As of this afternoon, VanRamblings has added a further three reviews to our thrived and became an institution over the years; more than 150 are now available. Included in today’s update, you’ll find new reviews for Childstar, Captive, and Stella Street. This week’s Georgia Straight reviews are available here.
Vancouver Film Being Held By Customs … May Not Make Festival

Canada Customs’ targeting of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender material has had an impact on more than just book stores. Independent multi-media artist Kai Ling Xue knows.
Xue’s latest short film A Girl Named Kai has been screened at festivals across North America this year, most recently at the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival. The film, en route to Canada, for screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival, was seized by Canada Customs earlier in the week, and is currently in bureaucratic limbo.
Xue received a terse letter from the Canadian government on September 29th stating that her film had been sent to the Senior Programme Advisor in Ottawa to be evaluated on for its possible ‘obscene’ content. The government letter did not contain any contact information, neither a phone nor a fax number. The government has indicated it will require seven days to make a determination as to whether the material contained in the film would be considered ‘obscene’, under the Customs Act. As of this writing, Xue has heard no further word from government officials, nor has she been advised as to a date that her film might be returned.
Ironically, the film contains no nudity or sexual content. Rather, it is a lyrical and sometimes melancholy meditation on Xue’s relationship with her family and sense of self. A Girl Named Kai is due to be screened at the Granville 5 on both October 5th at 9:15 pm and again on October 8th at 1:40pm.
New French Filmmakers: 6 First Films
Wondering what to do post-Festival? Pacific Cin�math�que, working in co-operation with Consulate General of France in Vancouver and France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, today announced a Vancouver Premi�re! film series titled New French Filmmakers: Six First Films, due to screen from October 15th to 17th and October 22nd to 24th.
Films and filmmakers in the series include Guillaume Canet’s My Idol; Julie Lopes-Curval’s Camera D’or winner at Cannes in 2002, Seaside; and noted French actress Zabou Breitman’s C�sar-winning (the French Oscars) directorial d�but — winner for best first feature, best actress (Isabelle Carr�), and best supporting actor (Bernard Le Coq) — Beautiful Memories.

Life has intruded, there’s washing to be done, work to attend to, sleep to get, and more necessary day-to-day activities that have been jettisoned over the course of the past week while attending the Film Festival became the priority, that VanRamblings must both take a break today, and announce reduced coverage of the final week of the Film Festival. Which isn’t to say that VanRamblings will not be attending Festival films — we will, but we may not have time to write fully about the experience.
All that said, VanRamblings will continue to add reviews daily to our extensive thrived and became an institution over the years. By the end of the weekend, you can expect to find a further 15 – 30 reviews to be published in the Guide.

As of this morning, VanRamblings has added a further four reviews to our thrived and became an institution over the years. Included in today’s update, you’ll find new reviews for Café Lumière, Campfire, Los Muertos, and Zero Day.
Tying Up Loose Ends, What’s Doing Well, and …

EFilmCritic.com has hired Jason Whyte to provide coverage of the 23rd annual Vancouver International Film Festival. In addition to festblog.ca and coverage on VanRamblings, EFilmCritic.com is a site worth surfing to.
A couple of items picked up on the street yesterday …

• The Festival’s new Film Centre, set to open later this autumn, will operate two, smallish 170 seat state-of-the-art theatres. Word as of last evening is that the new cinemas won’t open til February 2005, and initially will screen films only two days a week. No word as to whether the VIFF will bring back ‘hit’ VIFF films without a North American distributor in place.
• Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society presents “A Conversation with Don McKellar”, moderated by Vancouver Sun film critic Katherine Monk, at Cineworks Studio at the Pacific Cinémathèque tomorrow, September 30, from 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. As is the case with all seminars in this series, admission is free. Everyone is welcome.
• The 42nd annual New York Film Festival kicks off this Thursday. Several films screening at the VIFF have been selected by the New York Festival jury, including The 10th District Court — Moments of Trial, Café Lumière, Moolaadé, Or (My Treasure), Tarnation, Tropical Malady, Woman Is the Future of Man, and The World.
• Sold out screenings as of this writing (tickets available at the door half-an-hour before showtime, otherwise each film is considered to have been sold out) include: 20 Fingers (Oct. 3, 11:30 a.m.), As Life Goes By (Oct. 3, 7:15 p.m.), Berlin Blues (Oct. 2, 9:15 p.m.), Camping Sauvage (Oct. 2, 6 p.m.), Captive (Oct 1, 9 p.m.), Childstar (Oct. 3, 11 a.m.), Chokher Bali: A Passion Play (Oct. 2, 3 p.m.), Clean (Sept. 30, 9:45 p.m.), Cop Festival Reloaded (Oct.1, 5 p.m.), Dutch Light (Oct. 3, 7:30 p.m.), Four Shades of Brown (Oct. 3, 3 p.m.), Journeyings and Conversations (Oct. 3, 10:30 a.m.), Machuca (Sept. 30, 7 p.m.), ScaredSacred (Oct. 5, 10 a.m.), Stella Street (Oct. 2, 11 a.m.), Travellers and Magicians (Oct. 6, 7 p.m.), What Remains of Us (Oct. 7, 7:30 p.m.), Wilby Wonderful (Oct. 4, 6:20 p.m.), and The World According to Bush (Oct. 4 & 6 & 7 @ 7 p.m. … an extra screening has been added earlier on the 7th; see below).
• For those taking in a screening of Heddy Honigmann’s otherwise well-reviewed film, the word is give her latest, Dame la Mano, a miss … “the cinematographer filmed crap, there’s hardly a scene in the entire film that’s in focus … you can’t see the damn thing” is the word on the street.

Schedule Changes and other info …
As of this morning, the VIFF Programme Updates include two additional screenings for both Machuca and The World According to Bush (certainly among the most lauded films at this year’s Festival), as well as additional screenings for 11 other films (including Or (My Treasure) and Four Shades of Brown) which have received good notices. Too bad, though, that many of the additional screenings will be held in the Granville 7’s Theatre 6, the least amenable screen in the cinema complex.

As of this morning, VanRamblings has added a further dozen reviews to our thrived and became an institution over the years, bringing the grand total of films reviewed to date to 130, with more than 160 reviews of VIFF films available. Included in today’s update, you’ll find new reviews for L’Amant, Czech Dream, Elles Etaient Cinq, and Quiet as a Mouse, as well as supplementary reviews for a half dozen other films. A dozen new reviews by The Georgia Straight’s Ken Eisner are now available in the Festival Review Guide, as well.
The Vancouver Film Festival Provides a ‘Window on the World’

Here we are into Day 6 of the Vancouver Film Festival, and the sun continues to shine down on us, daytime temperatures unseasonably high at 23�C (75� F) — hardly the rain-soaked Festival weather we’ve come to expect each year at the end of September. Throughout the first three weeks of the month, the weather was so miserable and rainy in Vancouver that it seems a pity to have to lock oneself away inside a darkened theatre for much of the day. Such, though, are the sacrifices that must be made by the inveterate Film Festival aficionado … a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
Still recovering from the slings and arrows of poor fortune, as reported in the previous daily update, VanRamblings did manage to attend two Festival screenings on Monday (in pain and standing at the back of the theatre).

Essentially a travelogue, director Jia Zhangke’s major achievement with The World revolves around his ability to provide an anthropological insight into contemporary Beijing: the polluted and leaden grey skies of China’s largest city, the lack of protection for workers in the city’s booming construction industry, and the apolitical and consumerist orientation of the mostly ‘emigrant’ young population. There is none-too-subtle irony, either, that the film is set in the Disney-esque ‘World Park’ — which offers a scaled-downed version of London, Paris, Cairo and other world centres — that, it seems quite obvious, the oppressed workers employed at the park will never get the chance to see. Pretty much bereft of narrative and psychological insight into the characters we meet over the two-plus hour running time of the film, there’s no question that The World is powerful filmmaking, but given its lack of identifiable characters to carry a story forward, VanRamblings awards The World 2� stars.

Dead Man’s Shoes is quite another kettle of fish than The World. Stark, psychologically intriguing, violent verging on the grotesque, the film offers a Tarantino-like character study, the narrative almost entirely concerned with vengeful reckoning and character disintegration. Not for the faint of the heart, Dead Man’s Shoes — a Film Four production — is the sort of film you might see on HBO stateside, a propulsive 81-minute genre film that engages almost entirely from beginning to end. Another example of a film you’re unlikely to see released commercially in North America, Dead Man’s Shoes qualifies as near perfect, and gritty, Festival film fare. 4 stars.