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Arts Friday | VanRamblings’ Annual VIFF Introductory Column

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The 41st Annual Vancouver International Film Festival

The Vancouver International Film Festival returns to theatres after two years of a predominantly virtual, COVID-influenced online film festival.

Opening on Thursday, September 29th, the Festival’s Gala Presentation features a celebrated Indigenous film, Bones of Crows — a hit at the Toronto International Film Festival this year — by Métis filmmaker Marie Clements, who tells an epic story of survival during a shameful period in Canadian history, a powerful indictment of the abuse of Indigenous peoples and a stirring story of extraordinary resilience and resistance.

Fearless in its denunciation of centuries of oppressive policies by Canadian governments and institutions, Bones of Crows is also a memorable paean to the resilience and determination of those who survived the residential schools — and those who sought to bring their oppressors’ crimes to light.

The Festival will close 11 days later, on October 9th, with a Gala Presentation of VIFF favourite, South Korea’s Hirokazu Kore-eda, Broker, a sprawling crime story about a baby kidnapping scheme starring Song Kang-ho (Parasite), winner of Best Actor at Cannes earlier this year.

Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters and winner of the Jury Prize five years before that for Like Father Like Son, the writer-director once again displays great empathy for characters who are trying to put their lives in order, examining their predicaments from every possible angle and ultimately guiding them into a position where they can do the right thing.

Unfolding over a truncated 11 days (rather than its pre-pandemic customary length of 16 days), the Festival will again feature a virtual online presence, though not every one of the 135+ feature films and 102+ shorts will be available virtually.

In total, twenty-four films will screen online through VIFF Connect.

In person, meanwhile, as was the practice in the pre-pandemic times, VIFF’s theatres where all 135+ feature films and 102+ shorts will screen, include …

The VIFF digital Festival Guide is now available; click on the preceding link.

The free, glossy printed Festival guide is available across Metro Vancouver, at libraries, coffee shops, and bookstores, and all your favourite local haunts.

Although the Festival is smaller than in past years, the film programme categories will look familiar: Panorama, the main Festival film feature programme curated by Alan Franey and PoChu AuYeung, showcasing 90 carefully curated narrative films arriving from across the globe.

Northern Lights features the next wave of Canadian and Indigenous storytellers; while Insights, the always illuminating documentary programme, this year will incorporate the Spectrum programme, a collection of innovative nonfiction filmmaking; and then there’s Portraits, a kaleidoscope of ground-breaking artists, great performances, and cultural icons; and, Altered States, 8 challenging and  bizarre films the constitute VIFF’s 2022 late night series.

In last week’s, award winning VIFF films in 2022 featuring the work of Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, who brings his latest film, Empire of Light to VIFF; Martin McDonagh’s masterful, surprisingly poignant, and dazzlingly designed and performed, The Banshees of Inisherin; Corsage, Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer’s biopic about late 19th century Empress Elisabeth.

More Special Presentations? How about Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s Best Director Prize winner at Cannes this year, Decision to Leave, which offers a teasing, tantalizing neo-noir genre piece about a homicide detective who falls in love with the widow of an apparent suicide. There’s Mia Hansen-Løve’s quietly miraculous One Fine Morning, a balm of a film and another glorious showcase for the director’s light touch when dealing with complicated emotions.

VIFF’s Director of Programming Curtis Woloschuk told VanRamblings VIFF programmers curated a record number of films that emerged after the pandemic — half of VIFF’s films in  2022 feature first time filmmakers!

“There were over 4,000 films that our programming team watched and considered this year that leave us more educated and illuminated about the world we live in.”

In addition to the many screenings, VIFF Talks boasts visiting artists like Deborah Lynn Scott — responsible for clothing actors in films ranging from Titanic to the new, upcoming Avatar: The Way of Water  — who will present a masterclass on costume design. Kate Byron, who just led production design on Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, will give a masterclass on production design. And, Michael Abels, the composer for director Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope will make a special performance and speaking engagement with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on October 6th.

The VIFF Amp Symposium on Music in Film is set to run October 6th to 9th.

In other new and expanded initiatives, VIFF Executive Director Kyle Fostner told VanRamblings that, for the first time, the Vancouver International Film Festival will offer free memberships for persons 19 to 25 years of age, free access to Indigenous peoples, and more free offerings to community groups.

Individual tickets prices remain what they’ve been for years: $15 for any screening, except Special Presentations, which costs $17 for the award-winning future Oscar contenders, with reduced prices for seniors & youth.

VIFF passes and packages are also available again this year. A full Festival pass costs $350, with a senior rate at $300, and a youth rate of $120. There’s a 6-ticket pack at $84, and a 10-ticket pack available at $135. As was the case in 2020 and 2021, the VIFF Connect virtual online Festival pass will cost $70.

The VIFF Infoline, staffed by volunteers, is available 7 days a week, from noon til 7pm. Simply call (604) 683-3456 to have any question you have answered.

Arts Friday | Vancouver International Film Festival | Sept. 29 – Oct. 9th 2022

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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.

Vancouver International Film Festival: a humanizing experience like no other.

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.

135+ feature films
102+ shorts
25+ events
11 days

The VIFF 2022 digital guide will be available for download after September 15.

The VIFF printed guide will be available across Metro Vancouver on Sept. 20.

So many films to look forward to, and so many films to move and change you.

VIFF 2021 | Worshipping at the Church of Cinema

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Imagine yourself on this autumn Sunday afternoon during the glorious 40th annual Vancouver International Film Festival. You’ve just walked into The Vancouver Playhouse, where after showing your vaccine card, a piece of picture I.D., and having your ticket scanned — as a PDF on your smartphone (photos of the PDF won’t do), or in hard copy — and having been welcomed by one of the hard working VIFF volunteers, are then ushered into a darkened room with seats all facing forward.

You feel reverent.

You are about to worship at the ‘church of cinema‘.

One hundred years on, cinema has arrived as a form of transcendence, for many replacing the once venerated position held by the church. Think about the similarities: churches and the cinema are both large buildings built in the public space. Both have signage out front indicating what is about to occur inside.

As physical structures, both the church and the independent or multiplex cinema create a sense of sacred space, with their high ceilings, long aisles running the length of the darkened rooms, the use of dim lighting, the sweeping curvature of the walls, and the use of curtains to enhance the sacredness of the experience.

In the church of cinema we take communion not with bread and wine, but with the ritualistic consumption of our favourite snack and beverage.

Consider if you will, the memorable moment when you enter the auditorium to find your perfect viewing angle, allowing you to sit back, relax and enjoy (albeit in 2021, with your mask on). Although you may not receive absolution at the cinema, there is the two-hour reprieve from the burden & peregrinations of your daily life.

As the lights are dimmed, the service begins: The seating, and the opening introduction constitute a liturgy for one and all, not dissimilar to the welcoming ritual that occurs in a church service prior to the sermon.

If you are like most people, you obey an unwritten rule that requires you to be in place in time for either the singing (if you’re in church) or the rapturuous introduction of a film by a Vancouver International Film Festival theatre manager. And, you remain silent while in the theatre, focused on all that is unfolding before you.

There is, too, the notion that as the film limns your unconscious mind you are being transported, elevated in some meaningful way, left in awe in the presence of a transporting and ever-so-moving work of film art that is screening before you.

What we want from church is often, these days, more of what we receive from the cinema on offer at the Vancouver International Film Festival: the vague, unshakable notion that the eternal and invisible world is all around us, transporting us as we sit in rapt attention. We experience the progress and acceleration of time, as we see life begin, progress, and find redemption. All within two hours. The films at the Vancouver International Film Festival constitute much more than entertainment; each film is a thoughtful meditation on our place in society and our purpose in life.

As a VIFF film draws to a close, just as is the case following a sermon we might hear in church, our desire is to set about to discuss with friends that which we have just experienced. Phrases and moments, transcending current frustrations with a new resolve, all in response to a line of dialogue, an image on the screen or a friend’s comment we have now incorporated into how we will lead our life going forward.

In the holy trinity of meaning, cinema reigns supreme, the personal altar of our home theatres a distant second — although increasingly important in the era of the pandemic — the city providing the physical proof of the reality the other two point to, oriented towards the satisfaction of the devout cinemagoer’s theology.

Throughout the centuries we have sought to find meaning through manifest ritual and symbolism. If, as in the scene from American Beauty, a plastic bag sailing in the breeze is an intimation of immortality then there is, perhaps, something for us to consider respecting the difference between art as diversion and art in our lives as a symbolic representation of an awakened mindfulness, allowing us to not just transcend the conditions of our troubles lives, but change our lives for the better.

For those who have attended the Vancouver International Film Festival over the past 40 years, moving, independent world cinema from all across the globe has emerged as that place where we might experience life in the form of parable, within a safe and welcoming environment, that place where we are able to become vulnerable and open, hungry to make sense of our daily, protean lives.

Cinema, whether it be at VIFF or in the cineplex, delivers for many of us access to the new spiritualism, the place where we experience not merely film, but language, memory, art, love, death and, perhaps even, spiritual transcendence.

VIFF 2021 | NYFF59 and VIFF2021 Share 17 Films

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As has long been the case, the prestigious, oh-so-heavily juried and highly and lovingly curated New York Film Festival, and our local, homegrown Vancouver International Film Festival share many films, as is the case once again this year.

Today on VanRamblings, our annual virtual visit to the Big Apple / Gotham City, and the very fine New York Film Festival.

Here are the 17 films the NYFF59 and VIFF40 share in 2021 … enjoy!