Films to Watch at Vancouver's VIFF Centre in May

Tom, what are you most excited about in May?

We have a season dedicated to one of my favorite actresses, one of the greats, Gena Rowlands, who sadly passed away last year. Her reputation is based on the half dozen movies she made with John Cassavetes. I want to avoid the trap of thinking of her as a muse, because she was much more than that. She’s an actress of extraordinary courage and sensitivity, and she made him a better writer and filmmaker than he would have been otherwise.

I think when he realized how great she was as an actor, it led him to delve deeper into women characters, and even the feminine side of himself in a way that is unique in American cinema. Some standouts are Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, and Gloria, a film we’re showing on Mother’s Day. In Gloria, she plays the girlfriend of a gangster, who hates kids, and she ends up on the run from gangsters protecting a six-year-old boy. She was Oscar-nominated for that and for A Woman Under the Influence.

We also have a retrospective, Compassionate Light, dedicated to the Tibetan Buddhist filmmaker Pema Tseden. He made eight features between the early 2000s and when he passed away in 2023. It’s by far the most significant body of work to come out of a Tibetan filmmaker. This is a series that was curated by Shelly Kraicer. He presented this retrospective in Toronto and in New York prior to bringing it here. Shelly will be here for the first weekend of that series as well.

Another guest curator, Fay Nass, will be introducing a five-week series exploring queer cinema and that will kick off from May 15 and will be running on Thursdays into June.

What’s one film that is not part of a series, but shouldn’t be missed?

Kryptic, on May 9, is a BC horror film. It’s the first feature by female filmmaker Kourtney Roy, and it’s an impressive work. A woman disappears in the woods when she was searching for a creature. Another woman goes out in search of her and has a strange encounter with the beast, which causes her to lose short term memory. The film gets weird in the second half, but in a great way. This was all filmed near Hope, BC.

Cayne McKenzie wrote the score for this film — some of our VIFF+ members may know Cayne from the talks he’s given at the VIFF Centre in the past. He and Kourtney Roy are going to live-score the movie for us on May 9. I’m so excited about that.

What other VIFF Live events are coming up?

On May 14, Mary Ancheta will be doing a tribute to a funk cinema from the 1970s called Betty Davis. She’s an incredible talent, kind of funk. It’s kind of somewhere between Tina Turner and Donna Summer, and quite sexual. Dawn Pemberton is going to be coming in and doing the vocals, Mary Anchater is on keyboards, and we’re showing a documentary about Betty Davis with it.

On May 24, we are showing the documentary Blue Note: Beyond the Notes which we showed here at the festival back in 2018 and it’s about the famous jazz label Blue Note. Blue Note is one of the most celebrated of all the jazz labels from the Bebop era, and we have a quartet who are going to be performing music associated with that incredible legacy. Lots of good stuff there.

Thanks for the insight, Tom! See you at the cinema.

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.