In Vancouver, and across the province of British Columbia, we may find ourselves in the midst of civic elections in villages, towns and cities in every far flung corner of our province, but as you’re no doubt aware, life goes on.
At the end of September each year for the past 41 years (in the early years, VIFF happened in the spring), come rain or come shine, the good folks long associated with the Vancouver International Film Festival — who have spent the past 12 months curating film submissions from thousands of filmmakers, and visiting almost every film festival screening films in almost every country on our, it seems, ever smaller globe — present the best in world cinema to appreciative British Columbia audiences, cinephiles and cinéastes who love film, and those persons in our city who look forward each year to opening a window on this vast world of ours, to gain insight into how folks who live in every country across the planet live their lives, and how their struggles mirror our struggles.
VIFF’s Director of Programming, Curtis Woloschuk, introduces the depth and breadth of the 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival. A must watch.
Each Friday in September, VanRamblings will present you with insight into the 41st annual Vancouver International Film Festival — which films are can’t miss in 2022, and demand to be seen on the big screen (screening at the 1800-seat Centre for the Performing Arts is a Festival must), the tiny gems that are always at the heart of VIFF each year, which films Vancouver is sharing with other film festivals screening simultaneously to Vancouver’s homegrown festival by the ocean, the celebrated award winners, and so very much more.
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.
The 40th annual Vancouver International Film Festival wraps at 11:59pm this Thanksgiving Monday evening — and that will be it for another Festival year, although what is now termed the VanCentre Complex (3 theatres now available in the complex that used to house just the glorious Vancity Theatre — which remains, just in case you thought that wasn’t the case) — with VIFF Connect a year-around fixture for this next year, and probably long after that into the many years to come.
On Sunday, VIFF presented two screenings of Céline Sciamma’s exquisite Petite Maman, Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie, at the welcoming Vancouver Playhouse — occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future — the film emerging as a resonant, profoundly moving and elegantly made small scale, but wildly effective opus for the 39-year-old French filmmaker, the dappled forested backdrop a thing of pensive beauty, the coming-of-age story at the centre of the film an example of the way cinema can make memories real, without losing their bitter honesty, and dreams, without compromising on their glowing promise.
Without a doubt, Céline Sciamma is the finest director working today, anywhere across the globe, her body of work — Tomboy (2011), Girlhood (2014), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), and now Petite Maman — unrivaled in the pantheon of modern cinema, each film profoundly moving and filled with heart, must-sees for any cinephile worth their salt, simply the finest examples of what cinema, in the right hands, can achieve in moving all of us forward towards a better, fairer world.
Here’s what Barry Hertz, arts & entertainment editor at The Globe and Mail had to say about Petite Maman, when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month …
Well, this is an unexpected and wonderful surprise. Two years ago, French director Céline Sciamma knocked TIFF audiences out with her powerful and grand romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Switching gears, the filmmaker goes small, in all the right ways, for her pandemic-shot follow-up, Petite Maman.
A lovely, delicate look at the bridge between parents and their children, the film follows one lonely little girl who, while visiting her grandmother’s old country home, encounters a version of her mother as a young girl at the same exact age, through some unexplained feat of magical realism.
Featuring wonderful performances from twin sisters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, and also the cutest little murder-mystery game you’ve ever seen, Petite Maman hits all the right notes, creating an epic in miniature. One warning: It may leave you a blubbering mess.
There is one final VIFF screening of Petite Maman— as always, click on the preceding link to be taken to the VIFF web page to book your ticket — scheduled for this evening at 8:30pm on this Thanksgiving Monday, at the Kay Meek Arts Centre, located at 1700 Mathers Avenue in West Vancouver, easily accessible by both car or bus (there’s a bus stop just outside of the arts complex). Highly recommended.
In the weeks leading up to the 40th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, VIFF’s Board of Directors met with Executive Director Kyle Fostner, and a handful of senior programming administrators at the Festival, to map out a business plan for the upcoming hybrid Festival, and the return to in person, in-cinema screenings.
Arising from those series of meetings, the VIFF Board and senior staff drafted and agreed on a business plan which calculated full in-person, in-cinema attendance at all VIFF 2021 screenings. The only possible way that VIFF could be successful as an organization in 2021 — and maintain its integrity, sense of purpose and the Festival’s ability to survive into the future — was if the Festival was to sell every available ticket for each venue screening during the 11-day run of the Festival.
Those senior VIFF administrators not included, those lower down the ladder, in the decision-making process only rolled their eyes when the VIFF’s business plan was published. Never in the entire history of the Festival has every VIFF screening sold out, nor come close to achieving that goal. In fact, this fiction of full attendance has been borne out at VIFF 2021 as in-cinema attendance, although good, has proved below projection, with attendance at screenings at this year’s truncated film festival anywhere from half to two-thirds, and on rare occasion, fully sold out.
The pandemic has changed a lot of things around the world. In times of stress, sadness, and world upturning events, nothing beats going to the movies. Unfortunately, pandemics and crowded movie theatres don’t mix, either at Cineplex or Landmark Cinemas, or the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Film festivals have long been an exploration of art through storytelling, best experienced in a darkened movie theatre surrounded by fellow cinephiles. But for a great while now that has not been possible. A recent survey of film festival directors and creators across the globe told those who organized the research study that they see the future of film festivals as more of a place to express art and storytelling, and less about the medium itself — although nothing quite beats the in-person experience, and the anticipation of sitting in a Festival movie theatre.
Truth to tell, most film festivals were already facing an identity crisis, even before the pandemic. An impenetrably dense media landscape, the proliferation of on-demand content, and market instability created a mounting sense of uncertainty: What should festivals be doing — and how can they possibly persevere?
Last year, Nicole Guillaumet — who worked as Sundance’s co-director from its early days in 1985 all the way through 2002 — told IndieWire’s Eric Kohn …
“Film festivals are accessible only to those who can afford them. Attending in person has become an exclusive experience. It is very expensive and excludes many young people who cannot afford to pay often exorbitant rates for access, or passes,” says Guillaumet.
Over the past 19 months, as we have continued to live through history in the making, it was only a matter of time — and survival — that moved film festival administrators to adapt to unprecedented circumstances by going online for the very first time. Guillaumet sees the move toward hybrid film festivals as a needed shift toward democratized access. “The impact on future audiences and future filmmakers will be enormous,” she said. “We need both virtual and in-person festivals.”
Existential questions about the future of cinema-going are nothing new for Festival administrators. Over the past number of years, the rise of streaming services and the accompanying decline in ticket sales have prompted much hand-wringing over the relevance of the in-cinema experience, with the coronavirus pandemic amplifying those anxieties as Festivals faced an apocalyptic reality: with theatres darkened across across the globe, and with previous film festival fare bypassing theatres almost entirely — in favour of streaming services such as MUBI, Festival Scope, Docsville, IndiePix and BFI Player, among other festival streaming services, what does the future hold for film festivals like our beloved homegrown VIFF?
Director Christopher Nolan, long a champion of the theatre experience, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post underlining the human toll of closed theatres and diminished film festivals, urging distributors to re-consider their release plans.
“The theatrical and the festival exhibition community needs strategic and forward-thinking partnership from the studios and distributors,” Nolan wrote. “Much of the current short-term loss is recoverable. When this crisis passes, the need for collective human engagement, the need to live and love and laugh and cry together, will be more powerful than ever. The combination of that pent-up demand and the promise of great new movies will boost local and national economies, and allow film festivals to thrive into the future.”
Perhaps Nolan is right to sound the alarm. The future of the blockbuster Hollywood movie and independent film festivals alike may not be lost, but theatres, festival administrators and independent film studios must prepare for the possibility — and perhaps even, probability — of a grim post-pandemic reality.
