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.
Q&A Oct 1, Oct 4 & Oct 8
This short film program includes the following films:
Prelude Op. 28 No.2
Jenni Toikka, Finland (9 min)
Two distinct interpretations of Chopin’s notable repertory prelude, immortalized in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, now receive an updated treatment, with a shifting focal gaze and staging that implicates the performer as the listener and listener as the performer.
Laika
Deborah Stratman, USA (5 min)
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.
Parasite Family
Prapat Jiwarangsan, Thailand (6 min)
Re-discovered film negatives represent families of affluence who absorbed Thailand’s wealth, like parasites. The journey from analog to digital, and finally to AI-generated images, gradually evolves these captured faces into a new species of monster.
The Fruit Tree
Isabelle Tollenaere, Belgium (15 min)
For Sharleece, looking out of the window of a house for rent in a desert town where she lives evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles. The passing of time is ever-present.
Saving Some Random Insignificant Stories
Anna Vasof, Austria/Greece (14 min)
As a point of departure for Anna Vasof, a survey of the damage left by a flood in her parents’ house reveals a simple yet multilayered work about memory, loss, and how we deal with the past.
Neighbour Abdi
Douwe Dijkstra, The Netherlands (29 min)
How can you understand a violent history? Abdi reenacts his life in Somalia, marked by war and criminality, with the help of his neighbour and filmmaker Douwe Dijkstra (Green Screen Gringo, MODES 2016). Through playful reconstructions in a special effects studio, they embark on a candid and investigative journey through Abdi’s painful past, focusing on the creative process.
Various
Various
2021-2022
Various with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The President's Cake
Nine year old Lamia and her friend Saeed venture into the city to scrounge ingredients for a cake to celebrate Sadaam Hussein's birthday — a quest fraught with real peril in precarious times. Winner, Camera d'Or, Cannes.
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.