Canadian Premiere
Some forms we can only know by their shadow. Laika is an homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress.
USA
2022
No Dialogue
Featured in:
MODES 2
Looking closer at archival images and stories from the past, these artists re-examine and re-create to establish history anew. A daring mix of approaches that excavate new ways of seeing old perspectives.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Sinners
2025's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.
Montreal, ma belle
In this Valentine to discovering love later in life, the ever-elegant Joan Chen plays Feng Xia, a 53-year-old Chinese immigrant and mother in Montreal whose world is turned upside down when she meets and falls in love with a young Quebecoise.
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.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Oscars® Party 2026
Experience the Academy Awards in style at the VIFF Centre! Watch the ceremony live on the big screen with a red carpet, a fully licensed bar and live hosts.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
One of only a handful of live action children's films to capture the imaginations of generations, E.T. has a luminous warmth; it's a suburban symphony of emotion, and it's fascinating to revisit it in the light of The Fabelmans.
Credits
Cinematography
Deborah Stratman
Editor
Deborah Stratman
Original Music
Olivia Block
Director
Deborah Stratman
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control, and belief by considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, exodus, augury, surveillance, comets, raptors, orthoptera, sinkholes, levitation, sisterhood, and faith. She teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Filmography: The BLVD (1999); O’er the Land (2009); The Illinois Parables (2016)