What's On
A Safe Distance
Following a camping trip gone awry, a woman is rescued by a free-spirited couple living off the grid. As she warms to the pair, she finds herself becoming dangerously entangled in their psychosexual affairs in Gloria Mercer’s red-hot crime drama.
First Comes Love: Nakabingwit
An engaging hybrid documentary with a rom-com aesthetic, First Comes Love: Nakabingwit follows Canadian women in the Filipino diaspora as they search for the language to discuss race, privilege, and love with their white romantic partners.
Take Me Home
Liz Sargent’s film stars her sister Anna, who plays a woman quite like her real self: thirty something, cognitively disabled, and utterly vivacious. Exploring one unique family and the hardships it faces, this is a film of deep empathy and subtle beauty.
Image: © Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi
We Are All Strangers
Anthony Chen tells the soulful story of a father and son in contemporary Singapore, each of whom gets married for very different reasons. This is a film about the human cost of poverty — poignant, relatable, and profound.
A Place of Absence
A Place of Absence follows the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants along migration routes through Mexico and toward the United States, while tracing the disappearance that shaped the filmmaker’s own family history.
Rebecca Horn – the Secret Life of Things
Rebecca Horn's extraordinary biography is interwoven with her surreal oeuvre. An essential document of one of the 20th century's most influential artists, Rebecca Horn – The Secret Life of Things celebrates the unsung legacy of a pioneering visionary.
Image: © Rebecca Horn
Bitter Christmas
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest confection is a mischievously meta mea culpa, a bifurcated comedy about the perils of autofiction: A blocked writer-director borrows liberally from the lives of friends without so much as a by your leave.
Paris Paris
Three undocumented men from different backgrounds navigate Paris's luminous metropolis in this stirring drama of dislocation. Gorgeously composed and often humorous, Paris Paris questions what it means to truly belong.
Agridulce (Bittersweet)
Four aspiring young musicians in the Dominican Republic find fulfilment in the study of bachata music. Tinged with melancholy but full of joy, Agridulce (Bittersweet) is rooted in hopefulness of a bright future through music.
Fruit Gathering
Achingly sensual and graced with fine performances, Fruit Gathering depicts embattled desire in a conservative society. Two working-class women fall into a romantic relationship in contemporary Myanmar — but is their love real, or borne of desperation?
The Loneliest Man in Town
Vienna-based Al Cook plays a fictionalized version of himself in this poignant deadpan portrait of a bluesman at a crossroads. A beguiling minor-key medley of melancholy and nostalgia that draws you fully into its thrall.
Image: © Vento Film
Nowhere to Lay My Eyes
VIFF mainstay Hong Sangsoo returns with the story of a daughter, her estranged mother, and the step-family she's never met. Hong's visual style is unadorned as ever — all the better to highlight the strangeness of human interaction.