The spirit of the late Jean-Luc Godard lives on in It’s Not Me, French iconoclast Leos Carax’s latest unclassifiable whatsit—a film that, its title notwithstanding, is all about the director himself. Originally assembled for an exhibition in the Centre Pompidou, one that never ended up taking place, the film is ostensibly an answer to a simple question: “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” Running just 40 minutes long, Carax’s response is an anarchic, essayistic foray into the process of artistic creation itself, featuring the music of Ravel and David Bowie, the films of artists like Jean Vigo and FW Murnau, not to mention footage from his own iconic filmography (Holy Motors, Lovers on the Bridge, et al)
Endlessly inventive, rhythmically precise, and tonally unpredictable, It’s Not Me is as invigorating a cinematic experience as one is likely to encounter this year. No mere victory lap, it is a self-portrait of an artist confronting his place in movie history—a film that pays tribute to cinema’s past in order to make way for its future.
Denis Lavant, Katerina Yuspina, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Loreta Juodkaite, Anna-Isabel Siefken, Petr Anevskii
France
2024
In French with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Producer
Charles Gillibert, Leos Carax
Cinematography
Caroline Champetier
Editor
Leos Carax
Production Design
Florian Sanson
Leos Carax
Leos Carax is a French filmmaker renowned for his visually striking and often surreal cinema. A former critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, he transitioned to directing in the early 1980s and immediately established himself with Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986). Carax’s films frequently explore themes of love, identity, and existential angst. In 2021, his film Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, opened the Cannes Film Festival where he won the award for Best Director.
Filmography: Boy Meets Girl (1984); Mauvais Sang (1986); Lovers on the Bridge (1991); Holy Motors (2012); Annette (2021)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
The Track
In the middle of a mountain forest above Sarajevo, three boys train for the Olympics in a bullet-ridden luge track abandoned since the 1984 Winter Games. An ambitious, hopeful look at the next generation striving to overcome the sins of their fathers.
Yunan
In this haunting mood piece, Munir is a middle-aged Syrian writer in exile in Germany. In crisis, he takes himself up to one of the Halligan islands in the North Sea, a suitable place to end it all...
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.
The Mother and the Bear
Johnny Ma’s film stars Kim Ho-jung as a Korean woman who flies to Winnipeg when her immigrant daughter is hospitalized there. This crowd-pleaser plays up cultural differences to hilarious effect and offers a touching take on mother-daughter tension.