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

The Life of Chuck

Dir. Mike Flanagan
111 min

The winner of the coveted Audience Award at TIFF last year, The Life of Chuck keeps us guessing about what it's up to and where it's going... Trust us, it's a keeper.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Children of Men

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
109 min

2027: 18 years since the last baby was born, disillusioned Englishman Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Ghosts of the Sea

97 min

Imagine an especially poetic true crime podcast about a sailor who built his own sailboat and lived on the high seas, but lost not one, but two wives along the way... Now imagine it told from the vantage point of his daughter: Ghosts of the Sea.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Oldboy

Dir. Park Chan-wook
120 min

The second movie in Park's Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik stars as Dae Su, inexplicably held captive by he-knows-not-who for 15 years, and then, just as inexplicably, released. Not surprisingly, after all this time, he has only one thing on his mind...

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

The Gleaners and I

Dir. Agnès Varda
82 min

This lovely essay film about the art of foraging is also a self portrait of the artist at 72.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The Miracle Worker

Dir. Arthur Penn
107 min

Academy Awards went to Best Actress Anne Bancroft and Best Supporting Actress Patty Duke for their moving portrayals of Annie Sullivan and her remarkable blind and deaf pupil, Helen Keller. "A film that storms where most biopics respectfully tiptoe."

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre