The Vancouver International Film Festival is back for its 44th edition, in a climate that’s become increasingly difficult for the experience of moviegoing.
The festival is significantly shorter than it was in its pre-pandemic years, and its presenting organization, VIFF, is facing the same pressures felt by all exhibitors in the era of streaming: “the incredible challenge of people’s couches,” said VIFF Programming Director Curtis Woloschuk.
Nonetheless, the annual Festival perseveres, this year offering 170 films from 68 countries, screening October 2nd through 12th at multiple venues, mostly in the downtown area. Many of those screenings will feature guests and post film conversations; all will offer the camaraderie that being in a roomful of film lovers provides. Festivals like VIFF, said Woloschuk, are “very, very focused on bringing community together, because that is the thing you cannot do in your house.”
This year’s Opening Night Gala film is Richard Linklater’s comedy-drama Nouvelle Vague, a dramatization of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Breathless, and is set to screen at The Playhouse on Saturday, October 4th at 6pm. The film follows Godard as he begins production on the French New Wave film, which features film stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, with Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo.
This year’s Festival, Woloschuk said, has a special emphasis on independent voices — the majority of this year’s films are by first- or second-time directors, and most do not currently have theatrical distribution. “It very much goes back to the heart of VIFF,” he told VanRamblings.
“The kinds of films that the Festival has always brought to Vancouver have been those films that you might never see again.” He noted that streaming services, though plentiful, do not always focus on international films or challenging independent films. “VIFF really remains that place for discovery, and for those voices.”
It’s been a rough few years for the film industry in general, which has had to deal with multiple blows: the pandemic, union strikes, and devastating fires in Los Angeles that affected film and TV production workers. “The industry is still in a little bit of flux,” Woloschuk said. “While there wasn’t an intentional design to come up with films that didn’t have distribution, the films that we all loved and that we all felt passionately about didn’t have distribution. We’re hoping that being part of the Festival brings some attention to them.”
That said, the Gala & Special Presentations programme at VIFF 2025 features films with distribution, films that have won multiple awards at other film festivals, and films that will feature in this year’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar race. Those films of note include Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix award at Cannes, and Jafar Panahi’s, It Was an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past May.
In addition, VIFF filmgoers will want to ensure that they attend a screening of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Hikari’s Rental Family, László Nemes’ Orphan, Noam Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Sergi López’ Sirât, and the Dardennes brothers’ Young Mothers.
If you’re counting, you might notice that VIFF will screen fewer films this year (170, compared to 190 in 2024), and that there is no tribute event this year. That’s due to a development that nobody at VIFF anticipated or wanted: the loss of the 1800 seat Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, currently home to and owned by the Westside Centre Church, which declined to make the site available to VIFF in 2025.
It seems unthinkable to hold VIFF without the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, which has been a key part of the Festival for many many years. But when one door closes, another opens: the 688-seat Vancouver Playhouse. “All those films set to screen at the Vancouver Playhouse are going to look great,” Woloschuk said, the Vancouver Playhouse set to host numerous screenings during the Festival.
The Vancouver International Film Festival continues evolving focus to year-round exhibition, which began in 2007 with the organization programming films in the Vancity Theatre on Seymour Street, at Davie. The plan then, Woloschuk said, was “to allow us to be a film festival year-round” — to give a home to international films and independent films. As VIFF worked with The Cinematheque, another independent Vancouver venue dedicated to independent art and international films, VIFF “was able to balance the Vancity venue, with its smaller footprint for the Vancouver International Film Festival, which really allows us to invest the rest of the 353 days of the year in keeping that film festival year-round feeling.”
Kyle Fostner, VIFF’s Executive Director, added that VIFF demonstrates commitment to festivals in general, citing the recent partnership with the National Film Board’s Festival for Talented Youth (NFBTY), the 18th edition of which VIFF hosted last month. “These festivals are the feeder ground for year-round cinema,” he said, “so it’s not one or the other — it’s really championing the discovery of film. The premise is, life is better with a great presence of film in your life.”
As movie theatres struggle to recover from pandemic losses, VIFF is still with us: smaller than before, but nonetheless a major presence in Vancouver’s arts scene.
Woloschuk acknowledged that many of us have fallen out of the habit of regular moviegoing. “I think it’s important, as communities that support arts and culture, to get back into that habit,” he said. At VIFF, “the stories that we have that you can engage with, especially around a festival, are so important right now, at a time when elements within our community and elsewhere are trying to separate us.”
Fostner added that the combination of the film festival and year-round cinema has a cascading effect: People see a film they might not otherwise have seen, and then pass along that discovery. “It’s infectious, in a way,” he said. “Our guests who come in to the cinema are playing a role in our discovery mission as well — sharing the love of film and getting more people to enjoy them.”
Here are a few columns VanRamblings has published about VIFF 2025 to date. You can look for a fresh new VIFF column on VanRamblings each day this week.
VanRamblings’ Top 27 Best Bet Picks | VIFF 2025
Toronto International Film Festival award winning films that will screen at VIFF
VIFF 2025 Galas and Special Presentations, Part 4
VIFF 2025 Galas and Special Presentations, Part 3