Films to Watch at Vancouver's VIFF Centre in June

Tom, what are some of your film highlights in June?

It’s National Indigenous History Month so we have lot of indigenous programming spread across the month, including Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again, which recently played at the Doxa Film Festival. It tells the story of how the Nechako River in BC was dammed to generate hydroelectric power for an aluminum smelter in the 1950s. At the time, the First Nations on that stretch of river weren’t even allowed to protest and they’ve been mounting a legal case to try and get some redress for several decades. It’s quite a lyrical documentary about that fight, what the effects of the dam were, and the implications for the people who lived there.

We also have a terrific nonfiction animated comedy called Endless Cookie, which played at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It’s quite a challenging film to describe, but it’s about family and storytelling about how hard it is to make an animated documentary. Very left-field, very quirky, very fun.

What other film series are coming up?

We are doing a mini retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Masayuki Suô, whose best-known film was the 1996 version of Shall We Dance, later remade with Jennifer Lopez. This was one of the most successful Japanese films ever released in the US, and it’s a charming romantic comedy about a married ‘salaryman’, as they call him in Japan, who feels like there’s something missing from his life.

We’re showing it alongside the director’s two previous films from the early ‘90s, which are both broader comedies. Fancy Dance tells the story of a punk rocker who inherits a Buddhist temple, but only if he becomes a monk for a year. Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t is a classic Japanese underdog sports movie about the worst sumo wrestling school in Japan and how they salvage it. We’re also showing that one as part of a VIFF Live event with the Chen Baker band performing some classic J-pop. That film, funnily enough, was recently turned into a Disney+ comedy series.

We also start our newest Film Studies series on June 11, which is one component of a much bigger series that is going to run in parallel throughout the summer. The series charts the evolution of American screen acting from the end of World War II up until Raging Bull in 1980, which is in a way, the apotheosis of method acting. So, the method is really at the heart of this series — the impact of people like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. Directors like Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, and predominantly across the 1950s-60s and beyond.

It was a fascinating social period for American culture at that time, shifting from an entertainment mode towards something that’s more self-questioning, a little more challenging, and a little more serious. It’s also the end of the studio system, which was built around stars and filming on back lots. Audiences wanted something truer to their own experience. I think the war had a profound impact on the American psyche, and that one of the expressions of that was cinema that became more interested in psychology and inspired a wave of acting that was more about working-class authenticity and not about glamour. That’s the big change.

This is all a part of our larger summer series Getting Real: The Arc of American Screen Acting, which will run until the end of August. It will chart the development of American film acting through the decades, starting with Alfred Hitchcock, who notoriously said that actors should be treated like cattle. We go from there to A Streetcar Named Desire, where it’s really all about the acting. Director Elia Kazan’s approach couldn’t be further from Hitchcock’s idea of the director storyboarding every frame and the actor being told what to do.

What VIFF Live events are coming up?

Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger is being scored live by Chris Gestrin on June 7. Also, Chen Baker’s band is back for the live performance I mentioned before screening Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t, and a fantastic local violinist called Jesse Zubot is performing a solo concert on June 28 alongside a screening of the new BC film Inedia, which was filmed on Salt Spring Island with his brother. Jesse’s done maybe a dozen film scores over the last five years. He’s in real hot demand, so it’s going to be an interesting chance to see him up close.

Thanks 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.