Boost your festival experience with a refresher course on nine of the international auteurs whose work is making waves this year.
School of Rock
With not one, but two new Richard Linklater movies at VIFF this year (Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon), we thought it would be fun to revisit a choice cut from his rich back catalogue: the best Black and White movie ever made, School of Rock.
A White, White Day
In a remote Icelandic town, an off-duty police chief begins to suspect a local man of having had an affair with his late wife, who died in a tragic accident. Intense psychological drama from the director of Godland and The Love That Remains.
Down By Law
In this slowburn comedy from Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits and John Lurie are surly jailbirds who share a cramped cell with Roberto Benigni's Italian tourist, with transformative results. Jarmusch is back at VIFF this year with Father, Mother, Sister, Brother.
Mystery Train
Three oddball tales centered on a single seedy Memphis hotel, this may be the most accessible and purely enjoyable Jarmusch movie, a bittersweet evocation of crumbling Americana, haunted by the ghosts of rock n roll.
Right Now, Wrong Then
A visiting filmmaker arrives a day early for a festival screening. He meets and courts a painter (Kim Minhee) and spends the evening with her. Halfway through, the movie starts over: Same people, same places, significantly different outcomes.
On the Beach At Night Alone
Kim Minhee (The Handmaiden, Right Now, Wrong Then) plays Younghee, an actress reeling in the aftermath of an affair with a married film director (an echo of her relationship with Hong in real life.)
August Winds
A film of quietly unfolding sensual pleasure: Shirley (Dandara de Morais), a gorgeous young woman, is in the countryside taking care of her aging grandmother when her diver boyfriend discovers a skull in the ocean. Then a corpse washes ashore...
Afire
Christian Petzold (Transit; Phoenix) returns with this multilayered, serio-comic portrait of a sulky writer struggling with his novel at a friend's summer cottage. An impending deadline guarantees he'll be miserable but not that he'll get any work done.
Image: © Marco Krüger-Schramm
Other People's Children
The luminous Virginie Efira (Madeleine Collins) stars in this affecting portrait of a teacher whose biological clock is ticking. Rachel falls in love with Ali (Roschdy Zem), but their relationship is complicated by his four-year-old daughter Leila.