Every day during this year’s festival, we’ll be offering you some supplemental reading (and the odd visual aid) in order to better inform your future viewing or appreciation of work you’ve already seen.
Summer of 85 marks the 12th feature film by the prolific François Ozon that’s been an official selection at VIFF. His latest sees him relocating Aidan Chamber’s novel, Dance on My Grave to Normandy in order to deliver a “throwback to the bold, insouciant spirit of the director’s earliest works…”
With Cured, Bennett Singer and Patrick Sammon also turn back the page in order to chronicle a dark chapter of history in which activists had to fight in order to have homosexuality removed from the diagnostic manual of mental disorders. As the Georgia Straight writes, “it’s a timely opportunity to reflect upon a historical context for present-day struggles to ban conversion therapy and to address ongoing transphobia…”
Set in the more recent past, Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis documents German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open the border to refugees and draws from Robin Alexander’s meticulously researched The Driven Ones to ensure both accuracy and immediacy.
My Voice Will Be With You, a world premiere at VIFF, is Bruno Tracq’s first feature documentary as a director. However, his c.v. includes writing and editing Peter Snowdon’s The Uprising, which was declared a “masterpiece of iPhone cinema” by The New York Times and is available for free online.
“Documentary filmmaking for me is an excuse to discover other people’s lives and invite myself and my team inside their houses and knock at every door,” Jean-François Lesage tells POV Magazine of the m.o. that’s resulted in Prayer for a Lost Mitten, a “contemporary time capsule.”
Jessie Anthony’s Brother, I Cry celebrated its world premiere at this year’s festival by claiming the award for Emerging BC Filmmaker. In this interview with CFNR, she shares how her own loved ones’ struggles with addiction inspired and informed her powerful first feature.
On a similar note, Yoon Dan-bi won Rotterdam’s Bright Future competition earlier this year with her family drama, Moving On. In explaining how she crafted a story about three generations living in close quarters, she details, “Some filmmakers are inspired by external factors or a single image but I’ve tried to show myself honestly…”
Directing Maguy Marin: Time to Act with “sophistication and love,” David Mambouch offers Vancouver audiences the rare opportunity to see a performance of May B, his mother’s 1981 Beckett-inspired masterpiece.
VIFF is thrilled to be hosting the world premiere of Iván Mora Manzano’s Yellow Sunglasses, “a tragicomic look at the end of youth.” And while the film capably demonstrates Manzano’s nimbleness as a director, this video reveals that he’s a man of many talents.
VIFF Blog 