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.
No Other Land
Deemed by many critics one of the essential films of 2024, a multiple festival award winner and Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, No Other Land is a reminder that mass expulsion is by no means a new reality for Palestinians.
Flow
In this wordless and gorgeously atmospheric animated feature, a solitary black cat survives a tsunami and must confront his fear of water whilst sailing through a flooded world with a group of misfit animals. An enchanting adventure film for all ages. Rated: G
7 Beats per Minute
While attempting a world record freedive in 2018, Jessea Lu lost consciousness and stopped breathing for four minutes. Years later, Jessea returns to the site of her near-death experience, ready to dive again and become reborn.
Misericordia
Edgy, eccentric, and unapologetically queer, this film goes from drama to comedy without putting a foot wrong. Sex and murder are the subjects, and writer-director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) mines them for suspense and outrageous laughs.
The Stand
This rousing doc explores a 1985 dispute over logging in the Haida Gwaii. Taking us from canny retrospective commentary to the thick of the action, director Chris Auchter employs animation and a wealth of archival footage to riveting effect.
Julie Keeps Quiet
When her coach falls under investigation for inappropriate behaviour, a young tennis ace is thrown into turmoil. Her reluctance to testify about her experience puts her at odds with the club, her parents and her friends.
Grand Tour
A prizewinner at Cannes, the latest from the director of Tabu is a playful Asian travelogue, set in 1918 and now, in black and white and colour, a critique of colonialism, and a journey into the history of cinema itself.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
After finding her uncle's dead body on the roadside by a brothel, Shula grapples with her Zambian family's sanctification of a monstrous man. This darkly comedic absurdist drama was a prize winner at Cannes for director Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch).
I'm Still Here
Walter Salles (Central Station; Motorcycle Dairies) adapts the 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, an account of a family torn apart by the "disappearance" of a former congressman at the hands of the military dictatorship in Brazil, 1971.
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.
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
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
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.
Rumours
Guy Maddin and the Johnson brothers are back with an audacious and fantastical political satire about a G7 meeting descending into supernatural chaos and disaster. Luckily Canada's PM (Roy Dupuis) is on hand to save the day...
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The Chef & the Daruma
The inventor of the California Roll, chef Hidekazu Tojo helped bring sushi to mainstream popularity through his renowned Vancouver restaurant, Tojo's. The Chef & the Daruma is a mouthwatering film touching on immigration, identity, and reinvention.
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Physician, Heal Thyself
One of the world's foremost experts on addiction and trauma, Dr Gabor Maté shares not only his theories, but also his own story: his difficult childhood in Hungary and his long years of therapeutic practice in and around Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
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Inay (Mama)
Bold and deeply personal, Inay investigates the emotional and psychological repercussions of Canada's Live-In Caregiver Program, which attracted Filipino women migrant workers who left their children to care for strangers out of economic necessity.
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Queens (Reinas)
Early 1990s Lima, Perú. Charming absentee father Carlos “El Loco” Molina tries to earn his way back into his daughters’ lives before their mother moves them to Minnesota. A tender family drama, Reinas won the Generation Kplus Grand Prix at Berlinale 2024.
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The Girl With the Needle
A young seamstress finds herself abandoned and pregnant in post-WWI Copenhagen. With few options, she turns to a candy shop owner who offers special services to women in need, but who is not quite what she seems. Nightmarish expressionist cinema.
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The End
Set in a deluxe bunker two decades after environmental collapse, the first dramatic feature from Joshua Oppenheimer (Act of Killing) is an unironic musical starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay. The cult starts here.
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So Surreal: Behind the Masks
In the early 20th century many traditional Indigenous masks ended up in Europe, in museums and art collections, and, as this entertaining doc reveals, in the hands of surrealist artists like Max Ernst, André Breton, and Joan Miró...
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All We Imagine as Light
What Wong Kar-wai did for Hong Kong, Payal Kapadia does for Mumbai: the Cannes Grand Prix winner is a romantic heartbreaker about three nurses at different stages of life. It's a future classic.
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Luther: Never Too Much
There is a lot more to soul superstar Luther Vandross than his honeyed hits. This definitive doc sheds light on his work with artists including David Bowie, Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin, his struggles with his image and sexuality, and remarkable gifts.
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Paying For It
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 Brown's subsequent decision to start paying for sex.
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Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat
In January 1961, seven months after Congolese independence, Patrice Lumumba is assassinated. In excavating the history of this political murder, this essay-film traces the complex and unlikely intersections of American jazz and Cold War geopolitics.
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Emilia Pérez
When a defence attorney (Zoe Saldana) is enlisted to tend to the affairs of a notorious drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) completing gender affirmation surgery, there will be blood, ballads, and dance numbers. A maximalist musical from Jacques Audiard.
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A tense mystery and an act of radical protest, this film tells the story of an Iranian lawyer who’s lost his handgun and knows someone in his family took it. With every moment, his wife and daughters grow more afraid of him–yet none of them will confess…
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Armand
When six-year-old Armand is accused of abusing another boy, his mother is called in for a school meeting. Bracing and bold, this is a lacerating drama from writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel (the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann).
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