Levers starts with a bang as a crowd gathers in an unnamed Manitoban city for the unveiling of a new sculpture. Later that evening, a large blast erupts and ushers in a day of darkness. Worldwide, people huddle around the warm glow of their television screens eagerly awaiting a new sun to rise. Determined to satiate her curiosity surrounding recent events, an intrepid civil servant undertakes an odyssey into a world shrouded in mystery.
Developed from a script of poetry, filmed on location throughout the Red River Valley on broken Bolex cameras, and mixing in-camera effects with a delicate eye for natural beauty, Rhayne Vermette’s sophomore feature conveys an ominous story through a potent mixture of bewitching fantasy and the idleness of the everyday.
Val Vint, Andrina Turenne, Will George
Canada
2025
In English and French with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Producer
Rhayne Vermette, Oliver King, Charlene Moore
Screenwriter
Rhayne Vermette
Cinematography
Rhayne Vermette, Ryan Steel, Heidi Phillips, Kristiane Church
Animation
Elise Simard
Production Design
Janelle Tougas
Original Music
Bret Parenteau
Rhayne Vermette
Rhayne Vermette, born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba, is a primarily self-taught artist and filmmaker whose work explores place, time, and rhythm through collage, photography, and analog film. Her films have screened internationally, including at TIFF, Berlinale, and New York Film Festival. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Her debut feature Ste. Anne (2021) received critical acclaim, winning TIFF’s Amplify Voices Award. Rhayne lives and works in Winnipeg.
Filmography: Ste. Anne (2021)
Photo by Calvin Thomas
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
In which former OC star Ben McKenzie brushes off his economics degree and digs into the cryptocurrency conundrum. If bitcoin is truly all about transparency, how come no one can explain it?
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other
This intimate and candid film by a younger husband and wife artist team is a delicate and immensely moving dual portrait of two artists, husband and wife, together and apart, at that point in life when the end casts a shadow over even the sunniest day.
Image: © Manon et Jacob and Final Cut For Real
Do You Love Me
Lana Daher's bravura and defiant non-fiction film is a cultural-historical self-portrait of Beirut, comprised entirely of film clips (many of them from dramatic features, but also from news reports, TV and home video) culled from the last 70 years.
Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story
Judging by this candid, funny, passionate biographical documentary, it would have been a wild ride to have been Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, or even to have been in her circle of friends and lovers. Well, for an hour and a half we can pretend we were.
The Art of Adventure
The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.
