What's On
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
Riefenstahl
This fascinating documentary is a complex, sad portrait of Adolf Hitler's favourite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, whose 1938 film Olympia is deemed a masterpiece in some circles, and who spent her last half century disowning her Nazi sympathies.
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.
Breathless
In anticipation of Richard Linklater's extremely cool Nouvelle Vague (VIFF's opening gala), this is an opportune moment to revisit Godard's iconic debut feature, a criminal romance about a petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) on the lam with Jean Seberg.
Clearcut (Tribute to Graham Greene)
As a tribute to the beloved Graham Greene, we're screening one of his personal favourites, an intense, subversive environmental thriller directed by the Polish filmmaker Ryszard Bugajski.
Plainclothes
New York, mid 90s. An undercover cop used as bait to entrap homosexuals secretly suspects he's gay himself. Coming out could cost him everything...
The Glassworker
In this romantic, Ghibli-esque animated feature a young apprentice glassblower falls in love with a violinist. But his father is a pacifist, while hers is a colonel in the military, and the country is on the verge of war...
The Blue Trail
In a near-future Brazil, elderly citizens are forcibly relocated to live out their days in a senior housing colony. When 77-year-old Tereza learns that she will soon be taken away, she embarks on a fantastical odyssey into the Amazon.
Orwell: 2+2=5
Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck reimagines 1984 in this urgent essay on power, language, and control. With narration by Damian Lewis, it’s a chilling portrait of how Orwell’s warnings became our reality.
The President's Cake
Winner of the Caméra d’Or and Director’s Fortnight Audience Award at Cannes, Hasan Hadi’s fable-like drama set in 1990s Iraq follows an impoverished child's quest into the city to scrounge up ingredients for birthday cake for Saddam Hussein.