Movies
OFF-VIFF 2025
OFF-VIFF is a film festival dedicated to platforming the independent, underground and alternative based in Vancouver, BC at the Rio Theatre. Now in its second year, the festival put on by STUPID CO and BC-filmmaker Arran Shearing, was started as a means of putting the power back in filmmakers’ hands
Sirât: VIFF 2025
Trekking into an unforgiving Moroccan desert in a desperate search for his missing daughter, Luis (Sergi López) gets caught up in an anarchic rave that resembles Bosch by way of Burning Man, backed by deafening EDM. Tagging along with a group of crusty outsiders as they head for their next
Christy: VIFF 2025
Christy Martin (Sydney Sweeney) never imagined life beyond her small-town roots in West Virginia. But then she discovers a killer left hook and knack for knocking detractors out that just might be her tickets out of there. Fuelled by grit, raw determination, brash charisma, and an unshakable desire to win,
Honey Bunch: VIFF 2025
After waking from a coma with amnesia and a hobbled leg, Diane (Grace Glowicki) is taken to an experimental treatment centre in the wilderness by her husband, Homer (Ben Petrie). As the unorthodox methods practiced by the head doctor (Kate Dickie) start to unlock memories in Diane, disturbing visions manifest,
The Plague: VIFF 2025
Canadian Premiere Abandoned by his mother at an all-boys water polo camp, 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck) is plunged into the deep end of toxic peer pressure. Almost debilitatingly shy and terrified of incurring the wrath of his feral campmates’ pint-sized ringleader (Kayo Martin), Ben joins the braying pack in mercilessly
Tuner: VIFF 2025
A talented piano tuner (The White Lotus’ Leo Woodall in a breakout role) discovers that the patience and precision that allow him to excel at his day job are even more valuable when moonlighting as a safe cracker. Having scored an Oscar for Navalny, Daniel Roher shifts seamlessly into narrative
Follies (“Folichonneries”): VIFF 2025
After 16 years of marriage and two children, François and Julie have lost their spark in the bedroom. In an effort to reconnect, they decide to open up their relationship and rediscover their sexuality — but polyamory isn’t as easy as they hoped. Juggling family life while searching for matches
Pillion: VIFF 2025
Canadian Premiere Colin (Harry Melling) is a young gay man who lives with his parents and sings in a barbershop quartet. He meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), a leather-clad, hyper-masculine biker straight out of a Tom of Finland drawing. They hook up in a dark alleyway — a one-way transaction that
Father Mother Sister Brother: VIFF 2025
Canadian Premiere Jim Jarmusch is a master of short form cinema, evidenced not only by the diner compendium Coffee and Cigarettes, but in his early films Down by Law, Mystery Train, and Night on Earth, each of which wrapped simple vignettes into a pungent narrative bouquet. So it seems fitting
Train Dreams: VIFF 2025
There’s a strain of American pastoral cinema that found a patron saint in Terrence Malick and talismans in the solemn reveries of Badlands and Days of Heaven. Train Dreams belongs to this tradition, and it’s a thing of beauty. Based on the novella by Denis Johnson and set in the