Movies
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: 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: The Boathouse
Already anxious and skittish, Anne (Firecrackers’ Michaela Kurimsky) could’ve found a less triggering summer job. With her music professor Natalia (Kelly Martin) having gone missing, Anne’s been hired on by Natalia’s husband, Dominic (Alan Van Sprang), to be a live-in nanny at a lakeside cottage. After winning over the couple’s
VIFF 2021: Tin Can
A global outbreak of invasive fungus is spreading like wildfire, leaving its victims manifesting macabre growths that spread across their bodies, transforming them into something otherworldly. Parasitologist Fret (Anna Hopkins) might just be making headway with identifying a cure when she’s kidnapped and awakens in a locked suspended animation chamber.
VIFF 2021: Sinkhole
Middle-manager Park Dong-won saved up for 11 years to buy a home in Seoul for his family of three. When the Parks move in to their condo, they notice some structural glitches, like a slanted floor. But they are more alarmed by their weird neighbour Man-su. As Park’s co-workers gather
VIFF 2021: The Girl and the Spider
Both very sly and very daring, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s long-awaited follow-up to The Strange Little Cat (VIFF 2013) is largely set in a spacious bohemian apartment, as tenant Mara (Henriette Confurius) and various friends and family gather to help Mara’s longtime roommate, Lisa (Liliane Amuat), move out. But the
VIFF 2021: Bipolar
Reminiscent of its monochromatic brethren Dead Man and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Queena Li’s Bipolar is an odyssey all its own: a buddy comedy featuring a broken-hearted musician and technicolour lobster that sends the Orpheus myth crashing through the looking glass. In the Tibetan capital of Lhasa
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
VIFF 2021: Three Sisters
Laced with poisonous black humour and deliciously vindicating moments, this blistering indictment of patriarchal abuse and religious hypocrisy would make Chekhov’s jaw drop to the floor. Three wildly different sisters are hit by life crises all at once. Thrifty, self-harming doormat Hee-sook (Kim Sun-young) is spurned by her goth daughter
VIFF 2021: Strawberry Mansion
In 2035, James (co-director Kentucker Audley) makes an honest dollar auditing the dreams of others and assessing them back taxes for the more extravagant elements of their nighttime fantasies. Setting up shop at the rural home of elderly, free-spirited Bella (Penny Fuller), he dives into the deep end of her