending and participating in the 25th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, at least for this scribe, is the ride home on the bus at the end of a long day viewing movies in one, or more, of the film festival theatres located in Vancouver’s downtown core.
The bus ride home from Vancouver’s West End / downtown area through Kitsilano and Point Grey, to our home on the far west side of the city, is rife with life and possibility, love and the potential for connection, energy and flow, all within the context of safe passage in Vancouver’s (let’s face it, we’ve got something good going on here) Pacific west coast paradise.
Now, we’ve already made mention of the unseasonably warm and inviting weather that has accompanied the 25th annual edition of the Fest (right now, it’s sunny and 57° on a beautiful sunny afternoon on Canada’s west coast, as we take a short break to compose this fourth entry of our Fest coverage), almost a continuation of summer. So, when the last movie of the night lets out, it’s on to a Translink bus, full of humanity, mostly of the late-and-post teen University of British Columbia variety, making out, tipsy from hours in the bar or at the disco, alive and full of energy — and the perfect real-life extension of a day spent inside the lives of men and women and children on the screen, those life experiences spanning our globe.
Saturday, as had been agreed the day before, was to be Mr. Shayne’s day to choose the movies, and for the evening’s entertainment he chose …
The Last King of Scotland: Everything you’ve heard is true. Forest Whitaker will absolutely garner an Oscar nomination for the perfect embodiment of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, the film tremendously moving, funny, tragic, historically accurate (for the most part, that is; the doctor, played by James McAvoy, is a composite character created by author Giles Foden in his 1999 novel of the same title), and one of the most important films of the year.
You might think, “Maybe I’ll see The Last King of Scotland at the multiplex, maybe I won’t,” but you’d be doing yourself a tremendous disservice by not catching a film variously described by critics as “Shakespearean in its vision, an edgy, shockingly transformative, eye-riveting tale with a formidably compelling tour-de-force performance by Forest Whitaker that is all at once Faustian, suspenseful, volatile and absolutely spellbinding.”

Continue reading VIFF2006: In Search of the Perfect Orgasm →