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#VIFF45: A Festival to Remember — The Films, the Discoveries, and the Magic of Cinema

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A three-part VanRamblings wrap-up of the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival | October 1–11, 2026

Part One: A Final Weekend Worth Celebrating

There is something gloriously bittersweet about the final weekend of the Vancouver International Film Festival. For 10 days, Vancouver’s moviegoing community has been living inside a world of discovery, moving from one cinema to another, comparing notes over coffee, arguing about performances, falling hopelessly in love with films we could never have anticipated, and wondering how on earth we are going to fit just one more screening into an already impossibly crowded schedule.

And then, suddenly, the end is in sight.

The 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival has given Vancouver audiences an embarrassment of cinematic riches, with films arriving from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival. The final weekend offers one last opportunity to catch some of the year’s most accomplished international films, several of which have already become personal favourites here at VanRamblings.

Friday, October 9, begins with a particularly tantalizing double bill at the Park Theatre. At 6:15 p.m., Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Look Back offers another opportunity to experience the director’s extraordinary gift for finding tenderness in the everyday. Kore-eda has spent a career exploring the fragile bonds between parents and children, the families we inherit and the families we create. Here, he turns his attention to youth and the nature of storytelling, bringing his customary grace and emotional intelligence to a film that understands how imagination can transform the lives of young people. His work has a way of making the apparently ordinary feel quietly miraculous.

The Friday double bill continues with James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which has attracted considerable attention on the festival circuit. The intimate crime drama features Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, three performers whose contrasting screen personas promise a compelling study in loyalty, ambition and the dangerous entanglements of criminal life. Gray is a filmmaker fascinated by family, betrayal and the moral compromises people make in pursuit of security. With a cast of this calibre, Paper Tiger is a particularly enticing prospect.

The final weekend also brings a remarkable collection of films shared with the prestigious New York Film Festival. Friday’s offerings include Once Upon a Time in Harlem and 9 Temples to Heaven at Fifth Avenue, with Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva at International Village 9 at 8 p.m. and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur at the Lindsay Family Stage on Granville Island at 8:30 p.m. For festivalgoers who relish the experience of discovering a film before it reaches a wider audience, these screenings are precisely what VIFF is all about.

And then there is Lukas Dhont’s Coward, VanRamblings’ favourite film at VIFF 45, screening Friday evening at the Park Theatre. The Belgian filmmaker’s First World War drama, whose stars Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the Best Actor prize at Cannes, is a work of breathtaking emotional delicacy. More about that extraordinary film in Part Two of VanRamblings final column on VIFF 45.

At 9 p.m. Friday, the Vancouver Playhouse welcomes La Bola Negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s ambitious historical melodrama, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Moving between 1932, 1937 and 2017, the film interweaves the lives of three gay protagonists, giving a traditional historical epic a thrillingly contemporary queer sensibility. The filmmakers also shared the Best Director prize at Cannes. It is precisely the sort of ambitious, emotionally expansive storytelling that makes international cinema so rewarding.

Saturday, October 10, brings another remarkable sequence of screenings. At 11 a.m., The Only Living Pickpocket in New York opens the day’s programme at the Vancouver Playhouse. At 1:45 p.m., Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Japan’s Oscar submission, offers a quietly expansive meditation on human connection. Making his French-language debut, Hamaguchi explores the fragile structures that bind us to one another, with luminous, Cannes-recognized performances from Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. This is cinema that understands the expressive power of conversation, observation and silence.

The evening’s centrepiece is Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, VIFF’s Closing Gala, at 6:15 p.m. at the Vancouver Playhouse. With John Malkovich leading the cast, the film arrives amid considerable awards-season anticipation. McDonagh’s gift for combining dark humour, moral unease and unpredictable human behaviour makes this a fittingly provocative way to approach the festival’s conclusion.

And for those determined to make the absolute most of Saturday, there is a 9:15 p.m. screening of NAZA at the Park Theatre. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the investigative documentary examines Israeli military targeting practices in Gaza through interviews with military insiders. The title refers to a reported intelligence euphemism for anticipated civilian deaths in airstrikes. Produced by Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson, the team behind The Zone of Interest, NAZA has become one of the festival’s most controversial and politically urgent films. Its filmmakers argue that the systems used to calculate civilian casualties reveal a devastating process of dehumanization; its claims and implications have provoked fierce debate. The film received the Special Jury Prize at Venice. Whatever one’s response, this is documentary filmmaking that insists audiences confront uncomfortable questions about technology, accountability and the human cost of war.

Sunday, October 11, is the final day of VIFF 45, and the schedule is hardly a gentle winding-down. La Gradiva returns at the Lindsay Family Stage, while Everytime screens at Fifth Avenue. Mina Shum’s Whatcha Want brings a distinctly Vancouver perspective to the final day’s offerings at the Rio Theatre at 3:30 p.m. Meanwhile, Minotaur, Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix winner at Cannes, offers another opportunity to experience the work of a formidable contemporary filmmaker.

At the Park Theatre, Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care screens at 6 p.m., followed by Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas at 9:15 p.m. And at 6:15 p.m., the Rio Theatre screens I Play Rocky, one of VanRamblings’ other personal favourites of the festival.

The beauty of VIFF, of course, is that the festival’s final screening need not be the final opportunity to see a film. Programmer Tom Charity and the VIFF Centre regularly help bring festival discoveries back to Vancouver audiences, while other titles secure conventional theatrical engagements across Metro Vancouver. It is worth keeping an eye on the VIFF Centre’s subsequent programming rather than assuming that missing a festival screening means missing a film forever.

But first, there are two films that deserve a special place in this year’s festival conversation.

Coward: Lukas Dhont’s Most Beautiful Film Yet

VanRamblings’ favourite film of VIFF 45 | Directed by Lukas Dhont | Belgium, France, Netherlands

Some films move you. Others quietly rearrange the furniture of your heart. And then there is Lukas Dhont’s Coward, an achingly beautiful, tenderly observed, emotionally transporting work of cinema that left VanRamblings with the extraordinary conviction that we had just encountered one of the finest films of the year — of any year.

At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Dhont’s First World War drama earned the Best Actor prize for its remarkable young stars, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne. Their performances are the beating heart of a film that could easily have succumbed to the familiar conventions of the tragic queer period drama, yet instead finds something infinitely more generous, more courageous and ultimately more life-affirming.

Set amid the brutal realities of the Belgian trenches, Coward introduces us to Pierre (Macchia), a young soldier arriving at the front eager to prove himself in a world in which courage is measured in blood, obedience and the willingness to march towards almost certain death. But Pierre’s understanding of the world begins to change when he meets Francis (Campagne), a fellow soldier with an unexpected idea: to stage a theatrical performance for their comrades.

It is an audacious proposal in a place where imagination might seem like an unaffordable luxury. Yet the makeshift theatre becomes something extraordinary — a sanctuary of beauty, laughter and human connection amid the machinery of destruction. And between Pierre and Francis, something tender and transformative begins to emerge.

Dhont, whose Girl and Close established him as one of contemporary cinema’s most sensitive observers of adolescent vulnerability, has made his most mature film to date. Here, his storytelling possesses an emotional restraint that makes every fleeting glance, every tentative touch and every moment of physical closeness feel almost unbearably precious.

The chemistry between Macchia and Campagne is simply magnificent. Dhont has a tactile, compassionate understanding of how men — queer men especially — watch other men, the way attraction and affection can reveal themselves in a look held a second too long, or in a gesture whose significance cannot safely be spoken aloud. Coward is, by turns, breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual. Its most intimate moments feel less like conventional romantic scenes than like the discovery of an entirely new language.

And what a relief it is that Dhont refuses to drown that love in tragedy.

Unlike so many period tales of forbidden queer affection, Coward is not interested in dripping its canvas in despair. Dhont wants to leave us with a glimmer of hope. Actually, more than a glimmer: a wry smile of anticipation, a suggestion that all is not lost, that love can find a way even when the world seems determined to extinguish it.

This is a recuperation of queer representation as resilient and hopeful. Happiness — or, perhaps more importantly, contentment — is possible when we seek it and seize it. That assertion feels quietly radical in a film set amid the carnage of the First World War, where tenderness itself becomes an act of resistance.

Dhont does not minimize the horror surrounding his characters. Rather, he understands that the existence of beauty in terrible circumstances does not diminish suffering; it makes the preservation of our humanity all the more urgent. The theatre they create becomes an emblem of what art can accomplish when the world has seemingly abandoned its obligations to the living.

There is something almost miraculous about the film’s tonal balance. The violence is genuinely frightening, the romance achingly delicate, the humour unexpectedly liberating. Dhont allows the film to breathe, trusting his actors and the emotional intelligence of his audience. He never insists that we feel something when a glance or a silence can accomplish so much more.

And when Coward reaches its final passages, its hopefulness feels neither sentimental nor cheaply won. It emerges from everything these men have endured, from the risks they have taken and from the simple, extraordinary recognition that another person can make a life worth living.

This is sensitive storytelling at its most affecting: sweetly played, elegantly mounted, reaching towards hope not in light of war’s horrors, but in spite of them.

For VanRamblings, Coward is the film of VIFF 45. It is a reminder that cinema’s greatest achievement is not always to break our hearts.

Sometimes, it is to show us how beautifully they can mend.

VanRamblings Grade: A+

Fatherland: A Haunted Masterpiece of Memory and Exile

VanRamblings feels strongly Fatherland is the best film to screen at VIFF 45, one of the best films of the year | Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski | Poland, Germany, Italy, France

If Coward is the film that most tenderly captured VanRamblings heart at VIFF 45, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is the film that most completely convinced us of cinema’s extraordinary power to transform history into poetry.

Pawlikowski, the modern master behind Ida and Cold War, has fashioned another immaculate black-and-white work of European cinema, an 82-minute elegy of such precision, intelligence and emotional depth that its brevity feels almost audacious.

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Fatherland is a gorgeous, gripping drama whose resonance extends far beyond its carefully chosen postwar setting.

The film centres on Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), the actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, sixteen years after fleeing Nazi Germany for the safety of the United States, Mann returns to his native country. Accompanied by Erika, he embarks on an emotionally fraught road trip in a black Buick, traveling from American-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar through a Germany devastated by war and divided by ideology.

It is a journey across a shattered nation, but also across the wreckage of a family.

Pawlikowski understands that the aftermath of catastrophe is not merely a matter of rebuilding cities or redrawing borders. It is also about confronting the moral compromises of the past, the things people did, the things they failed to do, and the stories they tell themselves to make those failures bearable.

Mann is a towering literary figure, a man whose opposition to Hitler forced him into exile. Yet the film is not content to celebrate the Nobel laureate as a convenient moral monument. His relationship with Erika reveals a more complicated figure, a father whose public stature and intellectual authority cannot protect him from the consequences of private shortcomings.

Hüller, one of contemporary cinema’s most compelling actors, is extraordinary as Erika. Her performance is a study in intelligence, resentment, wit and barely contained pain. She gives the film its emotional counterweight, suggesting a lifetime of accumulated disappointment beneath the surface of an apparently formidable woman. Zischler is equally compelling, creating a Mann whose authority is unmistakable but whose capacity for self-understanding remains uncertain.

The relationship between them is the film’s beating heart. Every exchange seems to carry the weight of conversations that have never taken place, apologies never offered, affection expressed too late or withheld altogether.

Shot by cinematographer Łukasz Żal in exquisitely chiselled monochrome, Fatherland is a visual marvel. The landscape passes through the car windows like a wounded memory, the ruins and the uneasy coexistence of two political systems rendering history tangible. Pawlikowski’s compositions are austere but never sterile; his camera finds beauty in the contours of a devastated landscape without ever pretending that beauty can erase what happened there.

As the journey progresses eastwards, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with grief and the responsibility of the artist. What does it mean to create art in the aftermath of catastrophe? Can intellectual achievement compensate for emotional failure? And what obligation does a celebrated writer have to the people closest to him, rather than to the abstract ideals he represents?

These questions converge in a beautiful, sad epiphany, delivered with the divine economy that distinguishes Pawlikowski’s finest work.

There are moments when Fatherland feels chilly, even deliberately withholding. But that restraint is part of its achievement. Pawlikowski trusts us to recognize what remains unspoken, to find the sorrow in a pause, the tenderness in an awkward gesture, the devastation in an exchange that appears almost incidental.

The result is a film of haunted, ravaged beauty. Its mournful meditation on national identity, private tragedy and the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times speaks directly to our own fractured moment. The cultural riches that survive catastrophe offer no easy redemption, but they can provide small, crucial forms of solace.

Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing masterpiece, an extraordinarily economical film that leaves behind an emotional echo far greater than its running time might suggest.

If VIFF 45 has offered a reminder of why we go to the movies, Pawlikowski’s film supplies one of the most compelling answers: to experience the past not as a distant abstraction, but as a living, breathing presence in the room.

This is a gorgeous poem of a film, and, for VanRamblings, the best film to screen at this year’s festival.

VanRamblings Grade: A+

Part Three: The Movies, the Memories, and the Promise of What’s Next

What, then, has VIFF 45 achieved?

First, it has reminded us that the Vancouver International Film Festival remains one of this city’s most important cultural institutions. For eleven days, it has created a space in which audiences can encounter stories beyond their own experience, discover filmmakers they might otherwise never have encountered, and engage with works that challenge, provoke, entertain and occasionally change the way we see the world.

Second, this year’s festival has offered compelling evidence that 2026 may be one of the strongest years for cinema in a decade, both domestically and internationally.

From the moral complexities of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord to the exquisite emotional restraint of Coward, from Pawlikowski’s haunted Fatherland to the imaginative daring of films arriving from Japan, Spain and elsewhere, the year’s finest work has demonstrated that ambitious filmmaking is alive and flourishing. Cannes’ awards have been especially revealing, recognizing films that are artistically adventurous while remaining profoundly attentive to the human condition.

And what a year for Canadian cinema, too. Mina Shum’s Whatcha Want is a welcome reminder of the importance of Vancouver filmmakers telling stories that emerge from the communities they know, while the festival’s wider Canadian programme has offered audiences opportunities to encounter the country’s extraordinary range of voices and perspectives. A healthy film culture depends not simply on importing the world’s best work, but on creating the conditions in which our own filmmakers can flourish.

There is, of course, a practical challenge awaiting us after the closing credits roll. How do we sustain the excitement? How do we ensure that these films find audiences beyond the festival’s eleven-day window?

The work of VIFF Centre programmer Tom Charity, and the subsequent theatrical engagements that some festival titles will secure across Metro Vancouver, is essential. A festival should be a beginning, not an ending. The conversation that starts in a crowded cinema ought to continue over dinner, in the pages of publications such as VanRamblings, and in the choices we make when deciding what to watch next.

Most importantly, VIFF reminds us that watching movies together is an act of community. We sit in the darkness beside strangers, laughing at the same unexpected joke, holding our breath through the same moment of suspense, or emerging into the Vancouver night with tears in our eyes and the sudden urge to talk to someone about what we have just experienced. For a few precious hours, another person’s story becomes part of our own.

That is the enduring magic of cinema. It allows us to inhabit lives we have never lived, to recognize ourselves in people whose circumstances are utterly unlike our own, and to discover that tenderness, courage, grief, longing and hope are not the possessions of any one nation or culture. They belong to all of us.

As VIFF 45 draws to a close, VanRamblings find ourselves thinking again about Coward, about those young soldiers who discover a measure of beauty in a world consumed by violence, and about Fatherland, with its wounded landscapes and its insistence that the past must be confronted if we are to make sense of the present. These films are very different, yet both understand that art can preserve something precious when the world seems determined to destroy it.

And perhaps that is the most hopeful thing we can take away from this year’s festival.

In a time of political division, technological upheaval and genuine uncertainty about the future, filmmakers continue to make works of astonishing beauty, intelligence and compassion. Audiences continue to seek them out. Cinemas continue to fill with people willing to give themselves over to a story.

For eleven days, Vancouver has been a city of movie lovers, united by curiosity and the shared pleasure of discovery. The festival ends, but the films remain with us, becoming part of our private histories, our conversations and our understanding of one another.

Here’s to VIFF 46. Here’s to the filmmakers who will surprise us, the performances that will break our hearts, and the stories that will remind us what we share.

And here’s to the simple, extraordinary miracle of sitting in a darkened cinema, surrounded by strangers, and discovering that, for a little while, we are all watching the world together.

The Road to the Oscars Begins: Film Festivals That Shape the Awards Season

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Each September, the road to the Academy Awards begins in earnest.

Before critics’ prizes are handed out, before guilds weigh in, and long before Oscar nominations are announced, four of the world’s most influential film festivals — Telluride, Venice, Toronto and New York — introduce audiences to the films, performances and filmmakers that will dominate awards season.

In a typical year, roughly 80 per cent of eventual Best Picture nominees screen at one or more of these festivals.

The first stop is the 53rd Telluride Film Festival, held high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado over the Labour Day weekend, from September 4 to 7.

Telluride remains the most mysterious of the major festivals. Organizers refuse to announce the programme in advance, unveiling approximately 40 films only as attendees arrive in the picturesque mountain town.

That secrecy has become part of Telluride’s appeal.

Festival-goers routinely discover surprise screenings of films that go on to become major Oscar contenders. This year’s Guest Director is acclaimed British-American actress and filmmaker Rebecca Hall, who has curated a special programme celebrating overlooked classics and significant works from cinema history.

Alongside anticipated North American premières of prize winners from Cannes and Berlin, cinephiles will once again be searching for the festival’s inevitable “discovery”— the film nobody was expecting that suddenly becomes an awards frontrunner.

Almost simultaneously, attention shifts across the Atlantic to the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, running September 2–12 under the artistic direction of Alberto Barbera.

The world’s oldest film festival remains its most glamorous.

Every year the Lido becomes a showcase where international stars arrive by water taxi against the backdrop of the Venetian lagoon, while photographers line the red carpet awaiting the next iconic image.

Yet beneath the glamour lies one of cinema’s most important launching pads. Recent Golden Lion winners and Venice premières have gone on to claim Best Picture and Best Director Oscars with remarkable regularity.

This year’s Venice Biennale competition is especially rich.

Among the most anticipated films are Martin McDonagh’s 1970s-set black comedy Wild Horse Nine — which, by the way, is the Closing Gala film this year at the 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival — starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell; Florian Zeller’s marital drama Bunker, featuring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; Werner Herzog’s long-awaited, Bucking Fastard, starring sisters Kate and Rooney Mara; Casey Affleck’s directorial effort, Company; Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, with Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon; Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson; and highly anticipated new works from Lee Chang-dong and Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Venice’s red carpets will be equally crowded with Dakota Johnson, Pamela Anderson, Claire Foy, Orlando Bloom, Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Stephen Graham and Phoebe Bridgers, making her formal acting début in A24’s Primetime.

Noel and Liam Gallagher are also expected to reunite publicly while promoting the Oasis documentary, Don’t Look Back in Anger.

The festival’s combination of artistic prestige and celebrity spectacle makes Venice one of the defining events of the international film calendar.

North America’s largest public film festival follows immediately afterward.

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) runs September 10–20 and remains the industry’s première North American launching pad for prestige cinema.

TIFF opens with Sian Heder’s Being Heumann and closes with Yan Lanouette Turgeon’s Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend. Unlike Telluride’s exclusivity, Toronto welcomes hundreds of thousands of moviegoers, creating an atmosphere unlike any other festival.

Audience enthusiasm frequently helps propel films into the awards conversation, with the festival’s coveted People’s Choice Award having become one of the strongest predictors of eventual Oscar success.

This year’s lineup includes new films from celebrated auteurs Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Takashi Miike (Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo), Anton Corbijn (A Talent for Murder), Lee Chang-dong (Possible Love), Andrew Haigh (A Long Winter), Jesse Eisenberg (The Debut), James Gray (Paper Tiger), Chris Rock (Misty Green) and Rebel Wilson (Girl Group).

TIFF will also showcase an impressive slate of Canadian productions, continuing its long-standing commitment to homegrown filmmaking, while serving as an international marketplace where distributors search for the season’s breakout hits.

The final major stop on the autumn festival circuit is the 64th New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center from September 25 through October 12.

Unlike Toronto, New York rarely emphasizes world premières. Instead, it curates what its programmers believe represents the very finest cinema of the year, drawing acclaimed selections from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride and Toronto into one strong Main Slate. For many cinephiles, NYFF offers the year’s most rigorously curated programme.

The festival’s Centerpiece Gala will be the world première of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, starring Pedro Pascal, while Ava DuVernay’s documentary 14th, a follow-up to her Oscar-nominated 13th, will close the festival.

Rumoured selections include new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Paweł Pawlikowski, Radu Jude, Takashi Yamazaki and Ira Sachs.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” says New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim. “The most notable thing about the films in the Main Slate is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality.”

By the time New York concludes in mid-October, the contours of the Oscar race will largely have been established. Critics will have identified the year’s breakthrough performances, studios will begin refining their awards campaigns, and cinephiles will already be debating which films deserve Academy recognition.

For Vancouver audiences, the excitement will not end there.

Many of the year’s most acclaimed festival selections are expected to, and will, screen at the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival, running October 1–11, giving local movie lovers an opportunity to see many of the season’s most celebrated films months before Oscar nominations are announced.

Announced on August 26th at this year’s VIFF Media Launch,  VIFF programmers have curated perhaps the strongest array of films at VIFF in many, many years, including the Opening Gala film: Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.

Also débuting: Cannes winners Fjord, La Bola Negra, and audience favourite, Club Kid, and so very much more.

Plus: Minotaur, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, and Mike Leigh’s final film, Tender Loving Care.

The 45th Vancouver International Film Festival Programme Guide is already online, ready for you to begin purchasing your tickets — or pass — to this year’s festival.

Purchase tickets or a pass to #VIFF 2026 by clicking here.

Each Friday throughout September, VanRamblings will publish a VIFF Insight column in the hopes of preparing you for VIFF 45.

Come October, once the festival is fully underway, VanRamblings will provide coverage each of the two first weekends — given that Monday through Thursday, we’ll be providing in-depth coverage of this year’s Vancouver municipal election —  with VIFF coverage each Friday, Saturday and Sunday in early October, on October 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 9th, 10th, and the final day of this year’s festival, Thanksgiving Monday, October 11th.

For anyone who loves cinema, September is far more than the beginning of awards season.

September announces the annual celebration of the art of filmmaking itself — the moment when the world’s greatest directors, actors and storytellers unveil the films that will shape conversations for the year ahead.

Arts Friday | 2022’s Film Festival Season | An Oscar Season in Preview

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With cooling weather finally having taken hold, and the heat of the summer season soon to be but a fond memory, today VanRamblings will set about to preview the always provocative cinematic season of serious import,  the fall film festival season

As we discover each September, autumn is the season for all of our senses.

The feel of cooler temperatures after a long summer. A warm, visually pleasing palate of reds, oranges and browns. The taste of pumpkin spice in everything.

The sound of crunching leaves underfoot.

The smell of woodsmoke.

Like spring, autumn is a season of transition, a reminder of the value of change, in this case from a bright, buzzing, verdant summer of picnics in the park, towards the darker, quieter, more redolent calm of autumn and winter. It’s a journey inward; first experiential, then intellectual, delving into the collective unconscious.

“Autumn light is the loveliest light there is,” wrote author Margaret Renkl. “Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world an illuminated dream.”

In a cinephile’s world, dreams come to the fore in the fall through the release of films which will take on Oscar importance in the winter season to come.

Telluride, Venice, Toronto, New York each early autumn introduce the films which will fill our film consciousness over the many months yet to come.

The first of the important later summer film festivals occurs amidst the mountain landscape of Telluride, Colorado, which locale will be overrun with cinéastes over September’s Labour Day weekend, where prestige filmmakers ranging from Canada’s Sarah Polley (Women Talking), Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All), Sam Mendes (Empire of Light), Alejandro G. Inarritu (Bardo), Todd Field (TÁR), Sebastian Leilo (The Wonder), and Scott Cooper (The Pale Blue Eye) are set to garner the most buzz among the film cognoscenti, each of these filmmakers recipients of much past Oscar glory, each film highly anticipated, each film Oscar bound.

Overlapping the Telluride Film Festival is the 79th annual Venice International Film Festival, the Biennale Cinema, which will run from Wednesday, August 31 thru Saturday, September 10, where many of the films débuting at Telluride stateside will also feature in the star-studded Venice locale.

The big buzz film in Venice this year is White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s first film since Marriage Story. White Noise is a zany adaptation of Don DeLillo’s seminal novel about a Hitler Studies professor (Adam Driver) and his beleaguered wife (Greta Gerwig) whose lives are threatened by a toxic event.

Also at Venice: Andrew Dominik’s evocative drama Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, who disappears into the role as she struggles to cope under the glare of the spotlight. Add Bobby Cannavale as her second husband, Joe DiMaggio; Adrien Brody as her third husband, Arthur Miller; meticulous production design & luminous cinematography, and you have a potential awards-season juggernaut, streaming on Netflix Sept. 28th.

Olivia Wilde’s psychological chiller, Don’t Worry Darling, sees Florence Pugh and Harry Styles embody a picture-perfect ’50s couple whose unbridled passion for one another turns to suspicion when the former begins to fear that something sinister lurks beneath their carefree existence. Prepare for jump scares, glorious interiors, and Chris Pine as the film’s menacing mastermind.


A TIFF programme screen capture of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film, The Fabelmans

As the Telluride and Venice festivals wrap, the film festival season focus will turn to a renewed Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), now in its 47th season, running from Thursday, September 8th through Sunday, September 18th, as TIFF marks a return to its pre-pandemic days of in-person screenings, after two scaled-down editions spent in hybrid mode the past couple of years.

The big buzz film débuting in Toronto this year is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which will have its world première at this fall’s TIFF, with the iconic Oscar-winning director attending TIFF for the first time ever.

A long-in-the-works semi-autobiographical film, The Fabelmans is described by producers as a “deeply personal portrait of 20th-century American childhood,” which focuses on a family based in post-Second World War-era Arizona, the film following the young Spielberg facsimile Sammy Fabelman (played by Gabriel LaBelle) as he grows up with his father (Paul Dano), mother (Michelle Williams) and uncle (Seth Rogen). After discovering a “shattering family secret,” Sammy dives into the wonder of cinema to cope and find a path forward.

With a screenplay by regular Spielberg collaborator Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, and last year’s West Side Story), The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s latest shot at awards-season glory. The film’s première represents a huge coup for TIFF.

The New York Film Festival  has lined up titles from Kelly Reichardt, Claire Denis, Alice Diop, Joanna Hogg, and more for its Main Slate this year. Women directed or co-directed 13 of the 32 Main Slate films, amounting to about 41%.

The NYFF has returned to the city that never sleeps for its 60th year at the Lincoln Centre, which recently announced Laura Poitras’ new documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, to serve as the festival’s Centerpiece film. A story about art, politics, addiction, and David v. Goliath battles, the documentary chronicles the life of photographer Nan Goldin and her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in the opioid epidemic.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, the Léa Seydoux-starring romantic drama One Fine Morning, is also part of the Main Slate, as are Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon; Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up; Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter; Alice Diop’s Saint Omer; Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun; and Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage.

Another Oscar bound film? Clemency director Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, a biopic about the lynching of Emmett Till, and his mother’s pursuit of justice.

As has been the case since it’s inception 41 years ago, the NYFF runs in tandem with the Vancouver International Film Festival, our somewhat truncated festival set to run from from Thursday, September 29th through Sunday, October 9th.

The importance of festivals to culture and society cannot be underestimated, as they set about to provide empathetic insight into our often confusing world. Film festivals also provide the opportunity to switch off your everyday life, to become enmeshed in the lives of people from across the globe.

Arts Friday | The Much Anticipated Autumn Film Festival Season Underway

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In 2021, wherever a film festival may take place, appropriate COVID protocols will be in place, including mandatory masks in the screening rooms and common areas, and proof that cinephile patrons have been vaccinated.

The pandemic – particularly given the ravages of the COVID-19 fourth wave – will probably mean, and has meant at the Telluride and Venice film festivals, prejudiced attendance numbers at fall film festivals. As was the case in 2020 – and once again will be so in 2021 – films on offer will be made available for home viewing, with a small number of films  available exclusively for in-person screenings. In other words, in order for film festivals to “work” in 2021, festival directors have adopted a “hybrid model” to satisfy the viewing demands of their loyal patrons.

At Telluride and Venice, major film studios made their star-driven, Oscar contending film slates available to these two prestigious film festivals, as will be the case in Toronto – which got underway yesterday – and later this month in Gotham City, at the 59th annual New York Film Festival, which will share half their slate with VIFF.

At Telluride and Venice, Hollywood stars turned out in all their finery, engaging in post screening discussions with audiences, sitting in rapt & appreciative attention.

Above is a clip of Japanese-English director Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, a whimsical Victorian biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy — which, it was announced at the annual Vancouver International Film Festival media conference has been selected as VIFF40’s opening night film, on October 1st.

“Movies are a distraction from reality,” says a character in Paolo Sorrentino’s Hand of God — which débuted at Telluride — a sprawling, funny-sad, autobiographical coming-of-age story. That’s a good thing. Reality is drab and painful — “lousy,” according to the film’s English subtitles — and film provides a much needed respite.

The break-out Oscar contenders that débuted at Telluride include …

Cyrano, a lovely new telling of the classic story of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had its world première at Telluride, and took that film festival by storm — with guaranteed Oscar nods all around;

https://youtu.be/MUnsoxe7K4g

The North American première of Spencer, the mesmerizing new drama starring Kristen Stewart (a guaranteed Best Actress Oscar nominee) as Princess Diana; and

The crowd-pleasing King Richard, a drama charting the rise of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams, expected to launch Will Smith into the Oscar race for his portrayal of the girls’ demanding dad and coach, Richard Williams — a loving, egocentric father who, it turns out, did know what was best for his daughters.

Céline Sciamma’s exquisite Petite Maman — which débuted at the Berlinale, and has been set as VIFF40’s closing night film (cuz it’s VIFF programmer, Curtis Woloschuk’s, favourite film at VIFF this year, he told VanRamblings earlier in the week — don’t tell anybody, though, cuz it’s a secret) — a delicate film full of surprises. Sciamma, whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a VIFF standout in 2019 (at the pre-pandemic VIFF festival), examines female intimacy from a different angle.

Nelly and Marion (played by young twins named Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz) are 8-year-old girls living in similar houses in the woods. They strike up a friendship tinged with elements of fairy-tale supernaturalism, magical realism and time travel. The twists packed into the film’s compact 72 minutes arrive gently and matter-of-factly. The intense emotions they leave behind — this is one of the quietest tear-jerkers you’ll ever see — are at once familiar and wholly new.

Soon, the sane and responsible among us will be fully vaccinated and in possession of our province-issued vaccine card — making attendance at movie theatres, restaurants, bars and pubs safer and more enjoyable for the vast majority of us.

As much as COVID’s fourth wave will keep us in its troubling grip, for the most part it is the anti-social unvaccinated amongst us who will bear the malignant brunt of the coronavirus — for the rest of us, a return to a near normal state of being holds promise for our immediate future, and the prospect of an autumn movie-going season sitting amongst our brothers and sisters inside a darkened movie theatre.