Canadian Premiere
Hedgehog (Panos Papadopoulos) is desperate after the loss of his mother. Eager to bring her back from the dead, he and his brothers Dummy and Japan put their heads together to build a time machine out of odds and ends in her wardrobe. Initial tests prove horrific failures, as the brothers lose a pig and half of a chicken to the rickety machine. Hedgehog is convinced he needs a human test subject and when Dummy’s girlfriend comes by to party, he sees his opportunity.
Yannis Veslemes (Norway, 2014) mixes pitch-black comedy with sticky body horror to delirious effect in this fantastical freakshow. His penchant for surreal, hallucinatory visuals and jarring tonal shifts flourishes as the brothers unleash a hellish cosmic horror into their reality. More than cheap thrills, She Loved Blossoms More is a grotesque portrait of grief from one of the most twisted minds from the Greek Weird Wave.
Supported by
Media Partner
Panos Papadopoulos, Julio Giorgos Katsis, Aris Balis, Dominique Pinon
Greece/France
2024
In Greek and French with English subtitles
At International Village
At The Rio
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, Ant Timpson, Andreas Zoupanos Kritikos
Producer
Fenia Costovista
Screenwriter
Yannis Veslemes, Dimitris Emmanouilidis
Cinematography
Christos Karamanis
Editor
Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Production Design
Elena Vardava
Original Music
Yannis Veslemes
Yannis Veslemes
Born in Athens in 1979, Yannis Veslemes is a film director and music composer. He has directed feature films such as She Loved Blossoms More (2024, Tribeca premiere), The Field Guide to Evil (2018, SXSW premiere), and Norway (2014, Karlovy Vary premiere). He has released music records with international labels such as Optimo Music, Invisible Inc., and Macadam Mambo. His soundtrack composition work includes the films Wednesday 04:45, Suntan, Cosmic Candy, and more.
Filmography: The Field Guide to Evil (2018); Norway (2014)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Afternoons of Solitude
Pacification director Albert Serra turns his unflinching gaze on the subject of bullfighting, and in particular the famous young matador Andrés Roca Rey. The film challenges us to look its subject square in the eye and draw our own conclusions.
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.
The Executioner
Regularly cited as the greatest Spanish film ever made, Berlanga's masterpiece is a pitch black comedy about an undertaker lined up by the state executioner to marry his beautiful daughter -- but he'll also have to inherit the old man's job.
8
The always stylish, idiosyncratic Basque auteur Julio Medem is back with one of his most ambitious films (and our closing night gala), a sweeping historical romance in eight chapters, spanning eight decades in Spanish history from the 1930s to the present day.
The Plague
At a water polo camp, Ben is plunged into the deep end of toxic peer pressure. Terrified of incurring his campmates’ wrath, he joins them in tormenting a kid whose skin rash has been branded “the plague”. But then he experiences a breakout of his own...