The 43rd annual Vancouver International Film Festival, running from September 26th thru October 6th
In this second of a series on the upcoming Vancouver International Film Festival, as we did last Friday, once again today we will present four more films for you to put on your VIFF 2024 film schedule, films to take in and appreciate, films you will love, and films that will change your life immeasurably for the better.
All We Imagine As Light
Saturday September 28th
9:30pm, Vancouver Playhouse
Tuesday October 1st
3pm, Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets available online for the Saturday screening. Just click on this link.
Tickets available online for the Tuesday screening. Just click on this link.
Grand Prix winner, Cannes 2024
In last week’s edition of the IndieWire Screen Talk podcast, co-host Anne Thompson — for 40 years a luminary in the film business, the beloved editor of what was once upon a time the recognized standard in journalistic film coverage, Premiere magazine, and long Hollywood’s most accurate Oscar prognosticator — Anne Thompson enthusiastically expressed that All We Imagine As Light is her favourite film this year, the film she enthused: “an exquisite, spellbindlingly hypnotic, and poignantly lyrical symphonic film that transcends form and style, and a film of enriching humanity and gentleness, languorous eroticism, joy and sadness, presented throughout with an epiphanic, captivating beauty rarely seen on film.”
All We Imagine As Light relates the story of the lives of three women nurses who are front and centre in director Payal Kapadia’s luminous Mumbai-set drama. Prabha works long hours to avoid thinking about her husband, who left for Germany long ago and eventually stopped calling, while two of her colleagues are struggling with troubles of their own. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes this year (an historic first for an Indian film), the film offers a moving portrait of resistance and camaraderie, and a VIFF 2024 film that finds beauty and solace in the unlikeliest of places.
No Other Land
Saturday, September 28th
3:30pm, SFU Woodwards
Tuesday, October 1st
6:30pm, Fifth Avenue Cinema
Auditorium 3
Tickets available online for the Saturday screening. Just click on this link.
Tickets available online for the Tuesday screening. Just click on this link.
Best Documentary Award, Berlin 2024
A vital and wrenching documentary about Israel’s often barbaric efforts to expel a Palestinian community, co-directed by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, No Other Land offers a ground-level view of an occupation in action in this must-see, award-winning documentary.
A painfully human story, the film tracks Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta on the southern West Bank, and the mass expulsion of his community that has been his lifelong reality. Faced with the systematic demolition of homes and schools, carried out to make room for an Israeli military training ground, residents confront a painful choice: either move away and relinquish their land or endure and try to rebuild.
With the help of Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, Adra documents the evictions and organizes protests against them, even as the pair’s unequal personal situations hang over their work together. No Other Land is a vérité project and a witness testimony. It operates within the logic that visual evidence will galvanize the public to acknowledge the brutality faced by Palestinians.
Given the conditions of its production, No Other Land would be vital even in a more ragged form. But the filmmaking here is tight and considered, with nimble editing that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself. The intense, jolting impact of the film’s intense sequences of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation — often shot on phone cameras, to the consternation of army officials, and violent enough to shock many complacent fence-sitters on the issue into angry awareness — is balanced with more composed, observational scenes of Adra, his family and his neighbours trying to live an everyday life on ground that keeps getting pulled out from under them.
Hope is fading that the next generation might retain their ancestral land; if they do, they’ll likely inherit Adra’s activism with it.
John David Washington and Skylar Smith in Malcolm Washington’s Telluride hit, The Piano Lesson.
The Piano Lesson
Monday September 30
6pm, Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets available online. Just click on this link.
Denzel Washington executive produces an adaptation of a major American play by August Wilson, directed by one son (Malcolm) and starring another (John David).
A world première at the just wrapped 2024 Telluride Film Festival, where the film débuted to an appreciative reception, Wilson’s tome centres around a unique piano currently under the watch of Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler), a single mother who lives in a Pittsburgh home she shares with her Uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson reprising his Tony Award-nominated performance). Her relative peace is disturbed by the arrival of her brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his slightly naive friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) from Mississippi. She soon discovers that Boy Willie’s intentions do not align with her own.
At its core, The Piano Lesson is about a family attempting to come to terms with the long repercussions of slavery. Like almost all of Wilson’s work, it is a quintessentially American story peppered with characters that should resonate and spark conversation for decades to come. And, like many of Wilson’s literary contributions, translating it into the medium of cinema was no easy task. That Washington’s adaptation is the most successful so far, and in the context of his first film, no less, should be duly celebrated.
The End
Friday, October 4th
9pm, Vancouver Playhouse
Sunday, October 6th
9pm, Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets available online for the Friday screening. Just click on this link.
Tickets available online for the Sunday screening. Just click on this link.
Another hit at the Telluride Film Festival arriving on our shores at VIFF 2024 in early October, Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon sing for their lives in Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic musical, as the director of the acclaimed and memorably bizarre nonfiction film, 2012’s The Act of Killing — an account of the genocide in Indonesia, in which he famously persuaded the killers to re-enact their crimes on camera in gaudy cinematic vignettes — leaps into fiction with this staggering meditation on how we live with ourselves at the end of the world.
For a film whose slow-accumulating power doesn’t fully sink in until its final moments (a sweet refrain that’s all the more arresting for its anticlimactic conviction), The End doesn’t waste any time to put its cards on the table. The world as we know it is over. Something — or a chain reaction of somethings, most of them presumably climate-related — has spread across the surface of the Earth, destabilizing human civilization and making our planet unlivable. Hey, maybe British Columbia’s climate change denying leader of our province’s Conservative Party, John Rustad, oughta take in a screening of this film — you never know … it could open his eyes, and save us from four interminable years of “There’s no climate emergency. It’s all a hoax” rhetoric, and maybe save our planet, and our children’s lives.
