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
Romería
An orphan from a young age, 18-year-old Marina intends to pursue a university scholarship. The application, however, requires the signatures of her paternal grandparents, compelling her to embark on a pilgrimage and seek out the family she has never met.
Democracy Under Siege
As the USA turns 250, Oscar-nominated director Laura Nix considers the roots of the current political crisis with commentary from historian Heather Cox Richardson, progressive politician Jamie Raskin, and cartoonist Ann Telnaes, among others.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man
A chart topping pop star as one half of Peter and Gordon, Peter Asher was brother to Jane, brother in law to Paul McCartney, ran the Beatles' Apple, produced and managed James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and 10,000 Maniacs, to name just a few. He did it all.
Another World
This hit anime from Hong Kong gives us an unpredictable, sometimes darkly karmic tale taking place on either side of the afterlife involving a headstrong princess with bad karma and the spirit guide who tries to help her get on a better path.
Unforgiven
Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood) is face down in pig shit when we first see him. He's a bad farmer, but has a natural facility for killing people – a vocation to which he returns in a quest that combines both profit and justice. Or so he chooses to believe.