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Festival Encores

Whether you missed a movie at VIFF, or want to give a title a second look, here’s your chance. Catch these audience favourites as they return to the big screen.

Calle Málaga

Dir. Maryam Touzani
116 min

Seventy-nine-year-old María Ángeles lives independently in Tangier's Spanish quarter. When her daughter pressures her into selling her apartment, she refuses to give in, finding in her old age a new resilience and an unexpected romantic connection.

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2:15 pm
Sun Apr 05
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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8:10 pm
Sun Apr 05
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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3:15 pm
Mon Apr 06
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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Two Prosecutors

Dir. Sergei Loznitsa
119 min

In the midst of Stalin’s purges, a naïve prosecutor sets out to investigate a prisoner’s innocence, unaware of the labyrinthine bureaucracy awaiting him. A Kafkaesque procedural thriller about the pursuit of justice in the face of corruption.

Image: © SBS Productions

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4:45 pm
Sun Apr 05
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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5:45 pm
Mon Apr 06
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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5:30 pm
Wed Apr 08
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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The Blue Trail

Dir. Gabriel Mascaro
86 min

77-year-old Tereza makes a break for the Brazilian jungle in this trippy septuagenarian fantasy, the latest from Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro is a quirky picaresque, lushly photographed and filled with mordant humour.

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7:20 pm
Sun Apr 05
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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3:00 pm
Mon Apr 06
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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7:50 pm
Tue Apr 07
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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Agatha's Almanac

Dir. Amalie Atkins
86 min

Shot over six years on vibrant 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is an artful documentary portrait of filmmaker Amalie Atkin’s octogenarian aunt, who has fashioned herself an endearingly simple and self-sustaining lifestyle on her Manitoba farm.

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1:45 pm
Fri Apr 10
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
First Look Fridays Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance
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1:45 pm
Sat Apr 11
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Hearing Assistance
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6:40 pm
Sat Apr 11
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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The Art of Adventure

Dir. Alison Reid
90 min

The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.

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4:00 pm
Fri Apr 10
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Hearing Assistance
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11:45 am
Sat Apr 11
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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12:30 pm
Sun Apr 12
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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Follies

Dir. Eric K. Boulianne
101 min

After two kids and 16 years of marriage, François and Julie decide to open up their relationship in a bid to rekindle their dwindling sex life. A painfully hilarious and brutally honest depiction of love, sex, and intimacy in the age of the internet.

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6:10 pm
Fri Apr 10
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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8:20 pm
Sat Apr 11
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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5:00 pm
Sun Apr 12
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes

Dir. Jenn Strom
82 min

A beautiful portrait of E.J. Hughes, who quietly helped reshape the artistic landscape of British Columbia in the 20th century. This extraordinary documentary explores Hughes’s legacy not only as an artist, but as a devoted, humble human being.

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2:50 pm
Sat Apr 11
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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5:45 pm
Tue Apr 14
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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Modern Whore

Dir. Nicole Bazuin
80 min

In director Nicole Bazuin's cheeky, stylized documentary, Modern Whore-memoirist Andrea Werhun (Paying for It) recounts her experiences as an escort and stripper in Toronto, debunking misconceptions about the world’s oldest profession.

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6:10 pm
Sat Apr 11
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance
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5:55 pm
Mon Apr 13
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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3:00 pm
Thu Apr 16
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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Palestine '36

Dir. Annemarie Jacir
118 min

An epic historical drama from director Annemarie Jacir that follows an ensemble of rural villagers who face off against British colonial forces during the 1936 Palestinian revolt.

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1:30 pm
Fri Apr 17
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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5:00 pm
Mon Apr 20
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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3:20 pm
Tue Apr 21
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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Paying for It

Dir. Sook-Yin Lee
85 min

Talk about a hall of mirrors! Sook-Yin Lee wittily adapts the graphic novel of the same name by her ex-boyfriend, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown, about the end of their relationship and Brown's subsequent decision to start paying for sex.

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6:30 pm
Fri Apr 17
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance
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Dead Lover

Dir. Grace Glowicki
83 min

A foul-smelling gravedigger's romance ends in tragedy, spurring her to attempt a resurrection through a madcap series of science experiments. Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie’s film is a zany DIY horror that zaps fresh life into Mary Shelley's classic.

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9:00 pm
Fri Apr 17
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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8:30 pm
Sat Apr 18
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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8:30 pm
Mon Apr 20
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
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Fucktoys Advance Screening + Annapurna Sriram Q&A

Dir. Annapurna Sriram
106 min

Bold, irreverent, and fiercely queer, Fucktoys plunges into a world where pleasure, performance, and identity collide. This special advance screening comes with a Q&A with filmmaker Annapurna Sriram.

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8:30 pm
Tue Apr 21
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance

The Lives of Others

Dir. Florian Henkel von Donnesmarck
137 min

This month's Talking Pictures film is a masterly Cold War thriller set in East Berlin. An agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives...

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11:00 am
Tue Apr 28
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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Blue Heron

Dir. Sophy Romvari
90 min

In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island. Their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behaviour from Jeremy, the family’s oldest child.

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2:00 pm
Fri May 08
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
First Look Fridays Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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6:30 pm
Fri May 08
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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12:30 pm
Sat May 09
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
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The Mother and the Bear

Dir. Johnny Ma
100 min

Johnny Ma’s film stars Kim Ho-jung as a Korean woman who flies to Winnipeg when her immigrant daughter is hospitalized there. This crowd-pleaser plays up cultural differences to hilarious effect and offers a touching take on mother-daughter tension.

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11:30 am
Sun May 10
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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6:30 pm
Sun May 10
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
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Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Dir. Anna Hints
89 min

Within the confines of a smoke sauna deep in an Estonian forest, groups of women gather to cleanse themselves in both body and soul, sharing in traditional sauna-based rituals, while also revealing their hurts and longings, joys and pains.

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The Things You Kill

Dir. Alireza Khatami
113 min

Thirty-something professor Ali leads an apparently stable life. But when his ailing mother dies under ambiguous circumstances, he starts to unravel, resulting in an act that shatters our understanding of his person.

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The President's Cake

Dir. Hasan Hadi
105 min

Nine year old Lamia and her friend Saeed venture into the city to scrounge ingredients for a cake to celebrate Sadaam Hussein's birthday — a quest fraught with real peril in precarious times. Winner, Camera d'Or, Cannes.

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Women Talking

104 min

Sarah Polley's adaptation of Miriam Toews' novel is the most compelling movie to come out of the #MeToo movement to date, with stellar performances from Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy, as Mennonite women confronting a terrible truth.

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Happy Together

Dir. Wong Kar-Wai
96 min

Buenos Aires, the end of the world, 1997. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung are lovers trying to hash out their on-off relationship in an alien environment.

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