Films to Watch at Vancouver's VIFF Centre in September

What are some of the highlights this month?

I’m excited about the Paul Thomas Anderson retrospective. We’re showing all his feature films except his new film One Battle After Another, which opens at the end of the month in Cineplex theaters right before our festival. I’m a big fan of his, and the fact that it dovetails on the 21st century modern classic series is perfect, because so many of his films could have been included in that series. He has this kind of epic sensibility which will look great on our screen.

We also have a new series, Prelude, running from Sept 1 to the end of the month. What inspired this series?

I almost wanted to call it ‘Fest Prep’. The idea is to enhance the festival experience by sharing some of the back catalog of nine filmmakers who are featured in the upcoming festival. These are typically films that played at VIFF in the past, either in the year round or the festival or both, but that nevertheless people may have missed. They’re modern classics too. Films like Jim Jarmusch’s early movies Down by Law and Mystery Train.

I think they offer interesting perspectives that will resonate against their latest works that we’ll be showing in October. For example, Richard Linklater has had such a long and prolific and varied career, so us screening Boyhood and School of Rock shows that range, plus he has two new festival films which are also completely different, one of which is the opening film, Nouvelle Vague.

Three’s also stand out work by Christian Petzold, Kelly Reichert, Hylnur Palmason… it’s such a rich festival. It whets the appetite for the smorgasbord of international film that the festival always brings.

What new releases are must-sees in the coming month?

The Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy will start on Sept 12. A year ago, we showed Sex. And then in the spring, we showed Love. We’re going to reprise those two films and then show the third film in the trilogy, Dreams. The films are all set in Oslo, and they all deal with contemporary relationships and sexual identity. They have different characters, but there are echoes and correspondences across the three so it’s going to be interesting seeing them back-to-back like this. But they’re also strong films individually, on their own terms, and I think Dreams is the best of them personally.

What’s one other film that you are excited for audiences to see?

I’m really excited about The Road to Patagonia, which was over a decade in the making. It’s a documentary about an Australian anthropologist’s journey from Alaska all the way down to the tip of Chile, down the West Coast. He starts off in a van, which, in the very first scene, suffers the first of a series of setbacks. He comes through Vancouver Island, falls in love with an organic farmer there, and he takes his surfboard and motorbike all the way down to Mexico. The Vancouver Island farmer joins him, and they continue the journey and eventually trade the motorbikes for horses. It’s a long, wild journey, but beautiful and quite political and spiritual. In a weird way, it feels like a very Vancouver Film.

What VIFF Live events are coming up this month?

We’ve got a stellar line up of live events in September right up to the festival. There’s Cory Weeds performing a tribute to Sonny Rollins with the documentary Saxophone Colossus. We’ve also got New York saxophone player George Garzone playing before the documentary Fire Music, which is about pre jazz. It’s the wildest jazz, for your hardcore jazz fan.

Then, Kit Eakle’s Jaz’n’theViolin String Band is paying tribute to the fiddle music and blues of the 1920s and 30s. It’s completely different, much more accessible, almost like folk. They perform before a documentary called Louie Bluie, which is a portrait of a blues musician. It’s also the first film by director Terry Zwigoff, who went on to make Crumb and Ghost World and Bad Santa. And that’s a portrait of a blues musician.

We have the Blue Horse Opera, a song cycle which was in part inspired by westerns. We’re pairing that with The Big Gundown, a spaghetti western from the late 60s when it was a very political, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist genre. It’s a really interesting film with a great Ennio Morricone score.

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.