After seven consecutive 20-hour days, VanRamblings hit a wall last night (we’re talking figuratively here, but with VanRamblings you never know). We stayed home during the day on Thursday, attending only two evening films, the Chinese blockbuster, Aftershock (which, truth to tell, we found kind of cheesy in a Michael Bay sorta way, although we liked lead actress Jingchu Zhang, who we fell in love with last year in the film Night and Fog), and the quite extraordinary Spanish documentary, Garbo the Spy.
Prior to the screening of Aftershock on Thursday evening, the folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival announced Good Morning to the World! (Sekai, Good Morning!), directed by Hirohara Satoru of Japan, as the winner of the 17th annual Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema. It’d be safe to say that Mr. Satoru was excited about his win, as can be seen in Ariane Colenbrander’s photo of the award’s event.
This year, the Dragons and Tigers jury was comprised of Bong Joon Ho (The Host, Mother), Quebec-based producer-director Denis Côté and Jia Zhangke, whose 1998 film Xiao Wu was a Dragons & Tigers winner. Mr. Côté presented the award, along with a cash prize of $10,000.
We’ll likely post more later on today.
In the meantime, though, if you’re looking for something to see on Friday, you couldn’t possibly go wrong with a 2:30 p.m. screening of the captivating Polish film Reverse, or a 4:15 p.m. screening of Cell 211, one of the most powerful films we’ve seen at this year’s Festival.
As for ourselves, we’ll be taking in an 11:40 a.m. screening of Chicks (see picture above), and a 9 p.m. screening of Thomas Arslan’s In The Shadows, one of the buzz films at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Although we intend to catch a couple of screenings early in the day on Saturday, VanRamblings will be returning to our ‘regular work’ later on Saturday through until late Monday night, to return to the Festival first thing on Tuesday morning (probably even more tuckered than we are now but, hey, somebody’s gotta dedicate their life to film … hmmm).
