2007 Film Guide

Josie, a lonely, simple man running a crumbling garage in a quiet corner of Ireland, leads an unremarkable but basically contented life--until his desire for friendship leads to events that change things forever... Lenny Abrahamson's sophomore feature won the CICAE Art and Essai Cinema Prize at Cannes.  More...

Yasmin Ahmad’s comedy-dramas are popular in Malaysia, but crowd-pleasing laughter and tears don’t come at the expense of depth. She concocts a rich mix of high comedy, smooth melodrama and utopian longing that resonates with the textures of Malaysia’s richly multicultural experiment.  More...

“Issun Boshi,” Japan’s answer to Tom Thumb, was the subject of a series of picture books published by Kodansha, known to everyone in the baby-boomer generation. Regular long-distance collaborators Tanaami and Aihara (Trip, VIFF 05) riff on their childhood memories of these books, stressing the latent eroticism, humour and malice they found there. Their Issun Boshi is a distinctly phallic figure...  More...

VIFF has shown almost all of Aihara Nobuhiro’s erotic, Buddhist-minded animation over the years, and he has visited the festival twice. Lotus shows a dizzying mix of colours and lines from which a “foreign space” emerges. A paradoxical synthesis of the over-stimulated and the serene.  More...

Director Mania Akbari's sequel (of sorts) to Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, walks the delicate line between art and life. Mania is suffering from cancer and as her disease progresses, it ultimately dictates the nature of her journey. Moments of emotion are met and matched by hope in this remarkable film.  More...

Winner of the best screenplay award at Cannes earlier this year, this superbly cast drama limns the emotional arcs of six people--four Turks and two Germans--as they crisscross through love and tragedy. An utterly assured, profoundly moving fifth feature by Fatih Akin...--Variety  More...

Media/political critic Norman Solomon accuses the Bush administration--and many before it--of using misleading language, news manipulation, half-truths and outright lies to win public support for military actions of questionable necessity... [The film] presents a stimulating argument.--Variety. Narrated by Sean Penn.  More...

From the producers of City of God and director Tata Amaral comes this dynamic, vibrant and life-affirming work that looks at the lives of young women from the poor outskirts of São Paulo who find expression and a means of resisting societal constraints in hip hop music.  More...

Mix together a malfunctioning blast furnace, a young Chinese interpreter and a soulfully stubborn Italian engineer, and you get director Gianni Amelio's quixotic take on the cultural forces that bind and divide. Sergio Castellitto turns in a bravura performance in this captivating drama with so much truth to tell about modern China.  More...

Cult director Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor) returns with another dryly absurdist tale inspired by a line of ancient Icelandic poetry that reads: Man is man's delight. In the words of the director himself, “It is simply a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy about us.”  More...

Screenwriter Joko Anwar’s second movie as director is a ghost story set in a time of tyranny and political corruption. The secret behind some dying words unlocks both a dirty secret and a Borgesian labyrinth. A highly entertaining thriller.  More...