VIFF 2024: Paying For It

Sook-Yin Lee adapts a graphic novel by her ex-boyfriend, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown, about the end of their relationship and Brown’s subsequent decision to start paying for sex. Dan Beirne (The Twentieth Century) plays Brown, and he’s joined by a cast that includes Emily Lê as Lee stand-in Sonny and Andrea Werhun as Yulissa, the … Read more

VIFF 2024: 40 Acres

Two hundred years after the first Civil War, the descendants of African American farmers who settled in rural Canada struggle to keep famine at bay. Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) and her husband Galen (Michael Greyeyes) have raised their kids to live off the land and protect their home. Their safety and comfort are interrupted when … Read more

VIFF 2024: Realm of Satan

“This is the age of Satan! Satan rules the Earth!” Scott Cummings’ film proclaims before opening on the live birth of a baby goat that is later breast-fed by a hooded woman in a dark barn. Should that sound shocking, Realm of Satan is actually a humanizing portrait of the modern Satanist; less a traditional documentary and … Read more

VIFF 2024: Presence

Moving into their new home, the members of the Payne family are saddled with considerable baggage. With legal trouble already looming due to her workplace misconduct, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is called out by her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) for the overt favouritism she bestows on their competitive, callous son Tyler (Eddy Maday). Meanwhile, daughter Chloe … Read more

VIFF 2024: Dream Team

Two sexy Interpol agents: No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel, Call Me By Your Name) and Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai, formerly of Vancouver’s Dirty Beaches) travel to Mexico to investigate a conspiracy involving deadly, poisonous gas-emitting coral. Dream Team is a bizarro homage to 90s basic cable television; a bleary-eyed binge-watch of a six-episode season that unfolds like a … Read more

VIFF 2024: Timestalker

Seemingly pathologically incapable of remembering the past, Agnes is condemned to repeat it time and time and time and time again in this outlandish romantic comedy from writer-director-star Alice Lowe. Agnes’s downward spiral kicks off in 17th century Scotland when she falls for the disinterested Alex (Aneurin Barnard) at a public execution, only to meet … Read more

VIFF 2024: A Different Man

Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a facially disfigured man who leads a life of self-consciousness and awkward social encounters. His new neighbour Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) is an aspiring playwright, and for a moment it looks like he might have a chance at romance with her; alas, she rejects him. Soon after, Edward begins an experimental drug … Read more

The Virgin Suicides

In an ordinary suburban house, on a lovely tree-lined street, in the middle of 1970s America, lived the five beautiful, dreamy Lisbon sisters, whose doomed fates indelibly marked the neighborhood boys who to this day continue to obsess over them. A story of love and repression, fantasy and terror, sex and death, memory and longing. … Read more

A Woman Under the Influence (50th Anniversary Screening)

Join us at the Rio Theatre on September 22 as we dim the lights and fire up the projector in tribute to one of cinema’s most revered actresses, Gena Rowlands, with a screening of her legendary performance in John Cassavetes‘ iconic drama A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Nominated for multiple Oscars, Emmys, and Golden Globes … Read more

La Piscine

Jean-Paul (the late, great Alain Delon in one of his most memorable performances) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) indulge in their passion for each other while borrowing a friend’s luxurious villa in the south of France. When the friend (Maurice Ronet) and his daughter (Jane Birkin) arrive unexpectedly, rivalries and insecurities surface and events take a … Read more