Canada
2022
Without dialogue
Featured in:
VIFF Short Forum: Program 1
What kind of alchemy occurs to transform hardship into fortune? Here, the extraordinary burn brightly.
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The History of Concrete
After attending a workshop on pitching saccharine Hallmark movies, John Wilson tries to apply all the same best practices to his documentary about concrete. Frequently absurd and endlessly entertaining detours, asides, and digressions ensue.
La Bola Negra
A big, old-school historical melodrama gets a thrillingly modern, queer makeover from Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who artfully juggle three gay protagonists across stories set in 1932, 1937, and 2017. Winner: Best Director, Cannes. Screening on 35mm.
The Mad Dog of Europe
The story of an unmade screenplay from the writer of Citizen Kane. In 1932, Herman Mankiewicz wrote a film that foretold the persecution of the Jews and the war in Europe. But Hollywood wouldn't take the risk and The Mad Dog of Europe was never made.
The Mortal Storm
In this explicitly anti-Nazi melodrama directed by Frank Borzage (Three Comrades) a year before the US entered the war, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart fall in love as their friends and family fall prey to the rise of Hitler's Nazi party in Germany.
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.
Three Comrades
Scripted by F Scott Fitzgerald, Three Comrades (1938) was the first US studio film to chronicle the rise of European fascism in the 30s. Three German veterans open up a repair shop and try to regain a normal life, but political extremists have other ideas.
Credits
ANIM
Ashleigh Vaillancourt
Director
Ashleigh Vaillancourt
Ashleigh Vaillancourt is a multimedia artist and filmmaker working on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam)̓ Nation (Vancouver, Canada). She studied art and animation at Emily Carr University, and has shown her films and digital projections in film festivals and galleries internationally. Her work explores themes of personal resilience and social empathy, as well as the interplay of analog painting and generative digital art.



