Skip to main content
32 Sounds by Sam Green VIFF live event

Sam Green: 32 Sounds

Music by JD Samson

This event has passed

An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. The film will be at VIFF 2023 in its “live cinema” form at the Vancouver Playhouse, featuring live narration by Sam Green. Directed and performed by Sam Green, with music composed by JD Samson.

32 Sounds is a piece about sound, and the form itself will be focused on the experience of hearing and listening. 32 Sounds will provide headphones for every audience member to create an incredible binaural sound mix and add a new, deeply immersive element to the live documentary form.

 

Followed by a Q&A with Sam Green & sound designer Mark Mangini

 

A true original, Sam Green is a master raconteur. An endearing guide with a host of charms for encountering the many, many multitudes of ideas, artists, works of art, interviewees, and commentary that make 32 Sounds such a remarkable live cinema experience.
Impeccably researched, the work takes metaphysical stock, as it were, of the nature of ‘sound’ — its ability to profoundly shape our perceptions and sense of reality. 32 Sounds is Green’s latest live screen romp, here for VIFF LIVE 2023 with a special screening at the Vancouver Playhouse.
Green was last in Vancouver in 2014; the PuSh Festival screened The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Vogue to a packed house of raving enthusiasts. Similarly, 32 Sounds is a VIFF event not to be missed!

Norman Armour, VIFF Guest Live Curator

A relentlessly curious documentary. A wide-ranging meditation on sound and human memory. Heady and spine-tingling… engaging and richly visual. A 95-minute exploration that leapfrogs across several dozen scintillating surfaces.

Lindsay Zoladz, The New York Times

Sam Green’s 32 SOUNDS is a playful, thoughtful documentary… a delightful, joyous film that changes the way you look at — or maybe listen to — the world.

Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

Touches on sense memory…and it dares to tackle the question: If a tree falls in the woods, does it really make a sound?… probably the only movie to ever turn a Moho braccatus’s mating call into something that could move you to tears.

David Fear, Rolling Stone

 

Media Partner

Community Partner

Guest
Date

Oct 5

Time

7:00-8:30 pm

Venue

Vancouver Playhouse

Links
90 min

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Guest

Sam Green headshot

Sam Green

Sam Green (director, writer, editor) is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. Green’s most recent live documentaries include A Thousand Thoughts (with the Kronos Quartet) (2018), The Measure of All Things (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (with Yo La Tengo) (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements (2010). With all of these works, Green narrates the film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack. Green’s 2004 feature-length film, The Weather Underground, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, was included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.

Learn more about Green

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

Dir. Dean Fleischer-Camp
121 min

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a heartwarming film for all ages. Marcel, a tiny shell, lives with his grandmother Connie in a human house. When a filmmaker discovers Marcel, they team up to search for his long-lost relatives. Rated: G

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

The Wedding Banquet

Dir. Andrew Ahn
103 min

This joyful comedy cleverly updates Ang Lee's 1993 gay marriage comedy and transports the action to contemporary Seattle (actually, Vancouver).

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Tornado

Dir. John Maclean
91 min

Scotland in the 1790s, travelling circus samurai Tornado (Kōki) runs afoul of a band of murderous brigands led by Tim Roth and his ambitious son, Jack Lowden. Mayhem ensues.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Two Women

Dir. Chloé Robichaud
100 min

In this light-hearted, emancipatory take on a classic sex farce, two neglected married women discover the joys of casual sex and get their plumbing fixed.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again
Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again film; overhead shot of churning water

Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again

Dir. Lyana Patrick
91 min

In the face of environmental destruction, two Nations fight to restore their river and a way of life.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Fairy Creek

Dir. Jen Muranetz
86 min

Considered the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, the Fairy Creek blockade led to more than 1200 arrests. What Jen Muranetz's film gives us is the story from the front line from the activists' point of view (often, from the treetops).

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre