Canadian Premiere
In her dazzling debut feature, British filmmaker and artist Jenn Nkiru reimagines Manchester as a site of diasporic memory, where red brick buildings vibrate with ancestral presence and sound becomes a portal through time. The Great North moves through living rooms, nightclubs, and street corners — tracing the imprints of Black, Asian, and Irish communities across the city’s industrial past and speculative futures.
Nkiru calls her method “cosmic archaeology”, a nonlinear, sensory form of storytelling rooted in Afro-surrealism, the Black Arts Movement, and experimental cinema. Through pulsing sound design, archival fragments, and kinetic choreography, she animates a city built by empire and labour where architecture, movement, and music become equal containers of history. Known for her acclaimed shorts Rebirth Is Necessary and Black to Techno, as well as for directing Beyoncé’s Grammy Award–winning video “Brown Skin Girl”, Nkiru turns the screen into a cinematic bibliography: an invitation to feel, remember, and imagine otherwise.
Presented by
Media Partner
Community Partner
UK
2024
English
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Mothership
Producer
Aya Kaido, Nkem Nwaneri, Mikal Habteab
Cinematography
Fraser Rigg
Editor
Jermaine Quanioo
Production Design
Sami Khan
Original Music
Lord Tusk, A Guy Called Gerald, Barry Adamson
Jenn Nkiru
Jenn Nkiru is a Grammy Award–winning visionary artist and director from London. Her works have screened internationally, and she was one of 75 artists selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her music video for “Brown Skin Girl” by Beyonce won the 2021 Grammy Award Winner for Best Music Video, along with awards from CICLOPE, Soul Train, Cannes Lion, and the NAACP. In 2022, Nkiru directed two episodes of HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, and in 2023, Variety named her one of “10 Brits to Watch”.
Filmography: Black to Techno (2019); Out/side of Time (2021)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
A Poet
When embittered poet Oscar Restrepo takes a job at a local high school, he meets Yurlady, a talented student from a poor background. Seeking to help her cultivate her art, he draws her into the poetry world — to disastrous and comedic results.
Spring After Spring
Three daughters strive to live up to the standards set by their mother Marie Mimi Ho, and keep Vancouver Chinatown's Spring Parade going through thick and thin, in this enormously affectionate local documentary by Jon Chiang.
It Was Just an Accident
Having offered some late-night assistance to a stranger in the wake of an auto accident, a mechanic grows convinced that he recognizes the supposed stranger’s voice as that of his torturer during a grueling prison spell.
The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes
A beautiful portrait of E.J. Hughes, who quietly helped reshape the artistic landscape of British Columbia in the 20th century. This extraordinary documentary explores Hughes’s legacy not only as an artist, but as a devoted, humble human being.
Seeds
Shot over nine years, Brittany Shyne’s Sundance-winning documentary is a tender portrait of Black farming families in the American South. A moving meditation on land, legacy, and the strength it takes to hold on.