Vancouver International Film Festival reveals full program, opening with live-accompanied Ari's Theme
Canadian highlights include Oscar contender Universal Language and The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, with Mexican closer Emilia Pérez
VIFF opener Ari’s Theme.
Canadian Oscar contender Universal Language.
Portrait Series’ Modernism, Inc.
THE VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL will launch September 26 with Ari’s Theme, by local filmmakers Jeff Lee Petry and Nathan Drillot, it announced today in a full program reveal. Eight members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra will live-score select passages within the artfully made documentary film; it spotlights B.C. composer Ari Kinarthy, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, and his dream of creating a heroic score.
“No one will see this film the way we will present it on opening night,” said director of programming Curtis Woloschuk at today’s festival announcement. The event was held in VIFF Centre’s just-renovated main theatre, which boasts new surround sound and a cutting-edge 4K laser projector. The theatre is now the most technically advanced movie house in Western Canada, Fostner said, likening it to “a single gallery space on which they [filmmakers] can hang their work”.
In all, the 43rd annual fest will screen 150 features (including more than 70 premieres) and 81 shorts, with a strong contingent of local and national films, and entries from as far away as China, South Korea, India, Poland, Spain, and Thailand. At today’s press conference, executive director Kyle Fostner and Woloschuk highlighted themes of music (with several big presentations featuring live performance), resilience, colonialism, and the fight by women against oppression in Iran.
The closing film will be Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, which Woloschuk calls a “maximalist musical” crime comedy that was a hit at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival; it follows a Mexico City defence attorney (Zoe Saldana) handling the affairs of a notorious drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) in the midst of gender affirmation surgery.
Special guests in this year’s VIFF Talks speaker series will include Mad Max production designer Colin Gibson and Longlegs filmmaker Osgood Perkins.
Noteworthy Canadian offerings include Universal Language, Matthew Rankin’s quirkily absurdist Winnipeg comedy-drama that has created huge festival buzz abroad and was just selected as the Canadian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. Elsewhere, iconic late singer-songwriter Gord Downie’s brother Mike Downie screens the sweeping documentary series The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal; four surviving members of the band are due to speak at the opening screening marking 40 years of the beloved group. Also on deck, director Sook-Yin Lee presents Paying For It, her adaptation of Chester Brown’s autobiographical 2011 graphic novel, set in a comedic turn-of-the-millennium Toronto and chronicling the end of his relationship with Lee; and Canadian filmmaking icon Guy Maddin joins in the Canada-Germany production Rumours, made with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, and starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, in which world leaders get lost in foggy woods at the G7 while trying to tackle a global crisis.
VIFF closer Emilia Pérez.
Amid the locally made offerings, Burnaby-based Haida filmmaker Christopher Auchter will debut The Stand, a National Film Board–produced archival documentary. Drawn from more than 100 hours of footage and audio, the film documents the fall of 1985, when a small group of Haida people blockaded a muddy dirt road on Lyell Island to block loggers. “He’s used footage from the mid-’80s to allow his own perspective of an Indigenous person, that when you see it in the light of this day is extremely racist journalism,” Woloschuk commented.
Vancouver writer, filmmaker, and visual artist Ann Marie Fleming (Window Horses), meanwhile, debuts her first film in eight years: Can I Get a Witness?, starring Keira Jang, Joel Oulette, and Sandra Oh, is a live-action and animated feature set in a future where technology and travel are almost completely banned, and nobody is allowed to live past age 50.
Other noteworthy B.C. films include the world premieres of Jerome Yoo’s Mongrels; Liz Cairns’s Inedia; and Mads K. Baekkevold’s The Chef & the Daruma, about the life of internationally acclaimed Vancouver chef Hidekazu Tojo.
Elsewhere, Vancouver-based Yuqi Kang sees the local premiere of 7 Beats Per Minute, a coproduction of Ina Fichman’s Intuitive Pictures and the NFB that portrays Jessea Lu (Lu Wenjie), a Chinese freediving champion who had a brush with death. The fest also sees the Vancouver premiere of Amanda Strong’s NFB short Inkwo for When the Starving Return; the Michif/Métis artist, filmmaker and producer, who lives in Sechelt, has crafted this stop-motion animated piece about a gender-shifting warrior.
Amid the special series, PORTRAITS focuses on artists, great performances, and cultural icons. It includes Modernism, Inc., a documentary exploring the life and work of influential mid-century architect and designer Eliot Noyes; the world premiere of Viva Niki—The Spirit of Niki de Saint Phalle, an ode to the American sculptor and painter; and Googoosh—Made of Fire, about the iconic pioneer of Iranian pop culture.
International must-sees include Sean Baker’s Palm d’Or–winning Anora, an America comedy-drama about a exotic dancer’s beleaguered romance with the son of a Russian oligarch; German director Matthias Glasner’s darkly funny Dying, which took Berlinale’s Silver Bear; Conclave, director Edward Berger’s much-anticipated psychological thriller starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini; and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a film about an Iranian state investigator, grappling with paranoia and political unrest in Tehran, whose family becomes involved in anti-hijab protests, by now-exiled director Mohammad Rasoulof—The Guardian dubbing it “brazen and startling”.
VIFF had earlier this summer announced its Special Presentations and a VIFF Live program of screenings mixed with live music performances, including appearances by Jeremy Dutcher and Elisapie. Now, it’s added a major new show to that roster: Eno, the world’s first AI-live-generated documentary, celebrating the visionary artist and musician Brian Eno with a wealth of unseen archival footage. The screening September 29 at the Vancouver Playhouse will be followed by a Q&A with director Gary Hustwit and guests.
Another big concert event in collaboration with the VSO is a performance by Oscar-winning South Asian movie composer A.R. Rahman, best known in North America as the force behind Slumdog Millionaire’s memorable score. An Evening with A.R. Rahman: Stories and Music from His Career takes place at the Orpheum on October 5.
“This is a major, major event for VIFF—a once-in-a-lifetime presentation and a wonderful expansion into our partnership with the symphony with top-tier composers,” Fostner said.
VIFF has also brought in several special-guest curators, including Zarrar Khan, the filmmaker behind last year’s impressive In Flames, who will introduce each of his chosen movies at the Cinematheque.
Tickets are on sale now to VIFF+ Members at viff.org, and will be available to the public from August 29 at 12 pm. 
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