Tag: Vancouver International Film Festival

Full coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival, from every year that we have covered it.

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VIFF ’21 Review: ‘Night Raiders’ draws on Canada’s dark past to imagine a dark future

Night Raiders

Canada has a certain reputation that we like to uphold. We’re viewed as America’s nice neighbour, as the reasonable ones. The thoughtful and the multicultural ones. If you’re from here, though, you know that Canada’s reputation is not as deserved as we would like you to think it is, and we have a dark history of racism and colonialism that persists to this day.

This is the history that writer and director Danis Goulet draws on to imagine the post-apocalyptic world of Night Raiders, one in which the legacy of Canada’s treatment of indigenous people –and the Residential School system in particular– is drawn out to its logical darkest endpoint.

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Heads Up: The 2021 Vancouver International Film Festival starts this week!

VIFF 2021 Festival_Header

Good news everyone! This week the Vancouver International Film Festival returns for its 40th year, and we will be covering it! This will be Matt’s sixth and Simon’s second time covering the festival, and we are excited to be back. This year’s festival is a hybrid, with both in-person screenings and once again also to viewers across British Columbia via VIFF Connect!

The festival runs from October 1st to 11th, and you can find coverage on the site starting tomorrow, September 30th. Follow along with the VIFF 2021 tag!

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I made a list of film festivals

Film Festivals

He friends, I made a thing. I made a list of upcoming film festivals for my own reference, and I figured that others might find it useful, too. I know there are ways to find this info, but I like having it all in one big list, and I figure I can’t be the only one. 

This list is by no means exhaustive; it’s just the festivals that are presently on my radar. If you were wondering: yes, there are way too many for anyone to attend them all. If you know of a festival that I don’t have here, please feel free to shoot me an email or @ me on Twitter.

The list is presented in chronological order. Expected dates are present whenever they’re not available, and those dates are my guesses. I will do my best to keep this up to date on a monthly-ish basis. 

You can find the list here. I hope you find it useful.

-Matthew

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VIFF 2020: Favourites from the festival with Thomas from ForReel Movie Reviews and Leanne from QMFM!

The 39th Vancouver International Film Festival is officially ended! It was a great festival and well-executed given the current state of the world. Before the festival started, Thomas from ForReel Movie News & Reviews talked on Zoom about our most anticipated films of the festival, and this week as the festival drew to a close, I once again joined him, along with Leanne McLaren of 103.5 QMFM, to talk about our festival favourites.

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VIFF Review: Beans is a coming of age story set against a horrible, true, Canadian backdrop of violence

Beans

In 1990 a developer was permitted to expand a golf course and build condominiums in Montreal. Straightforward enough on the surface, but the land they wanted to build on was the ancestral land of the Mohawk people of that region. They had been attempting to make a land claim there for years, but with that claim not being in place at the time, they were not even consulted, nor would the municipal government even speak to them about it.

I am sure I am missing all the nuance and detail of this story, but the result of this was a 78-day standoff between the Mohawk people and the government that resulted in one death and over 100 wounded, mainly on the Mohawk side. This is the Oka Crisis.

It is a truly Canadian story and a black mark on our record of dealing with First Nations peoples, which is mostly just a series of black marks. This is the story of Beans, the new coming of age film by Tracey Deer.

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VIFF Review: ‘Time’ is an unforgettable indictment of the American justice system.

Time

There is a saying: if you do the crime, you do time. It’s a popular one in certain circles, but it raises one question for me: who, exactly, determines how much time each crime is worth?

In the first frames of Time, Sibil “Fox Rich” Richardson is a young woman. Fresh out of jail, she reunited with her children and expecting two more. Instead, she has served three and a half years for driving the getaway car for her husband as he robbed a bank, a sentence she received by taking a plea bargain. Her husband, Rob, who did not accept a plea, receives 60 years, or what will most likely be the rest of his natural life.

Who decides that 60 years is an appropriate sentence for a bank robbery? I don’t have an answer to that question. I can tell you that in the absence of any death, 60 years is too much. The fact of the matter is that in many ways, and for many people, the American justice system is centred not around rehabilitation but punishment. Who is being punished with that 60-year sentence, though?

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VIFF Review: ‘The Curse of Willow Song’ highlights the bad side of Vancouver

The Curse of Willow Song

The downtown east side of Vancouver is a ghetto. We don’t like to admit that, but it is. There are many issues, and there’s no easy conversation or solution, but the result is that there is a whole segment of the population that is challenged, exploited, and abandoned.

The Curse of Willow Song takes place in the downtown eastside of Vancouver and follows a recovering addict and ex-con as she tries to navigate life in single room occupancy housing, a difficult job market, and discrimination at every turn. It also follows the journey she takes as the latent supernatural powers within her.

The issue is that while one of these stories feels complete, the other one does not.

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VIFF Review: ‘In the Name of the Land’ is a melancholy tale about life on a modern farm

In the Name of the Land

Farming is hard work. I don’t know that those of us who live in the cities and suburbs really appreciate that all the time. The food we buy at grocery stores often ends up there due to many people doing backbreaking labour seven days a week.

We tend to think of farming as a simple life, but in truth, modern farming is anything but. As corporate interests push further and further into the market, they make it harder and harder for farmers to get ahead, all the while profiting off the sweat of the working man’s brow. That might sound like hyperbole, and it is, but it’s also true.

If you still aren’t convinced, In the Name of the Land is here to set you straight. Édouard Bergeon’s generational family drama tells the story of a man struggling to stay afloat as the world changes around him. It is a melancholy tale, with an excellent central performance, and despite being set in France, it feels like it rings true everywhere that corporate interests are involved in farming.

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Patron Exclusive: Helen Shaver Video Interview

Helen Shaver / Happy Place

Hey team! This year at VIFF I have taken on a few interviews. The first of them was with Canadian director Helen Shaver to speak about her first feature film, Happy Place.

I conducted that the interview via Zoom, and now as a bonus Patrons at the Lieutenant level and higher can watch the video.

Keep your eyes on this space for more patron exclusives. This week I should have a review of The Haunting of Bly Manor available to patrons at least two days ahead of running it here on the site. If all goes to plan that will be the case for some other content, too.

Thanks to everyone for your ongoing support.

Matthew

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VIFF Review: ‘My Salinger Year’ is a fine coming of age tale

Margaret Qualley / My Salinger Year

You have seen this story before. A young, bright-eyed person has to New York City to pursue their artistic dreams and gets waylaid in a job adjacent to their dreams in the meantime. It has been told so many times before that I doubt you could count them, so it takes a lot to stand out.

My Salinger Year, based on the memoir of the same name by Joanna Rakoff, has everything going for it. An up and comer in Margaret Qualley in the lead role. A major star in Sigourney Weaver in the main supporting role. It is set in a nostalgic period, recreated in exquisite detail. What a film like this needs to become truly great is that certain extra something, the Je ne sais quois that can make something add up to more than the sum of its parts.

This film does not have that. But that’s not an indictment because the film is perfectly lovely as it is, adding up to exactly what it is.

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VIFF Interview: Curtis Woloschuk, VIFF Associate Director of Programming, on the changes and challenges of hosting a festival in a pandemic

Curtis Woloschuk

There’s no denying that 2020 has been an abnormal year for film, and film festivals are by no means exempt from that. I sat down with Curtis Woloschuk, associate director if programming for the Vancouver International Film Festival, to talk about this years festival moving online and other challenges of hosting a festival during a pandemic.

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VIFF Review: ‘Women in Blue’ is a good look at why reforming the police may be a lost cause

Women in Blue

It is easy to see what drew documentary filmmaker Deirdre Fishel to the Minneapolis police as a subject. At the time Women in Blue starts chronicling their story, the first female police chief, Janée Harteau, has been sworn in and has made it a point to promote women to positions of leadership. Women, Harteau points out, now occupy a position in every level of the department.

Following the shooting death of Jamar Clark in 2015 by Minneapolis it becomes apparent that something needs to be done. Protesters occupied the local precinct following the Jamar Clark shooting for 18 days; an event that helped Harteau understand the need to detoxify the police beyond her own experience of fighting back against a workplace hostile to women.

What’s incredibly frustrating about this story is that while it’s focussing on the story of Harteau, along with four other female police officers at various ranks in the organization and the misogyny they face, the story of the institutional racism within the police force is playing out in the background seemingly unobserved. Harteau says that the policing needs an update for the 21st century, but she also ended that 18-day protest at 4 am with 10 minutes notice and arrested anyone who didn’t vacate.

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VIFF Review: ‘Another Round’ has Mads Mikkelsen giving one of the best performances of the year

Mads Mikkelsen / Another Round

Most people have had, or will have, a moment like the one Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) is having at the start of Another Round. Coasting through life, disengaged from his work as a school teacher, the parents of his students organise an intervention because they know their children are going to be ill-prepared. Disengaged from his home life, exacerbated by his wife working nights as he is working days, or is that her choice because he is simply not present?

At dinner with four colleagues one night, following a confession that he knows he has lost something but can’t exactly put his finger on what, someone hypothesises that the human body has a 0.05% blood alcohol deficiency; that people are more relaxed, more confident, and better able to achieve when they are just slightly drunk. Martin and his friends decide to put this hypothesis to the test.

The idea of being slightly drunk all the time sounds like an appealing one, empowering even. The fantastic thing about having slightly less than two drinks is that it can feel like anything is possible[1]. The problem with having slightly less than two drinks is it leads to the urge to have slightly more than two drinks.

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