The veracity of history is made visible, audible, and tangible. Embodying the principle of “Art as modes of truth production,” strap in for a sensory examination of the varying forms of aggression enacted by those with power as a means of dominance.
Sept 28: Q&A with filmmakers
This short film program includes the following films:
The Cavalry
Alina Orlov, Canada/USA/Israel (17 min)
Using a semi-documentary approach, newcomer Alina Orlov highlights the brutal desensitization techniques used to condition Israeli police horses in the West Bank.
Flowers
José Cardoso, Ecuador/South Africa (30 min)
Filmmaker José Cardoso streams disparate details of a war in Ukraine, “justified” by a string of seemingly unconnected events as an ethnocide unfolds in the Amazon. The duties of parenthood routinely interrupt the onslaught of tense imagery, granting gentle moments in the garden with his young son.
Man Number 4
Miranda Pennell, UK (10 min)
A startling confrontation with a photograph taken in Gaza, in December 2023 (which now exists on social media), triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.
The Diary of a Sky
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lebanon (45 min)
A self-described ‘Private Ear,’ Turner Prize winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan gathers, investigates, and analyzes audio and video recordings of Israeli fighter jets illegally infringing on the otherwise peaceful skies above Lebanon.
Community Partner
Various
Various
2024
Various with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Train Dreams
A lovely, ruminative movie set in the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the last century. Robert (Joel Edgerton) is a lumberjack, a taciturn man who comes to appreciate the life slipping between his fingers.
Dawn Pemberton Sings Aretha + Amazing Grace Film Screening
These dates are going to knock your socks off: one of the all-time great concert films, Aretha Franklin performing at the New Bethel Baptist Church in 1972, and Canada's own Queen of Soul, Dawn Pemberton, performing live in Aretha's honour.
Left-Handed Girl
Co-written and edited by Sean Baker (Anora), Shi-Ching Tsou's heartwarming solo feature debut follows a single mom in Taipei who is too consumed with her noodle stand to keep tabs on her five-year-old daughter's burgeoning shoplifting habit.
The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
The Librarians
Dispatches from the front line of America's culture wars (and ours too): librarians speak out about the war against ideas, history, freedom of expression and sexual identity, a campaign in which an open mind is the ultimate enemy.
Caravaggio
In the latest from Exhibition on Screen, co-directors David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky shed light not only on Caravaggio's paintings, but his life, often kept half-hidden in the same chiaroscuro tones he shaded his masterpieces with.