The 44th annual Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) kicks off later this week, on Thursday, October 2nd and is set to run through Sunday, October 12th
A somewhat truncated, but still well juried, film festival as compared to pre-pandemic festivals of yesteryear, in 2025 VIFF will screen 170 films from 74 countries, spanning the globe.
As we wrote last month, commencing in late August, when the fall film festival season gets underway, movie stars, studio executives, journalists and cinephiles begin their annual trek to Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, crisscrossing continents to watch the latest films. Then there’s those of us who live in Vancouver, movie lovers who only need to travel short distances to experience new worlds.
The flagship event of the film year, our Vancouver International Film Festival incorporates a mix of best films the world has to offer, feature length and short, from across the globe. There are dramas, biopics, horror movies and selections that defy easy classification, like Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, a heady exploration of Black life that leaps across time, space and genres. Other selections that will light up screens and minds include Sentimental Value, a tender, tough family story from Joachim Trier (last here with The Worst Person in the World); and the giddy thriller No Other Choice, from Park Chan-wook.
In addition, among this year’s 170 features are two from the always unexpected Romanian director Radu Jude (Dracula); a shambling lark from the Italian filmmaker Francesco Sossai (The Last One for the Road); and a sui generis chronicle of the bloodstained life and times of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan from the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz (Magellan). You may need to recalibrate your bodily rhythms for Diaz’s epic, which moves more leisurely than a Hollywood movie. Yet changing things up, including your ideas about what movies can and should do, is a reason festivals like this exist.
A number of selections in the lineup have made splashes at earlier festivals.
Among these is Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which recently won top honours at Venice. With calm, delicacy, a steady eye and Jarmusch’s characteristic deadpan, the movie charts the inner and outer lives of different families, creating distinct pointillist group portraits through smiles, gestures, silences, ritualistic pleasantries and stinging asides. In one, a sly cool cat of a father (Tom Waits) receives a visit from his normie twins (the equally bespectacled Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik); in another, an aloof mother (Charlotte Rampling) serves tea to her nervously needy daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps); in the third, twins (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) mourn what they’ve lost.
Noah Baumbach is back in the festival with Jay Kelly, about a movie star who, ta-da, is played by George Clooney.
Established in 1981, the Vancouver International Film Festival has been an essential part of the city’s film scene since its founding and its importance has only grown.
Like other arts events, it has weathered doubts about its purpose, political storms, religious controversy, economic pressures and internal strife. It’s also emerged from the pandemic with renewed vigour because of new and younger audiences.
Nearly a third of the audience in 2024 were first-time attendees, explained the festival’s director of programming, Curtis Woloschuk. Equally notable, 62% of all the festival attendees were between 21 and 44 of age, a crucial demographic for any organization, especially one that relies as heavily on its patrons as VIFF does.
As stated above, the Vancouver International Film Festival runs October 2nd thru October 12. For more information, go to https://viff.org/festival/viff-2025/.
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.
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