Here we are with less than one week to go before the commencement of the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, and you can almost feel the palpable excitement in the air as the many thousands of VIFF patrons anticipate what may become the best local film festival in years.
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Clicking on the graphic above will take you to all of the VIFF 2019 columns VanRamblings has published to date, where we’ve written about the most anticipated films set to screen at this year’s festival.
Today’s post will be our second to last pre-festival VIFF 2019 column — we’ve got an extensive, barn burnin’ column ready to go early next week. You’ll want to return to read that VanRamblings post next Tuesday.
Note: Anytime you see a link on the line where VanRamblings publishes the date, time and place that a VIFF screening is set to take place, if you click on the link in that line, you’ll be taken to the VIFF 2019 page for detail on the film, and an opportunity to purchase tickets for that particular film.
Who’s that good lookin’ fella on the right (decidedly not his politics, for they don’t come any more progressive, left and activist than Tom) in the graphic above? Yep, that would be Tom Charity, a celebrated VIFF programmer and the genius (is there any other word that might be used? we think not!) involved year-round in programming VIFF’s home cinema venue, the comfortable, welcoming and humanely programmed Vancity Theatre.
Each year for the past decade, working on behalf of VIFF, Tom has traveled to Toronto to attend the Toronto International Film Festival with the mandate to add a film or two from TIFF not already programmed into that year’s VIFF festival. On that count, Tom has more than succeeded this year in bringing Trey Edward Shults’ Waves as a late addition to the programme for VIFF 2019. As it happens, and as you might well imagine, Waves is one of Tom’s three favourite TIFF films (out of 10) that will screen at VIFF 2019.
Emerging at the top of Tom’s TIFF favourites list, as the indefatigable Mr. Charity writes in the online VIFF programme guide …
The third feature from Trey Edward Shults (Krisha; It Comes at Night) catapults him into the front ranks of new filmmakers. This tremendously cinematic movie puts us in the head of Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr), a high school athlete who seems to be on the fast track to success — but whose drive (instilled by a dedicated but overbearing father) is his undoing. When things go awry, bad decisions pile up like wrecked cars, and there will be an accounting, not only for Tyler but for everyone who loves him.
Shults vividly conveys the intense pressures on young men and women on the cusp of adulthood, and how precarious sporting promise really is. But Waves goes much deeper and further than that, exploring the destructive properties of the male ego, and the damage that reverberates across families and generations. Audacious and passionate, this is one of the most soulful and artistically daring movies since Moonlight.
Waves will screen once, at noon, at The Centre, on Sunday, October 5th.
Sitting at #2 on Tom’s TIFF favourites list, perhaps the most controversial film set to screen at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, The Painted Bird, Václav Marhoul’s “stunning adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s controversial 1965 novel/memoir” caused mass walkouts when it screened at the Venice Film Festival, and more than a few walkouts at TIFF, for this blistering, bracingly defiant and emotionally plangent film that is rife with uncompromising, unvarnished brutality (murder, rape, torture, bestiality) that, as Sheri Linden writes in her THR review of the film, “doesn’t begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.”
The Czech Republic’s entry this year in the Oscar Best International Film Festival category, The Painted Bird screens twice at VIFF 2019, both times at The Playhouse, at 9pm on Saturday, September 28th, and again on Monday, September 30th, at 2:15pm. Don’t say you haven’t been warned!
And the third of Tom Charity’s TIFF favourites set to screen at VIFF 2019 …
Noah Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, wowed ’em at both the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, and at this point is the odds on favourite to win Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, among other probable Oscar wins, tracks the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple — played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson — negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. It’s as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving. Marriage Story will screen at The Centre, 8:45pm, Thursday, October 10th.
Scarborough (Grade: A-). Featuring parallel, cross-cutting stories of illicit teacher-student affairs drive this spare, dangerously charged British drama adapted from Fiona Evans’ award-winning play. At the same seaside hotel in Scarborough, two couples spend a weekend away from their regular lives and prying eyes, where both couples laugh, quarrel and lustily make love.
Fifteen year old Beth (Jessica Barden) is a student so young that she packs a teddy bear backpack for her trip with her art teacher, Aiden (Edward Hogg). Similarly, 30-something Liz (Jodhi May), in a decidedly darker and much more forboding story, has snuck away with teenage Daz (Jordan Bolger). As the weekend progresses, each couple discovers that it isn’t just the rules of the outside world that could end their relationships.
As written, produced & directed by auteur filmmaker Barnaby Southcombe, Scarborough refuses to judge its characters, but makes his stance clear with the overt sensuality and raucous fidelity of the sex scenes. Gorgeously well-wrought (Ian Liggett’s lambent cinematography, Daniel Pemberton’s low-key score, and the director’s revelatory, slow burn atmospheric pacing contribute to making this a VIFF 2019 must-see), Scarborough may prove tough viewing for some given its transgressive approach to the film’s subject material, but as Screen Daily records, Scarborough is “intriguing, and at times unsettling film fare … an intelligently slippery study which positions the audience in the grey area between empathy and complicity.”
Scarborough screens twice at VIFF 2019, both times in Cinema 9 at the International Village, at 6:45pm on the evening of Tuesday, October 1st, and for a final time at 1:30pm in the afternoon, on Thursday, October 3rd.
Wrapping up today’s VIFF 2019 VanRamblings column …
Well, it took awhile, but the good folks at VIFF are finally able to say that director James Mangold’s propulsive new film, Ford v Ferrari — tracking the surly, testosterone-fueled glory of two of auto racing’s most celebrated progenitors, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles’ (Christian Bale), both of whom for years raced cars at Daytona and Le Mans — will screen as a Special Presentation on the final day of VIFF 2019, on Friday, October 11th at 6pm at The Playhouse.
Also take note, TIFF Audience Award winner, Jojo Rabbit will screen at VIFF 2019 just once, as a Special VIFF 2019 Presentation, at 6:15pm, on Wednesday, October 2nd, at The Centre.
Tickets, ticket packs and festival passes are on sale and available at the Vancity Theatre box office on Seymour Street from noon til 7pm Monday thru Saturday, and 2pm til 7pm on Sundays. Consult your programme guide (available free of charge all over town) or call the Festival Infoline, noon til 6pm daily, at 604-683-3456, for more information.
