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
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Guest
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.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Nutcracker at Wethersfield
Back in the long, dark Covid winter of 2020, there was no way the New York City Ballet could mount their traditional Christmas production of Tchaikovsky's fairytale. But choreographer Troy Schumacher had a dream to save the show -- reimagining a classic.
Pictures of Ghosts
A companion piece to Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent, Pictures of Ghosts is a lovely, relaxed, ruminative riff on movies, memory, the imaginative space conferred by that place we call Cinema, seasoned with love and boundless anecdotes.
North of Ourselves
In the depths of winter, two adventurers set out to cross Quebec from one end to the other on bike and skis, exploring its staggering geography and meeting its inhabitants (human and otherwise) along the way.
The Secret Agent
Having run afoul of an influential bureaucrat in Brazil’s military dictatorship circa 1977, Marcelo decamps to Recife to live under an assumed name — but he’ll soon come to understand precisely how rampant the country’s corruption has become.
Cutting Through Rocks
Winner of Sundance's World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize, Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi — motorcyclist, midwife, and first-ever councilwoman elected in her Iranian village. A vérité triumph by Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni.