Films to Watch at Vancouver's VIFF Centre in December

What’s coming up at the VIFF Centre in December?

This month at the VIFF Centre, the emphasis is on fun. We are doing the new Wallace & Gromit movie, Vengeance Most Fowl, daily from December 18 right through to the end of the month. It’s 35 years since Nick Park introduced us to Wallace and Gromit, and I think it’s around 15 years since their last film, so it’s really lovely to have them back. The film’s delightful, charming, and funny, and will work for all ages.

Also screening pretty much every day over the holidays, from December 20, and also classified for all ages, we’re showing a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo. This is a very big budget adaptation out of France by the screenwriters and directors behind the Three Musketeers films that we showed last year. This is one of the greatest adventure stories ever written, and the movie is a blast. It’s three hours long, but it just gallops by, and you kind of wish it was longer.

Each December VIFF does our annual Best of the Year series – a list of the top 10 films of the year. How do you choose these films, and which ones stood out to you?

I try to put together a program that highlights the exciting work coming from all angles of the globe, which is something that VIFF has always championed – a kind of global view of culture. So we’ve got About Dry Grasses from Turkey. We’ve got The Monk and the Gun from Bhutan. And we’ve got, inevitably, three or four American films, but they’re all independent films that probably wouldn’t be what you would predict.

So there’s Good One, the first feature by India Donaldson, which is a very simple story of a teenage girl going camping with her father and his best friend. And the film just deserves to be seen more widely. It’s a perfect film. I think in its 90 minutes, it doesn’t put a foot wrong.

I’m also excited to share I Saw the TV Glow. There’s a Twilight Zone feel to it. It’s about two teenagers who are kind of misfits, and they bond over their shared obsession with this weird supernatural TV show that is clearly inspired by Buffy. The girl begins to insist that the show is bleeding into her reality, and then she disappears, and you don’t know why. It cuts forward 15 years in time, and the boy is growing up to be married and have a kid and a job and a very normal life and… and it all cracks apart.

And then there’s Challengers, the tennis sex comedy. It pretends to be a sports movie, but it’s not really about sports. It’s about sex. And it’s very funny. An amazing piece of craftsmanship, very stylish, amazing score. Lots of fun.

And maybe my favorite film of the year, Close Your Eyes, which is a Spanish film by Victor Erice, another of the old masters who hasn’t made a film for a long time, like 30 years or something. We showed that film in the New Spanish Cinema series in January, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything better all year.

Do you have a favourite Canadian film of the year?

This film is going to be playing over the holidays several times, and I think it’s the best Canadian film of the year. I didn’t include it in the Best of the Year series, but if we weren’t already showing it multiple times, I probably would have – it’s called Who by Fire, and it’s a Quebecois film about a filmmaker. He’s got a big house out in the middle of nowhere in the woods and has invited his old screenwriting partner to come up for the weekend with some other people. It’s about the tensions between these two artists who used to be really tight, and now they kind of kind of resent each other. And there are teenagers who’ve come on the trip as well, and they’re playing out certain romantic disagreements.

It’s a formidable piece of filmmaking with maybe four or five long, extended sequences that are almost mini films in themselves, single-take scenes that last five to ten minutes. It’s an incredible choreography between the actors and the cameramen where these tensions kind of build up and up and up.

Thanks so much, Tom!

Tom Charity has been the year-round programmer at the VIFF Centre since 2009. He is the author of the critical biography John Cassavetes: Lifeworks, and has written or cowritten several other film books. A former film editor and critic for Time Out London magazine and CNN.com, he has also written for The Times and Sunday Times, the Vancouver Sun, and many other publications. He contributes to Cinema Scope and Sight & Sound Magazine on a regular basis.