Intimate and unapologetic stories of women and queer lives are uncovered through provocative and deeply personal accounts that examine memory, identity, and dignity.
Oct 3 & 11: Q&A
This short film program includes the following films:
Rezbotanik
Pedro Gonçalves Ribeiro, Portugal/Brazil/Spain (19 min)
After a night partying, Rezmorah sobers up in the botanical gardens of Lisbon, pondering what the plants can teach us about queerness.
Abortion Party
Julia Mellen, Spain (14 min)
Director Julia Mellen animates and celebrates the termination of her pregnancy with an unexpected array of guests.
It Must Be Because I Decided to Leave
Zhuoyun Chen, China/USA (19 min)
A young woman’s drifting consciousness traces the mystery of an elusive red car.
Daria’s Night Flower
Maryam Tafakory, Iran/UK/France (16 min)
Daria has written her first manuscript about falling in love with a mysterious girl called Blue. The night flowers in her garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes.
Goodbye, Fishies
Jonathan Zhang, Australia (12 min)
Personal stories reinterpreted by the actors and director, depict a Thai mother consumed with deep regret for missing her grandmother’s last moments.
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
Lesley Loksi Chan, Canada (29 min)
Thirty years after his passing, filmmaker Lesley Chan re-examines Lloyd Wong’s uncompleted video art project about living with HIV.
Community Partner
Various
Various
2024 & 2025
Various
Book Tickets
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...