The Faraway Place

Kikuyu Land follows Mr. Mungai’s struggle to reclaim family land taken during the colonial era. Through personal stories and archival research, the film explores the enduring impact of land dispossession in Kenya.

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.

Interior worlds reveal wisdom, intuitive connections, the esoteric, and death. Or is it liberation? A bid to commune with the feminine, other realms, and ghosts.

When her ugly cry costs an aspiring actor her dream role, she takes desperate measures in pursuit of perfection. A cheeky injection of dark humour and delirium, this genre-bending psychological thriller takes a clever jab at internet-age beauty standards.

An immersive sci-fi documentary, Daughters of the Forest follows two Indigenous mycologists who are bridging modern science and visual storytelling to preserve Mexico’s fungi and forests.

Using era-appropriate visuals, ironically deployed music, and copious archival footage, Matthew Rankin tells the story of Brian Mulroney’s rise to power. This is Canadian history as you’ve never seen it before — amusing and dismaying in equal measure.