VanRamblings has, perhaps, overstated the “new direction” of the VIFF.
For, in reality, the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival is the same well-programmed festival of heart and conscience, as ever, offering a Cinema of Despair, and an unparalleled insight into the human condition, and as ever holding out the thrilling possibility of hope for much better.
There is no better example of the thesis above than the first two films which were on offer as advance festival screenings this past Wednesday morning & early afternoon at VIFF’s year-round home, the Vancity Theatre on Seymour, for members of the press, industry folks and passholders.
Documentarian Jane Magnusson’s warts-and-all biography of the flawed, mad genius of Swedish film, the incomparable Ingmar Bergman, examines the problematical personal history of one of the world’s most cherished and prolific filmmakers. Who among us could not love 1957’s Wild Strawberries, the achingly wise exploration of the life of a self-absorbed old doctor (Victor Sjöström) who quietly steps back into the slipstream of humanity while traveling to receive an honorary degree; or The Seventh Seal (also produced in 1957), in which a man (Max von Sydow) seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper, a film which stars the young & beautiful Bibi Andersson, Bergman’s fifth wife and muse, who would star in more than a dozen Bergman films.
Filmgoers & lovers of film will be provided the opportunity to see Bergman: A Year in the Life at no other time than at the always splendid 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival — offering all the more reason for you to set about to purchase your tickets for this penetrating documentary, about which Owen Gleiberman, Variety’s lead film critic, writes, “(Magnusson’s documentary) captures Bergman as the tender and prickly, effusive and demon-driven, tyrannical and half-crazy celebrity-genius he was: a man so consumed by work, and by his obsessive relationships with women, that he seemed to be carrying on three lives at once.”
The second VIFF advance screening of the day was introduced by Alan Franey, VIFF’s Director of International Programming — who told those of us gathered in the Vancity Theatre, that he did not and has not resigned from the festival, but instead has given up the day-to-day administrative tasks that consumed a good portion of his life for a quarter century, to focus on his first love: programming the best in world cinema.
And so Alan has, and so he will continue to do, a calm, warm, articulate, unruffled renaissance man of spirit, humility and uncommon intelligence.
Arantxa Echevarría’s Carmen & Lola, which Alan brought back from Cannes this year, is the perfect, low-production value, trenchant and moving slice-of-life-drama that Alan, as a person of heart and conscience, has so long loved, a vibrantly realized story of two teenage Roma gypsy girls that proves to be a spirited addition to the ‘coming out as gay in a repressive culture’ genre, a queer awakening drama buoyed by wildly sympathetic performances from the principles of the film’s title, an authentic evocation of life in Madrid’s scruffy satellite towns, and a perfect example of the informing intelligence and defining ethos of the Vancouver International Film Festival: a humane and hopeful, and a heady, compassionate, joyful, deeply felt and transcendent window on our too often troubled world.
