Vancouver International Film Festival announces full program for September 28 to October 8
Opening with Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves and closing with Tran Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu, it’s a year of complexity and striking imagery
Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves.
THE VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL Film Festival unveiled the full lineup today for its epic 42nd edition, which runs from September 28 to October 8. The event opens at the Park Theatre with award-winning Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, a simple yet visually striking love story about two working-class people.
Known for the deadpan comedy, timeless imagery, and melancholy-infused style of his films Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki delivers an of-the-moment piece marked by details such as radio broadcast clips of the Ukraine invasion.
Closing out the festival is Vietnamese-born French director Tran Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu: its’s a romantic, taste-tingling dedication to the culinary arts that comes exactly 30 years after Hùng’s debut film, The Scent of Green Papaya, screened at VIFF.
Kyle Fostner, VIFF’s executive director, shared at a press conference this morning that the festival made its final selection of 138 feature films and 93 shorts after considering over 5,000 submitted and sourced films. As a result, an impressive array of 70 countries are represented in the chosen flicks, with 76 different languages that can be heard on screen.
“This year’s festival is very much in that vein—it has a very solid end-to-end program,” Fostner said. “It’s not a year where we’re depending on one or two titles of significant starpower to carry the festival. Every single title brings something to the complexity and to the tone of the program itself.”
Films that share local stories are abundant at this year’s festival, with 32 Canadian features and 50 Canadian shorts on the lineup. Four Vancouver-produced documentaries are premiering, including Jamila Pomeroy’s Union Street, a celebration of Black community-building in Vancouver through the lens of historic downfalls like the destruction of Hogan’s Alley.
The Northern Lights series, which centres Canadian and Indigenous storytellers, presents such works as Corey Payette’s Les Filles du Roi, a musical in English, French, and Kanien’kéha (Mohawk); Seagrass, director Meredith Hama-Brown’s exploration of a crumbling relationship and lacking family connection in the aftermath of death; Banchi Hanuse’s Aitamaako’tamisskapi Natosi: Before the Sun, a thrilling, dangerous portrait of a young Indigenous woman’s bareback horseback riding; and plenty more.
Tran Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu.
There are two all-new series to keep an eye out for at this year’s festival. The first is Leading Lights, which allows a Canadian filmmaker to present a curated selection of international films that have influenced their artistic journey; and the second is Focus, in which a guest programmer chooses a theme to guide cinematic exploration.
Actor-director-producer Anthony Shim (Riceboy Sleeps) is the inaugural Leading Lights curator, presenting four films that have impacted his life: A Woman Under the Influence, Dust in the Wind (戀戀風塵), Joint Security Area (공동경비구역 JSA), and Peppermint Candy. Fay Nass, founder and artistic director of Aphotic Theatre, helms the Focus series with their chosen theme Women, Life, and Freedom. The five films centre Iran’s revolutionary battle for women’s justice, exploring the lasting impacts of patriarchy and misogyny.
The kaleidoscopic Portraits series switches gears to 10 films that spotlight art and creatives. Highlights include Call Me Dancer, a seven-year follow-along of Manish Chauhan’s journey from a hip hop dancer in the streets of Mumbai to becoming a classically trained ballet dancer; and Sculpting the Giant, a chronicling of an Indonesian sculptor’s opposed effort to build the largest copper and bronze statue in the world. There’s also the Canadian premiere of Wim Wenders’s Anselm, a 3D documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer, and Alexandria Bombach’s It’s Only Life After All, a peek into folk-rock band the Indigo Girls’ 40 years of collaboration and friendship.
This year also features several much-anticipated Special Presentations (announced last month), and five interesting VIFF Talks—including Welcome to Barbie Land With Sarah Greenwood & Katie Spencer (a conversation with the production designer and set decorator of this year’s record-breaking film Barbie), and Building the Closet of Oppenheimer with Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick (featuring insights on costume design for period pieces, as seen in the equally as popular Oppenheimer).
“It’s really been a long process, but such a rewarding process, to take this wealth of film—this bounty of film, these 5,000 individual works—and try to assemble a program where the films can exist in dialogue with each other,” said VIFF’s director of programming Curtis Woloschuk this morning. “Each film you watch in succession can enrich the ones you’ve seen previously.”
The films will screen across seven different Vancouver venues, including this year’s main flagship location, the Vancouver Playhouse.
Tickets are on sale now for VIFF+ members, and beginning September 7 at 12 pm for the general public. The full festival schedule, and links to purchase tickets, are at viff.org.
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