Vancouver. Preview.

Decamping from this year's Telluride Film Festival (September 1 through 4), the salutory refrain among critics and industry was, "See you in Toronto." While the North American feast of festivals warrants compulsory attendance each fall, it's that other Canadian film destination that inspires rabid devotion among cinephiles. The 25th annual Vancouver International Film Festival runs over two weeks and the program reads like a rejoinder to cine-lamenters anywhere.

To wit: here you can see not one but two films from the formidable Chinese director Jia Zhangke (whom Vancouver practically introduced to the world after his Xiao Wu won the coveted Dragons and Tigers award in 1998), the documentary Dong and the Venice Golden Lion-winning feature it inspired, Still Life; new films from the symbiotic Taiwanese duo Tsai Ming-Liang (I Don't Want To Sleep Alone) and his muse Lee Kang-Sheng (My Stinking Kid, co-directed with Tsai); a new film from Pedro (Portuguese maverick Costa, that is, although Almodóvar's Volver is here, too), the critically-annointed Cannes fave Colossal Youth; two medium-length shorts from directors I personally couldn't live without, Signes by Eugène Green from France and About Love by Darezhan Omirbayev from Kazakhstan; slices of South American minimalism in Fantasma by Lisandro Alonso (Argentina) and Paraguayan Hammock by Paz Encina (the first Paraguayan feature in over 30 years); the highly awaited Host (Bong Joon-Ho, whom VIFF has been faithful to since screening his 1995 short Incoherence); the hotly anticipated Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell (with its star and CBC personality Sook Yin-Li introducing the film, this could prove to be the, uh, hardest ticket to come by since the mob scene for Wong's In the Mood for Love years back).

The list goes on. Obviously, consummate programming is chief among VIFF's attractions. Many consider the Dragons and Tigers program, "the largest showcase of East Asian films outside of Asia," to be a festival unto itself and travel here for that purpose alone. The Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema has become a virtual role-call of who's who in Asian film (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Jia Zhangke and Hong Sang-Soo were all feted here), and who won't soon forget last year's winner, the astonishingly economical Oxhide by Chinese director Liu Jiayan? You can prod programmer Tony Rayns to tip you on the short list, but he remains equivocal about the wealth of talent he unearths annually. Perhaps a documentary about Yokohama Mary, a Japanese hooker who prowled the streets until she was 83, may not make it on to your card of must-sees, but the pleasure of Dragons and Tigers is all about the act of discovery. In an instance of reaping what it sows, this year VIFF has the pleasure of screening new films from Kore-eda Hirokazu (Hana - yes, it's a samurai film!), Hong Sang-Soo (Woman on the Beach) and Miike Takashi (Big Bang Love, Juvenile A - yes, it's a prison movie!).

As the largest survey of Canadian films anywhere, VIFF's Canadian Images program is sorely without Guy Maddin's The Brand Upon the Brain! (snatched up by the New York Film Festival) but includes other highlights such as Monkey Warfare, Reginald Harkema's Jury Award-winner at Toronto, and Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal's portrait of photographer Edward Burtynsky as he documents the wages of globalization in China's unprecedented capitalist thrust (Burtynsky's vision is complemented by the estimable cinematographer/director Peter Mettler [Gambling, Gods and LSD]).

The Spotlight on France section features new films from Claude Chabrol (A Comedy of Power, with Isabelle Huppert in her seventh role for Chabrol), Benoît Jacquot (The Untouchable, teaming again with the luminous Isild Le Besco), and Xavier Beauvois (the sleeper policier Le Petit Lieutenant, with an unforgettable turn from Nathalie Baye). The anthology film Paris, je t'aime features 18 world-class directors paying homage to the city of lights. As a producer's wet dream, such films are always a mixed bag, but with names involved such as Christopher Doyle, Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant and Suwa Nobuhiro, who can resist a little vicarious travel? Crowning the French selection is a special presentation of Jacques Rivette's 743-minute New Wave opus, Out 1: noli me tangere, never before screened outside of Europe. The film screens over the course of two days and will be introduced by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Like reading Proust or watching Wagner's Ring cycle," extol the program notes; the film's phantom life 35 years later gives new context to the notion of "target audience."

Given the state of global politics as defined by US interests, where better for an American to get perspective than Canada? The VIFF online program guide even has an interests menu that includes Terrorism and War, and the list is heady (as Paul Arthur notes in a recent Film Comment piece, "[O]ur most cogent representations of the Iraq conflict are clearly taking place on the big screen"). That James Longley's plangent and poetic Iraq in Fragments has languished this long without distribution is criminal; here you can catch it alongside Laura Poitras's My Country, My Country, "The definitive non-fiction film about the Iraq occupation" (according to the Village Voice). Not only the stuff of documentary, the topic of terror is examined in visceral minutiae by Julia Loktev in Day Night Day Night. Mining similar territory as Paradise Now, albeit wholly stripped down, Loktev's film tirelessly follows a young girl on a suicide-bombing mission in Times Square. Physically detailed but ideologically abstract, Day Night Day Night should ignite debate well into the film year. See it at VIFF before the rhetorical smoke clouds your view.

If the aforementioned isn't compelling enough, consider the context in which VIFF unfolds. Asked what makes VIFF special, associate programmer Mark Peranson (editor of Cinema Scope) doesn't hesitate to single out the festival's prosaic virtues: "In short, a moviegoer truly gets his or hers money's worth at the VIFF, and in a convivial atmosphere; most of the theaters are within walking distance of each other, with numerous options of filmgoing available at any time, from 10 am to 10 pm." If you factor in the post-screening after-hours cocktail with a first-time Russian director of an experimental black comedy, that clocks your film day in at around seventeen hours. In the dream logic of festival time, one can conceivably still get a good night's rest.

Peranson confirms VIFF's reputation as both populist and uncompromising. "It's a festival for the people that manages to straddle the lines of high art and popular entertainment, and attempts to program with an eye on what its audience wants, as well as present the best artistic achievements of the film year." This means having whatever you consider your cake - from Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates to a sneak preview of Todd Field's Little Children; from Aki Kaurismäki's Lights in the Dusk to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. As for eating it too, VIFF is well-attended, but seats are not impossible, nor ticket prices prohibitive. The new Vancouver International Film Centre is a plush state-of-the-art theater and optimum viewing venue; both Claire Denis's L'Intrus and James Benning's 13 Lakes, which screened at last year's festival, took on new life in this setting.

It's a good sign for VIFF 06 that the number of eagerly anticipated titles far exceeds those that, probably not for the festival's lack of trying, couldn't make the trip. Among the myriad on my list to see are Jafar Panahi's Offside (Iran), Manoel de Oliveira's Magic Mirror (Portugal), Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century (Thailand), Ulrich Köhler's Windows on Monday (Germany), Valeska Grisebach's Longing (Germany) and Albert Serra's Honour of the Knights (Spain). These ought to allay my curiosity for the few missing in action: Barbara Albert's Falling (Austria), Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred (Argentina) and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (France). Still, this is mere grumbling. Summarizing the Vancouver experience, I'm reminded of an encounter with a European critic (who writes better in a third language than I can ever hope to in my first) at last year's edition. His description of a film I was about to see struck me as a gesture of deference: "It is quite okay," he said, which I took to mean "middling." But the film in question, Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, was rather staggering. That's when I understood that quite okay meant just that. Similarly, VIFF's modest profile belies its continued depth and sense of purpose. Upon departing VIFF's two-week immersion in Same Planet. Different Worlds, it's now common to say to the filmgoers you've met here, "See you next year."

Posted by dwhudson at September 28, 2006 2:38 AM