VIFF celebrates the season with Wes World, Best of 2022, December Docs
Tribute to Wes Anderson’s witty oeuvre kicks off with a party December 21
The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Holy Spider.
Vancouver International Film Festival is featuring trio of festive offerings all this month.
WES WORLD: 10 Films by Wes Anderson
December 21 to January 5
Welcome to the marvellous, melancholy cinema of Wesley Wales Anderson, 10 rueful comedies, 1996-2021, bittersweet tales of eager dreamers and disappointed over-achievers; frauds, failures, foibles and follies. Anderson is unique, a supremely playful aesthete whose movies remind us that, sometimes, Style is Substance. Wes’s world is wittier, prettier, infinitely more amusing than our own, which is why we are drawn to revisit these flights of fancy even as we recognize the regret running through them.
The Wes World series launches with an Opening Night Party on December 21, where fans can join the VIFF crew for a festive celebration with Anderson’s classic romp The Grand Budapest Hotel. Filmgoers are invited to dress up in their best Wes Anderson-inspired costume. There will be prizes, trivia, a poster gallery, and an exclusive WA cocktail. Doors open at 6:00pm; film at 7:15 pm, with tickets $25 (includes drink ticket). Tickets are at https://viff.org/series/wes-world/.
Best of 2022
VIFF’s annual Best of… series is a chance to look back at the year that was and celebrate some of the most acclaimed and popular movies released in cinemas these past 12 months. This year’s showcase includes just two U.S. movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once; Marcel the Shell With Shoes On). Elsewhere, look for two from Iran (Hit the Road and a taboo-breaking thriller, Holy Spider, even if Ali Abbasi’s film is technically Danish); Charlotte Wells’s heartbreaking souvenir of a holiday with her father, Aftersun; the uproarious Swedish Cannes-winner Triangle of Sadness; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s hallucinatory meditation on sound, memory, and history, Memoria; and Park Chan-woo’s South Korean noir romance Decision to Leave. From Nunavut, VIFF champions Nyla Innuksuk’s spirited teen girls-versus-zombies horror flick, Slash/Back, a genre movie with a fresh Indigenous spin. And finally, on New Year’s Day, the astonishing Indian blockbuster RRR takes its spot as the most fun at the cinema this year. Tickets are at https://viff.org/series/best-of-2022/.
December Docs
In September this year, the jury at the Venice Film Festival chose All the Beauty and the Bloodshed as the winner of the top prize, the Golden Lion. The award was well-deserved. Laura Poitras’s film is a compelling piece of cinema, artfully balancing Nan Goldin’s life and work, her photography and her political activism to ask important questions about culture, capitalism, class and creativity. But this is far from the only note-worthy non-fiction film showing at the VIFF Centre this month. VIFF is also delighted to bring back Kat Jayme’s The Grizzlie Truth, which won the Special Presentations Audience Award at VIFF in October. Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude won the Best Canadian Documentary award at VIFF, and at Hot Docs earlier this year, as well as two prizes at Berlin. Meanwhile Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes won two prizes at Sundance, and David Siev’s Bad Axe won an Audience Award and a jury prize at SXSW.
Elsewhere, the powerful expose Tantura has been described as “the best documentary ever made in Israel”, while the extraordinary Nelly & Nadine is among the nominees for European Documentary of the Year. Then there’s Hidden Letters, about the secret ancient script Nushu, known only to Chinese women, which won the top doc prize at the Heartland Film Festival just last month. And not forgetting Revival 69, which hasn’t won anything, but only because it’s so new no one has seen it yet. On the music front, in Neil Young: Harvest Time, the musician revisits never-before-seen footage from the recording of his Harvest album fifty years after its release. Songs include “Old Man”, “The Needle and the Damage Done”, and “Heart of Gold”. Tickets are at https://viff.org/whats-on.
Post sponsored by Vancouver International Film Festival.