Movies
VIFF 2021: Saloum
Kicking off at a velocity that would leave most Mission: Impossible entries in its dust, Jean Luc Herbulot’s breathless genre gem vaults us into a darkly poetic, wholly cinematic realm. Having orchestrated a coup in Guinea-Bissau, extracted a foreign drug lord, and absconded with a gold bounty, the Bangui Hyenas—Chaka
VIFF 2021: Red Rocket
Arriving on his estranged wife Lexi’s (Bree Elrod) dilapidated doorstep barely dressed, badly bruised, and all but penniless, semi-legendary porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) needs somewhere to hole up for a while. Within a matter of days, the manic motormouth has not only talked his way into Lexi’s bed,
VIFF 2021: Records
Twenty-one years after Alan Zweig’s groundbreaking first feature documentary Vinyl, Zweig returns to the topic of compulsive record collecting with newfound introspection and a sunnier disposition. Punctuated by his signature mirror-confessionals, Records compiles colourful interviews with vinyl enthusiasts, swirling around the proverbial maxim that music has the power to connect
VIFF 2021: Queen of Glory
Director Nana Mensah vividly captures the Ghanaian-American experience of being caught between two worlds in her film, Queen of Glory. Sarah Obeng (Nana Mensah) is set to move to Ohio with her boyfriend (Adam Leon) when her mother suddenly dies. She must then pick up the pieces of her mother’s
VIFF 2021: Passing
The Jazz Age. Irene (Tessa Thompson) is surprised to bump into Clare (Ruth Negga), an old childhood friend, in downtown Manhattan. While Irene is living relatively comfortably married to a Harlem doctor (André Holland), glamorous Clare is living the high life. Her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) is a wealthy businessman, and
VIFF 2021: Kicking Blood
Robbie (Luke Bilyk) and Anna (Alanna Bale) cross paths courtesy of a “meet macabre:” he’s a despondent alcoholic in desperate need of a drink, while she’s a high-on-hemoglobin immortal who’s looking for her latest fix. Unexpectedly enchanted with his take-it-or-leave-it approach to life, a disarmed Anna stows Robbie away in
VIFF 2021: Him
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”—Margaret Atwood Over the course of one day, three men suffer humiliation or emasculation from women, reacting with self-imposed alienation and increasingly aggressive behaviour. Petter, a renowned filmmaker now denied funding for his latest
VIFF 2021: Handle With Care: The Legend of the Notic Streetball Crew
Largely composed of immigrants and first-generation Canadians from Vancouver’s suburbs, The Notic underground basketball collective overcame all odds to achieve global fame 20 years ago. In defiance of their high school coaches’ casual racism and desire for oppressive conformity, this gregarious group discovered self-expression through streetball’s loose structure and aversion
VIFF 2021: Girlfriends
The airs of a life in the world of high art are unceremoniously shattered when a young high-class fashion photographer is fired from her magazine and forced to return to her hometown in order to make ends meet. Her three childhood buddies are happy to welcome her back to the
VIFF 2021: Flee
Leaving a home behind collapses a set of connections to the world; for the refugee, who cannot return, it means to watch those connections disappear without the power to renew them or prevent their distortion by memory. Amin Nawabi, the pseudonymous subject of Flee, recounts his family’s forced departure from