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
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
House of Hope
"House of Hope" is the name of a Waldorf elementary school near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, founded by Manar and her husband Milad. This documentary follows their efforts to go about their lives before, during, and after the events of October 7.
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.
You Had to Be There
In a strange quirk of fate, the legendary Toronto '72 production of the musical comedy Jesus hit Godspell launched a constellation of comedy stars, all unknown at the time but now known to us as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber, et al
Atonement
A former Marine suffering from PTSD seeks a meeting with the Iraqi family to which he did great wrong ten years earlier in the Gulf War. Atonement navigates challenging, politically-charged psychological territory with diligence and sensitivity.
The Sandbox
Borders are the faultlines of the world. Kenya-Jade Pinto's doc examines how modern surveillance technology, bio-metrics and AI are combining to make land and sea borders as impenetrable as air travel, and suggests the unspoken cost is our own humanity.