Women Directors
Edhi Alice: Take
Kim Ilrhan's doc explores the lives of two trans women. Alice is a lighting director who dreams of becoming a dancer; Edhi is a counsellor preparing for gender-affirming surgery. The film is notable for its honesty and its wealth of detail.
Landmarks
Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary is a haunting portrait of land, violence, and resistance. With rare access to trial footage and the Chuschagasta community, Landmarks reframes a 2009 murder within centuries of Indigenous dispossession in Argentina.
Blue Heron
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.
Meadowlarks
Fifty years after being separated during the Sixties Scoop, four Cree siblings reunite for the first time on a long weekend trip to Banff. Tasha Hubbard’s sensitive drama relates an emotional and life-affirming story of kinship and belonging.
Rental Family
In his first lead role since The Whale, Brendan Fraser plays a lonely American actor in Tokyo who lands a gig at a "rental family" agency, offering stand-ins for real world situations. Need a pretend boyfriend or funeral mourner? Brendan's your man.
Blood Lines
In this emotional second feature from filmmaker Gail Maurice (Rosie, VIFF 2022), a proud lesbian Métis journalist struggles to reconcile with her estranged mother, while a new entanglement with a captivating stranger threatens to upheave their lives.
2: Memory & mediation
Shorts from: Canada, France, Lebanon, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Syria, USA.
Dead Lover
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.
Akashi
In Mayumi Yoshida’s tender drama, struggling artist Kana journeys to Tokyo to attend her grandmother’s funeral. While there, she reconnects with her childhood love and stumbles across a family secret that prompts her to reconsider her place in the world.
Mile End Kicks
In this fresh, quirky rom-com from director Chandler Levack (I Like Movies, VIFF 2022), a young music critic (Barbie Ferreira) searches for her voice as a writer in Montreal while falling head over feet for two members of the same indie rock band.