Movies
VIFF 2024: Rita
At 13, Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) flees from an abusive home life, only to be detained by the government in an all-girls shelter that resembles a prison. Though she has stopped believing in fairy tales, her fellow wards prophesize that she is the warrior angel who will liberate them from
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;
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
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
VIFF 2024: Párvulos
Many years after a viral zombie outbreak, three brothers are forced to fend for themselves, living off the land in a cabin in the woods. With their parents long gone, the eldest, Salvador is tasked with feeding and protecting his brothers, but his amputated leg means he needs assistance from
VIFF 2024: Nightbitch
“Mother’s not quite herself today…” That Norman Bates line from Psycho gets a new spin in this bracingly strange movie based on Rachel Yoder’s acclaimed 2021 novel. Mother (Amy Adams) used to be an artist in the big city. Now she’s just another mom in the suburbs. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) still
VIFF 2024: Mongrels
The howling of wild dogs through the windows of a summer evening… In the middle of the night, a man talks to his dead wife on a disconnected telephone… Airplanes are swallowed up in the sky. In rural Canada in the 1990s, a Korean family – a widower, his teenage
VIFF 2024: Methods to Madness with Longlegs’ Osgood Perkins
Even before its release, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs had become the stuff of legend, anointed by tastemakers as “nightmare fuel” of the highest order. And by the time the public had their fill, Longlegs was not only the most successful release in NEON’s history, but also the most successful independent film of 2024. In this
VIFF 2024: Grand Theft Hamlet
Out-of-work, UK actors Sam and Mark are in a pickle about what to do with their time in lockdown. Escaping into the violent online world of Grand Theft Auto V, they happen upon an amphitheatre. Inspired, they decide to mount a full production of Hamlet in the city of Los Santos, a perfect
VIFF 2024: GIFT: A Film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi X Live Score by Eiko Ishibashi
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Eiko Ishibashi, who scored director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning film Drive My Car (VIFF 2021) presents the Canadian Premiere of GIFT—a new silent film directed by Hamaguchi, and accompanied by a dynamic, live soundtrack performed by Ishibashi. Developed in collaboration with Hamaguchi’s latest feature film, Evil Does Not Exist (VIFF 2023), GIFT has been hailed