The 50th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) wrapped yesterday, handing out awards to the winners and runners up that screened at TIFF50.
Clicking on the italicized, underlined titles of the films below will take you to the VIFF web page, where you can learn more about the film, and purchase tickets.
Five of TIFF’s award winning films will screen at VIFF 2025. They are …
Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice. Winner of the TIFF People’s Choice International Award. Adapted from a novel by Donald E. Westlake (The Ax), this incisive, darkly comic satire from Park Chan-wook (VIFF ’22’s Decision to Leave) follows a newly unemployed man who, desperate to land a coveted position, hatches a ruthless plan to dispatch his competition.
Presenting present-day South Korea, where seniority counts for little and looking for employment proves to be a cutthroat business.
Man-soo (Lee Byung Hun) had it all: a loving wife, two talented children, two happy dogs. He even bought the beautiful forest-enclosed house where he grew up. Then, after 25 years of dedicated work for Solar Paper — where he was awarded Pulp Man of the Year in 2019 — Man-soo is suddenly given the axe.
Soon he is falling behind on his mortgage payments and his wife Mi-ri (Son Yejin) insists they put the house up for sale. Man-soo is desperate to scoop a coveted position with Moon Paper, but he knows there are other job seekers who match his pedigree. So he hatches a plan: invent a phony paper company, reach out to each of his rivals, lure them into a meeting … and dispatch his competition.
Brilliantly scripted by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee, and Canada’s own Don McKellar, No Other Choice is a chilling satire on workplace politics. In Park Chan-wook’s world, given the right set of circumstances, anyone can be driven to murder. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
| Saturday, October 4th 9:00 pm Vancouver Playhouse |
Thursday, October 9th 8:45 pm Vancouver Playhouse |
Zacharias Kunuk‘s Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband). Winner, Best Canadian Film, TIFF50. A strange death, village upheavals, and swarming suitors lead to a love story gone awry in acclaimed Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s latest enthralling imagining of ancient Inuit stories.
Seamlessly blending the supernatural with verité realism, Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) follows a boy, Sapa (Haiden Angutimarik), and a girl, Kaujak (Theresia Kappianaq), whose union in marriage is promised by their families from birth.
In their village, time passes as they hunt and prepare food, eventually becoming known as “future husband” and “future wife.” Their peaceful existence, however, is soon to be disrupted. Vivid dreams foretell a battle, and an ominous troll-like creature lurks by the waterfront, attempting to pull someone from the village away.
Long-gone elements of Inuit culture, like arranged marriages, sit alongside enduring components like shamanism and drum dancing. Nicknames and namesakes are a large part of Uiksaringitara — there’s a “Wifeless Buddy” in the film, and Kaujuk calls her mother “Younger Sister” because it’s an inherited name — and the importance of naming continues in Inuit culture today.
With arresting imagery, his trademark humour, and a cast of mostly non-professional actors, Kunuk has again created a world that not only builds upon Inuit stories and legends to enthrall audiences but works to preserve these re-imagined stories for generations to come. Born from oral traditions, and committed to authenticity, Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) is a unique feat of both cultural conservation and engrossing cinema.
| Wednesday, October 8th 9:00 pm SFU Woodwards |
Friday, October 10th 3:00 pm SFU Woodwards |
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Part of VIFF’s Galas & Special Presentations programme at VIFF 2025, Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie won TIFF’s People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award.
For the uninitiated, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s Nirvanna The Band The Show was a cult web series where its two creators portrayed hyperactive, hap-witted versions of themselves as a musical duo desperately failing to book a gig at the storied Toronto venue The Rivoli. Their hilarious misadventures continued a decade later across two seasons of a Spike Jonze–produced television series, and both iterations brilliantly blended Matt and Jay’s fictional exploits with hysterically incredible real-world public interactions. Every episode further contained a potpourri of irreverent pop-culture references and nebulous copyright violations, but always culminated in a sweet-hearted expression of friendship and perseverance.
Now in a critically acclaimed major motion picture that harmonizes with the series but stands alone, “Nirvanna the Band” are older, but none the wiser. When Matt presses Jay to partake in a death-defying publicity stunt, it goes spectacularly sideways, and the fallout inspires Jay to strike out on his own. But thanks to Matt’s inadvertent intervention with a short-lived Canadian novelty beverage (remember Orbitz?), the boys find themselves traveling through time where they risk compromising their very own origin story.
Utilizing meticulous visual effects, costuming, and the judicious integration of archival footage to recreate Toronto’s not-so-distant past, Johnson and his collaborators polish a satirically sobering and riotously funny cultural mirror that reflects just how much (and how little) things have changed, all the while celebrating the infectious joy of living for your dreams … with a little help from your friends.
| Friday, October 3rd 6:00 pm The Rio Theatre |
Sunday, October 5th 2:30 pm The Rio Theatre |
Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron. Winner of the Best Canadian Discovery Award, TIFF 50. Sophy Romvari‘s graceful, singularly heartsore début feature has a sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand. A film whose quietly flooring opening frames of a vast landscape becoming home to a compassionate story of a Hungarian-Canadian family navigating an uncertain world together already signal it as a major, incisive and intimate work.
Blue Heron only grows even greater from there.
Heartbreaking barely begins to describe it, although the terms masterful and transcendent also apply. If you’ve ever imagined how you’d try comforting your younger self or your family about the uncertain future ahead of them, Blue Heron may be the most emotionally devastating film of the year — and also perhaps the most comforting.
| Saturday, October 4th 6:00 pm The Cinematheque |
Sunday, October 5th 1:00 pm The Cinematheque |
Sunday, October 5th 3:30 pm Fifth Avenue Cinema |
100 Sunset. Honourable Mention, for Best Canadian Film, TIFF 50. In this mesmerizing film by Kunsang Kyirong, the deepening bond between two young women threatens to have repercussions throughout a community of Tibetan immigrants living in an apartment complex in west Toronto.
Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of this fully realized first feature is Kyirong’s ability to combine a detailed portrait of this wider network of intersecting lives with a similarly specific and empathetic look at two people resisting the roles they’ve been assigned.
Those deft shifts between macro and micro perspectives are mirrored by the activities of Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel), the taciturn introvert at the film’s centre. Kunsel’s fascination with others manifests in her two primary pursuits: spying on her neighbours with a newly acquired video camera and committing petty thefts. But after she meets Passang (Sonam Choekyi) — an enigmatic newcomer with a much older husband — Kunsel must venture beyond her comfortable position as a wary, watchful outsider.
Working in collaboration with members of Toronto’s Tibetan-Canadian community, along with some of the city’s sharpest film talents — including cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov, whose many films at TIFF include TIFF ’24 selections Measures for a Funeral and Matt & Mara — Kyirong establishes herself as one of Canadian cinema’s most exciting new filmmakers in her stunning feature début. In her hands, this noirish tale of mystery and desire becomes a means to capture an under-represented corner of Toronto in all its richness, exploring her characters’ feelings of cultural dislocation and, even more poignantly, their desires for escape.
| Friday, October 3rd 6:15 pm The Cinematheque |
Sunday, October 5th 3:30 pm International Village 7 |