Films to Watch at Vancouver's VIFF Centre in January

We’re hitting the ground running in 2025 — New Spanish Cinema kicks off on Jan 3. What are some standout films from that series?

The film I personally am most excited about is They Will Be Dust. It stars Ángela Molina and Alfredo Castro — she plays a theater diva, he plays a director, and they’re a couple. She has a terminal illness and wants him to help her commit assisted suicide, and he elects to end his own life at the same time. Their children are horrified, as you might imagine. The film is interspersed with musical numbers, predominantly dance numbers, which you wouldn’t expect from that scenario, but the comedy, the music, dance and the drama are all interwoven, and it’s very accomplished. So I recommend that.

We’re also doing a very charming movie called Little Loves by Celia Rico, which is about the difficult relationship between grown up woman and her elderly mom. It’s over the course of a summer that they spent together trying to paint the old lady’s house.

The new series Citizen Artist Activist… Lino Brocka runs Jan 10-16. What’s the story behind that series?

It is a tribute to the Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka, who worked from 1970 till his death in 1991 in a car accident. He predominantly worked through the dictatorship in the 1970s and he made 60 feature films in those 20 years. He is an incredibly interesting person. He was gay, poor, became a Mormon, then worked for 18 months in a leper colony in Hawaii for the Mormons, which was a profound influence on him. Then he went back to the Philippines, renounced Mormonism, became a filmmaker, and churned out popular melodramas, which are what the local market demanded.

Interspersed with these, he made half a dozen hard hitting political, social melodramas that were deeply critical and honest about the conditions of the poor, of women, and of marginalized peoples, flying in the face of the image that the Marcos dictatorship wanted to present.

These films got picked up and noticed in international festivals. He had the first Filipino film ever invited to Cannes, he won prizes, and made what is considered the greatest Filipino film of all time, Manila in the Claws of Light. We’re showing three of those political films, and we’re doing a live event with Manila in the Claws of Light — a jazz pianist called Victor Noriega, of Filipino descent, is doing traditional Filipino music with a six person band.

I’m so excited for our upcoming Bong Joon-ho retrospective — Bong 1-7. What can audiences expect?

We’re doing all seven of his feature films, from Barking Dogs Never Bite, which came out in 2000, up to his Academy Award-winning Parasite. On that weekend, Saturday and Sunday, we’re going to show all seven films in a symposium setting with half a dozen academic speakers introducing all the films, so you can binge the films or you can watch them spread out across the week.

All of his films are good. Some of them are masterpieces. Clearly, Parasite is one of them. Memories of Murder is the other masterpiece. Mother is sorely underrated — a great, great film. And The Host is the most popular South Korean film ever made to this day, and it’s great fun. It’s a monster movie inspired by films like Jaws, but still subversive and political. All of his films are very funny and packed with action and spectacle.

We’ve discussed series — what’s one non-series film that you would highly recommend everyone sees this month?

Vermiglio, which is Italy’s nomination for Best International Film in the Academy Awards. That is a first feature by Maura Delperro. It’s set in an alpine village towards the end of the World War II, and has astonishingly beautiful cinematography, a vivid, authentic sense of village life at that time. It tells the story of a teenage girl who falls in love with a returning war hero who has decided he doesn’t want to go back to the front. I think it’s got a very good chance of being nominated. It’s excellent.

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.