The 44th edition of the annual Vancouver International Film Festival might spring into action later this year, running in October as opposed to late September like years’ prior, but curators are promising the program is worth the wait. The festival, pushed back to provide some breathing space from the Toronto International Film Festival, will run Oct. 2-12 and will spotlight 170 features and 100 shorts at 13 venues throughout the city. According to Curtis Woloschuk, director of programming at VIFF, determining what films would make the cut was “no small feat,” and involved whittling the final selections down from 5,000 potentials. “I encourage people to take their Saturday morning and take a deep dive into (the VIFF) website, because I’m really, really proud of what our teams put together this year in terms of the calibre and the breadth of the lineup,” he says. Taking centre stage will be the Canadian premieres of a number of films by renowned, international directors. They include the new Noah Baumbach film Jay Kelly, a coming-of-age tale about a famous movie actor that stars a number of famous movie actors (George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern and Greta Gerwig are on the billing) and Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, a comedy drama anthology with Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett that follows the reunion of long estranged siblings. Paolo Sorrentino’s 10th feature film La Grazia will be showcased after world premiering as the opening film of the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, and Daniel Craig and Rian Johnson’s will return with the third installment of their British murder mystery lineup Knives Out with Wake Up Dead Man. Radu Jude’s off-kilter, three-hour-long Dracula spoof and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, with a performance from Rose Byrne that has garnered much praise online this year, were both announced as part of VIFF’s sneak peek earlier this month. Outside of the commercial hits, the festival will continue international offerings via its annual Spotlight Series - this time focusing on Korea as the country of choice. Major works by Korean directors like Park Chan-wook and Hong Sang-soo will join a lineup of films from emerging directors. As far as local talent is concerned, theatre-goers can expect to see twelve B.C. feature films, several with Vancouver filmmakers at the helm. While each has been chosen for their unique storylines, there is a recurring theme running throughout, says Woloschuk, that echoes the city’s melting pot nature. “A number of those are diasporic narratives that see people now situated in this part of the world,” says Woloschuk. “The films look at their immediate family or another generation of their family and where they hailed from, how they are now looking to determine their own identity in relation to their family heritages.” Among those plots include one that follows a struggling artist who returns to Tokyo after 10 years spent living in Vancouver, a documentation of one Vancouver filmmakers’ exploration of her Hakka Chinese family history, and a coming-of-age documentary tale that follows three teenagers in post-war Bosnia as they chase Olympic dreams. Woloschuk says guests can expect the “shiny baubles,” the marquee attractions that are on most film lovers’ must-view lists, alongside more confronting pieces that resonate with audiences in terms of “showing them an aspect of the world, or an aspect of humanity that perhaps they haven’t encountered previously.” Audience members in Vancouver love popcorn flicks as much as they do avante-garde cinema, says Woloschuk. They are politically attuned, “very well schooled in cinema,” and have a “real sense of adventure” that is unique to those residing in the Hollywood North. Last year’s edition of the festival showcased a “really heartening development” in the amount of audience members who showed up to consume the meatier, more thought-provoking documentaries, he says. The audience members, too, were more varied in age and background than expected, even in a time of straight-to-streaming cinema. Wolochuk says he continues to witness younger audiences attend the VIFF’s year-round cinema events, particularly the repertory cinema and focused series that showcase flicks from the 90s or 70s. “They have seen these films, but they’ve never seen them with an audience before,” he says. “The opportunity to come into the VIFF center or The Cinematheque, and to be able to watch these films with other people, and talk about them together, is a very different thing (to watching at home),” he says. It’s why Wolochuk says he has no fear of dwindling audiences, even in the face of changing audience habits and an evolving film industry. He’s still seeing the “lingering of people in atrium spaces and lobby spaces after a screening” and the desire to make movie-going an event rather than a quotidian activity best carried out from the sofa. There’s this pride, too, he adds, in being one of the first to see a much talked about film. The ability to dive into and dissect the plot weeks, if not months, before others can see it in the mainstream cinema or on their TV’s. This year’s Vancouver International Film Festival will close with Köln 75, a German film that premiered in Berlin earlier this year. The musical follows the true story of Vera Brandes, a 16-year-old promoter who harnesses her youth and rebellious spirit to stage a concert for jazz giant Keith Jarrett. Despite race-against-the-clock efforts and an almost-failure of the show, its recording ultimately becomes one of the biggest, best-selling jazz albums of all time. A fitting end, muses Woloschuk, to a festival strung together by dozens of volunteers and staff, fueled by nothing but a devout love for the arts.
