Celebrate Canadian and Indigenous Storytelling
VIFF is proud to champion and showcase Canadian and Indigenous filmmaking. The VIFF Centre is a vital hub for this storytelling, presenting over 60 Canadian features in 2024 alone. Today, this commitment is more important than ever. Only Canadian filmmakers illuminate the values, experiences, and stories that define the special character of this place we proudly call home.
3-Ticket Pack: $42
Canadian Film Week spotlights 18 features, including six Vancouver premieres and four brand new films from BC filmmakers, most of whom will join us for Q&As. The lineup also features returning classics, new favourites, and free screenings on National Canadian Film Day.
National Canadian Film Day, April 16 | Free Screenings
Velcrow Ripper and Cari Green join VIFF for the 20th anniversary screening of their non-fiction film ScaredSacred, a special tribute screening to producer Tracey Friesen. And director Sandy Wilson will introduce her coming of age classic My American Cousin, which marks its 40th anniversary this year.
Sweet Summer Pow Wow
After the local hit The Great Salish Heist, writer-director Darrell Dennis proves his versatility with this charming love story about two young people who meet cute on BC's Pow Wow circuit. Her mom wants her to become a lawyer, but Jinny loves to dance...
The Decline of the American Empire
Friends from the History Department at the University of Montreal come together for a dinner party. While the men prepare the meal, the women work out at the gym. In both groups, the conversation returns repeatedly to sex...
Village Keeper
In Karen Chapman’s sensitive debut feature, a widowed mother desperate to shelter her teenage daughter and son from a surge of gun violence in Toronto takes it upon herself to cleanse the blood from crime scenes in her Lawrence Heights neighbourhood.
The Barbarian Invasions
Arcand's belated sequel finds his erstwhile "sensual socialist" facing terminal cancer and trying to make peace with his financier son. This is one of the most acclaimed Canadian films ever made, garlanded all over the world.
Incandescence
Filmed across the Okanagan before, during and after several devastating fires by veteran non-fiction filmmakers Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper (Metamorphosis; ScaredSacred), Incandescence is a mesmerizing cinematic contemplation of the power of wildfires.
Crocodile Eyes
Drawing on home movies and her immediate family relations, Ingrid Veninger sets out to make a film comprising 100 "real moments": birth, death, and the in-between. Minutes mundane and momentous, personal histories, memories shared.
Universal Language
In a wintery, Farsi-speaking city that’s equal measures Winnipeg and Tehran, storylines entangle and the concepts of space, time, and identity grow increasingly opaque. Inventive and absurd, Rankin's poetic fable reminds us that Winnipeg is a wonderland. Rated: G
The Players
In this intense semi-autobiographical debut feature, teenager Emily (the remarkable Stefani Kimber) joins an experimental theatre troupe led by the charismatic Reinhardt (Eric Johnson). It will be a rite of passage fraught with menace.
Field Sketches
A Vancouver architect (Vincent Gale) goes into a midlife tailspin when his business fails and his younger girlfriend walks out. Trying to get back on track, he resolves to tough out a Saskatchewan winter on the farm where he and his brother grew up.
Young Werther
"Based on the smash hit 1774 novel of tragic romance," as the opening text declares, this delightfully arcane Toronto rom-com is one of the most unexpected debut features of the past year, and a low-key triumph on top.
Are We Done Now?
Down River director Ben Immanuel returns with a wry, self-aware Covid comedy in which a socially distant Vancouver documentarian checks in with a stressed-out therapist (Gabrielle Miller) and several of her patients over the course of the pandemic.
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story
An R&B star who eclipsed Etta James and Little Richard, trans soul singer Jackie Shane blazed an extraordinary trail with an unbreakable commitment to her truth. Forty years after vanishing from public view, this lost icon finally gets her second act.
Seven Veils
Haunted by disturbing memories Jeanine allows her repressed trauma to reshape the present as she re-enters the opera world in order to remount her former mentor's most famous work, Salome. Atom Egoyan's latest is a fractured mirror of abuse and catharsis.
Image: © Amanda Matlovich
Matt and Mara
Featuring terrific performances from Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson, this is a film that buzzes with vitality. In exploring the fraught, ambiguous relationship between two writers, director Kazik Radwanski produces indelible, deeply relatable moments.
Who by Fire
Jeff, a 17-year-old aspiring filmmaker, goes on vacation with his friend Max and his family to an isolated lodge. Philippe Lesage’s film is a tense, mesmerizing tour de force that is both agonizing and cathartic. A Berlinale award winner.
Tea Creek
Join food activist Jacob Beaton for this special screening of a documentary about his Indigenous food sovereignty and trades training initiative at Tea Creek, in northern BC.
ScaredSacred
In the wake of 9/11, BC filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Incandescence) embarked on a global pilgrimage, visiting ground zero in Manhattan and other sites of disaster and devastation, seeking out seeds of hope and spiritual regeneration.
My American Cousin
Sandy is 12 and bored. Enter Butch in a screaming red Cadillac. He's 16 going on James Dean and about the most exciting thing to hit Penticton since rock-n-roll. Sandy Wilson's first feature -- 40 years young -- is a Canadian coming-of-age classic.