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Festival unveils 304-film line-up
FAR FROM HEAVEN TO CLOSE VIFF IN SIRKEAN
STYLE
Vancouver, BC (September 4, 2002)
– The 21st Vancouver International Film Festival’s
complete 304-film line-up was announced today. Festival Director
Alan Franey unveiled an
eclectic collection of world cinema that includes a “Bow
to Bollywood …” series, a powerful
Nonfiction Features program of 70 films including a “Holding
History Accountable” sub-series,
and a strong 104-film Canadian Images program. The Festival
ends with a Closing Gala
screening of Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM
HEAVEN. Among the features to be screened at the
Festival are 10 World Premieres, 23 International Premieres,
31 North American Premieres, 32 Canadian and 13 English-Canadian
Premieres.
CLOSING GALA – FAR FROM HEAVEN
Bookending the Festival in Sirkean style, Franey announced
that this year’s VIFF will close on
October 11 with a Gala screening of Todd Haynes’ brilliant
and incisive drama FAR FROM
HEAVEN. Set in 1957 in Hartford, Connecticut, FAR
FROM HEAVEN stars Julianne Moore
and Dennis Quaid as a couple with two children whose marriage
falls apart when the wife
discovers the husband, a TV salesman, sleeping around. The
husband goes into therapy and the wife becomes infatuated
with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert). FAR
FROM HEAVEN
draws on Haynes’ preoccupations with “the women’s
picture,” the connection between
repression and the construction of sexual desire, middle-class
suburbia, the Fifties, and,
obviously, the films of Douglas Sirk, including All That Heaven
Allows and Imitation of Life.
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
Joining the previously announced DRACULA
– PAGES FROM A VIRGIN’S DIARY and the
digitally restored COME DRINK WITH ME,
the Festival revealed the rest of its expanded
line-up of Special Presentations, which features some of the
year’s most honoured and
anticipated films. All will be presented at the VISA Screening
Room @ The Vogue.
From Canada come two films from this country’s greatest
auteurs. A tour-de-force of mise-en-scène, David Cronenberg’s
perfectly formed SPIDER stars
Ralph Fiennes as a schizophrenic released to a London halfway
house.
Set against the production of an epic movie about the Armenian
genocide, Atom Egoyan’s ARARAT
interweaves scenes of history in the making with a depiction
of the effects of history on the present. With his trademark
time-shifting style, Egoyan explores the quest for personal,
sexual and cultural identity.
Cosmopolitan Toronto provides the setting for the Italy/Canada
co-production of Edoardo
Ponti’s debut feature, BETWEEN STRANGERS,
a richly layered ensemble piece that
interweaves the stories of three disparate women. This Special
Presentation stars Ponti’s mother Sophia Loren (in her
100 th film), Pete Postlethwaite, Gérard Depardieu,
Mira Sorvino and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Two other Special Presentations stare down the barrel of a
gun, and react with laughs or shocks. Michael Moore’s
irreverent, incendiary documentary BOWLING
FOR COLUMBINE looks at America’s obtuse love affair
with firearms, taking no prisoners. Fernando Mereilles’
nervy and stylish CITY OF GOD
– which like Moore’s film caused a sensation upon
its Cannes debut – takes place in the violent barrios
and favelas of Rio, where a young man must choose between
a life of crime and a less criminal path.
The last two Special Presentations, though wildly divergent
in tone, highlight two of the year’s
best award-winners from Europe. A war film about the struggle
for peace, Paul Greengrass’
stunning BLOODY SUNDAY –
presented as a Canadian Premiere – revisits January 30,
1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland with the intensity of a Shakespearean
tragedy. His efforts earned him the Golden Bear at this year’s
Berlin Film Festival. In Aki Kaurismäki’s wonderful,
hilarious B-movie musical melodrama THE
MAN WITHOUT A PAST, which won the Grand Prix and the
Best Actress at the Cannes festival, an amnesiac starts his
life anew among Helsinki’s dockside downtrodden.
A BOW TO BOLLYWOOD … AND BEYOND
This is the year of Bollywood and of all things Indian. From
Baz Luhrmann to Andrew Lloyd
Webber, and from Deepa Mehta to a host of upcoming cross-over
English and American films, campy, all-singing, all-dancing
artificiality is in. VIFF celebrates the bursting energy,
swirling songs and wet saris of the planet’s most prolific
movie industry with a bow to its best, screening Karan Johar’s
splendidly fun 1998 college romance musical comedy KUCH
KUCH HOTA HAI.
Bollywood’s influence beyond Bombay is illustrated in
the Festival’s Anniversary Gala selection BOLLYWOOD/HOLLYWOOD
as well as in Egyptian master Youssef Chahine’s SILENCE…
WE’RE ROLLING. Back in India, Tamil master Mani
Ratnam shows his facility with the Bollywood form in WAVES,
but also pushes the genre’s boundaries into hard -hitting
social issues with his new film A PECK
ON THE CHEEK.
Indian films, of course, are more than music and melodrama.
This year’s VIFF features a number of impressive Indian
films of a spiritual nature. A young Indian girl’s quest
for emancipation from her repressive destiny underlies Indian
master Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s latest lyrical classic, A
TALE OF A NAUGHTY GIRL. Set in and around a rural brothel,
Dasgupta’s magical masterpiece understatedly presents
the physically intimate friendships that form between the
prostitutes, who, like all the characters, are on their own
journeys to freedom. Dasgupta will be at the VIFF as an honoured
guest.
Indian critic K.N.T. Sastry’s debut, THE
RITE … A PASSION, is a powerful parable about
the tension between modernity and tradition and the corrupting
power of money, in which a Brahmin corpse-carrier tries in
vain to find funds for a ritual that will save both his newborn
grandson and his son from their bad fate.
Graceful, simple and eloquent in equal measures, G.R. Kannan’s
PILGRIMAGE tells of the unrequited
love felt by a retired teacher and a former student when the
two of them go on a pilgrimage together 36 years after their
first meeting. Both are presented at VIFF as International
Premieres.
NONFICTION FEATURES OF 2002 –
HOLDING HISTORY ACCOUNTABLE
“This year’s Nonfiction Features program, the largest
in the history of the VIFF, consists of 60
films, including two World Premieres, nine International Premieres,
11 North American
Premieres and 11 Canadian Premieres. Including all series,
we are presenting a total of 71 feature or mid-length documentaries
this year. Last year’s Festival was held in the blazing
shadow and gathering storm clouds of September 11th. Just
one year later, many of the most interesting films we have
seen explore the historical conditions behind the fears and
conflicts of our time. So remarkable is this constellation
of perspectives that we have created a special series of nonfiction
features this year called HOLDING HISTORY
ACCOUNTABLE,” said Franey.
Two documentaries provide succinct primers in broad strokes
to the century’s most powerful and significant events,
albeit in different forms. Andreas Hoessli and Isabella Huser’s
wide-ranging documentary EPOCA: THE MAKING
OF HISTORY provides a montage of significant
events from the 20th century that together provide an insight
into the darker side of the human soul. THE AGE
OF TERROR is a lucid, clear-eyed and information-packed
four-part
documentary chronicling the history of modern terrorism, beginning
in 1946 in the Middle East and ending there half a century
later.
On a more personal note come two stories of how individuals
recover the past. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for best
documentary at Sundance this year, the emotionally loaded
DAUGHTER FROM DANANG follows one
Vietnamese-born woman–brought to the US as part of “Operation
Babylift,” Gerald Ford’s 1975 campaign to provide
Vietnamese “orphans” with US homes – as she
returns home to reunite with her birth mother. In 1959, director
Irene Lusztig’s grandmother robbed a bank in Bucharest
and was condemned to life in prison. Forty years later, in
RECONSTRUCTION, Lusztig uses interviews,
contemporary footage, and archival footage to build her portrait.
“As always at the VIFF, we are proud to present documents
of artists’ lives,” said Franey. “Two of these
place artists at the crossroads of World War II. Chaplin and
Hitler – both born in April, 1889, both recipients of
a harsh childhood, both bearers of similar moustaches.”
Kevin Brownlow’s remarkable, comprehensive documentary
THE TRAMP AND THE DICTATOR, a
Canadian Premiere, finds ironies in the two men’s lives,
and advances a new analysis of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.
A unique look at the life of an extraordinary woman, J. David
Riva’s MARLENE DIETRICH: HER OWN
SONG concentrates on his grandmother’s no-nonsense
politics over the decades. The film focuses on her struggle
against Hitler’s Germany, her days as a USO performer
on the front lines of WWII and her attempts to grapple with
the war’s legacy.
Germany, in particular, found itself the epicentre of the
past century’s political struggles. An
examination of the beginnings and subsequent growth of dissident
culture in East Germany
between 1949 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Hava
Kohav Beller’s THE BURNING
WALL, a North American Premiere, investigates the fight
for social justice, freedom of speech and civil rights in
Germany.
In BLIND SPOT, HITLER’S SECRETARY,
Adolf Hitler’s personal secretary talks about her life
in the corridors of Nazi power. She seems unable to forgive
the young girl she once was, the one who worked alongside
the Führer from the fall of 1942 until her final assignment
– transcribing his will in the bunker.
Andres Veiel’s deft documentary BLACK
BOX GERMANY uses the opposing life stories of assassinated
banker Alfred Herrhausen and Red Army Faction member Wolfgang
Grams to chronicle the tumultuous 70s and 80s in West Germany.
As events in the Middle East continue to alarm the world,
three documentaries look at either
present or past political strife. GAZA
STRIP, a feature-length film by American filmmaker
James Longley, is an immersive documentary set in the occupied
territories that, in the words of The Village Voice, “would
make the stones weep.” Filmed shortly after the Israeli
army had withdrawn from the Jenin refugee camp, Jenny Morgan’s
thoughtful and measured AFTER JENIN,
an International Premiere, skilfully interweaves recent tragic
events with an analysis by both Palestinians and Israelis
of their historical context. Christopher Mitchell’s DEAD
IN THE WATER is a timely documentary about the Israeli
Air Force’s attack on the USS Liberty, a spy ship that
was bombed and torpedoed off the Sinai peninsula during the
1967 Six Day War. Was it an accident? The filmmakers don’t
think so, and their analysis of a conspiracy and cover-up
is watertight.
Three other films deal specifically with historical crimes.
A detective story with the power of Greek tragedy, THE
GUGULETU SEVEN is a classic tale of cover-up and disclosure
about the killing of seven young men by the South African
police. Is Henry Kissinger, America’s revered elder statesman
and Nobel Peace Prize winner, a war criminal? That’s
the question posed by the startling documentary THE
TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, which bases its accusations
on Christopher Hitchens’ controversial book. Filmed over
five years on four continents, STEALING
THE FIRE uncovers the complex, scarifying web of arms
trading, including the 60-year history of a German multinational
that profited from the Holocaust and in recent decades has
become a leading supplier of nuclear weapons technology to
developing nations.
Finally, the series also presents two films that show the
forces of history need not continue unabated thanks to individual
activism. Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent) and Katerina
Cizek travelled the world interviewing media activists about
the socio -political uses of camcorders. Interweaving archival
footage and actuality in SEEING IS BELIEVING:
HANDICAMS, HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE NEWS, presented as
a World Premiere, the directors address essential questions
about the risks and responsibilities inherent in front-line
filmmaking. In 1939, Englishman Nicholas Winton (now 93) saved
669 Czechoslovakian
children – including the film’s narrator, Joe Schlesinger
– from certain death in the Nazi
extermination camps. Matej Minác’s moving documentary
NICHOLAS WINTON: THE POWER OF GOOD
looks at the nature of quiet heroism.
JURY FOR THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD AWARDS
For the eleventh year, the National Film Board of Canada will
present an award for Best Documentary feature. The nonfiction
jury will be comprised of: Bonnie Sherr Klein, who made pioneering
documentaries in the National Film Board of Canada’s
Challenge for Change
Program and Studio D, the Women’s Unit; Fiona Morrow,
a London-based freelance writer and critic who for five years
was a television critic for Time Out London, specializing
in documentary film; and Angela Pressburger, co-producer of
the award-winning documentary,
Whisper in the Air, and programmer for the Sunshine Coast
Film Society.
The films nominated for the NFB Award are:
• DEAD IN THE WATER
(Christopher Mitchell, Israel/USA) International Premiere
• EPOCA: THE MAKING OF HISTORY
(Andreas Hoessli, Isabella Huser, Switzerland) North American
Premiere
• FAITH, LOVE AND CHARITY
(Katrine Borre, Denmark) North American Premiere
• FIX: THE STORY OF AN ADDICTED
CITY (Nettie Wild, Canada)
• GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD
(Peter Mettler, Canada)
• GAZA STRIP (James
Longley, USA) Canadian Premiere
• MAMA BENZ AND THE TASTE
OF MONEY (Karin Junger, The Netherlands) North American
Premiere
• ON THE SEVEN SEAS
(Johannes Holzhausen, Austria) North American Premiere
• RECONSTRUCTION (Irene
Lusztig, USA/Romania) Canadian Premiere
• STEALING THE FIRE
(John S. Friedman, Eric Nadler, USA) International Premiere
• THOMAS PYNCHON – A
JOURNEY INTO THE MIND OF P. (Fosco Dubini, Donatello
Dubini, Germany/Switzerland) North American Premiere
Canada leads with 104 films
FLOWER & GARNET TO OPEN CANADIAN IMAGES
SERIES
Keith Behrman’s British Columbia feature
FLOWER & GARNET will kick off a Canadian
Images series that includes 29 features, five mid-lengths
and 62 shorts, Canadian Images
programmer Diane Burgess announced today. Canadian films playing
outside the Canadian
Images series include four Special Presentations, one Gala,
one mid-length and one short in the Nonfiction Feature series,
and one short in Cinema of Our Time, for a total of 104 Canadian
films screening at the 21st Vancouver International Film
Festival. Behrman’s emotionally resonant debut offers
a portrait of love and loss in small-town British Columbia.
Sixteen-year old Flower (an impressive performance from newcomer
Jane McGregor) and her little brother Garnet (Colin Roberts)
have always shared a particularly close bond. But as
their family struggles under the weight of tragedy, that bond
will be tested. Set against the starkly beautiful landscapes
of Ashcroft, FLOWER & GARNET co-stars
Callum Keith Rennie,
playing against type with measured brilliance as the family’s
bereft patriarch. “The great strength of Behrman’s
film lies in his ability to capture the subtle changes in
Flower and Garnet’s relationship,” commented Burgess.
“With a sharp eye for detail, he conveys the
nuances of family bonds, while drawing achingly real performances
from his lead actors.”
ARCHIVAL SCREENINGS
Canadian Images includes two archival screenings this year.
The first screening is of a newly
restored print of Sylvia Spring’s MADELEINE
IS… (1971), the first Canadian feature film
directed by a woman. Adapted from her award-winning short,
Spring’s debut follows the story of Madeleine (Nicola
Lipman) as she struggles to find herself in an often hypocritical
Vancouver society and a relationship with an abusive pseudo-revolutionary
boyfriend (John Juliani). MADELEINE IS…
was recently highlighted in the issue of Take One magazine
devoted to “Forgotten Classics of Canadian Cinema.”
This year’s program also includes an archival screening
of Claude Jutra’s Nouvelle Vague-influenced debut feature
À TOUT PRENDRE (1963).
Set against the backdrop of 1960s
cultural change, and told with boundless energy, wit, and
style, Jutra’s film put Canadian cinema on the international
map. This archival film accompanies a screening of Paule Baillargeon’s
new documentary CLAUDE JUTRA: AN UNFINISHED
STORY. A blend of archival material, film excerpts
and interviews with his famous friends (including an early
encounter with Federico Fellini), this fascinating film chronicles
the inspiring and tragic life of one of the foremost figures
in Canadian cinema.
OTHER CANADIAN IMAGES HIGHLIGHTS
Nonfiction Film
Canada’s outstanding tradition of innovative nonfiction
filmmaking continues this year. Canadian Images features the
World Premiere of ADVENTURES IN BREATHING,
the moving story of filmmaker Karen Murray’s struggle
with a high-risk double-lung transplant. The individual is
also at the forefront of films such as the formally dazzling
yet tender biography of Mike Hoolboom’s TOM, as well
as Jean-Daniel Lafond’s SALAM IRAN,
A PERSIAN LETTER and Masoud Raouf’s THE
TREE THAT REMEMBERS, a pair of gripping portraits of
men and women who escaped Iran’s Islamic revolution.
Nonfiction highlights also include GAMBLING,
GODS AND LSD, Peter Mettler’s globe-spanning quest
for meaning, and Magnus Isacsson’s extraordinary portrait
of Quebec City’s 2001 Summit of the Americas, VIEW
FROM THE SUMMIT.
The Ties that Bind
The theme of “the ties that bind” runs through this
year’s crop of fiction features. In Deborah
Day’s lively ensemble comedy EXPECTING,
a free-spirited woman invites her friends and
family to participate in a home-birth. Barbara Willis Sweete’s
compelling PERFECT PIE follows
a famous opera singer who returns home after many years to
play a benefit organized by her childhood friend. Coming home
is also a motif of Manon Briand’s gorgeous LA
TURBULENCE DES FLUIDES, a graceful story of a scientist
drawn back to her hometown by a peculiar tidal phenomenon.
Other highlights from Quebec include the English-Canadian
Premiere of Michel Jetté’s intense prison portrait
INSIDE, and Kim Nguyen’s
haunting fable,
THE MARSH.
Atlantic Canada
There is a strong showing from the Atlantic provinces this
year, with eight films – twice as many as last year.
The features include two films from IMX Communications’
digital series Seats 3a and 3c, which find their protagonists
in the aforementioned first class airplane seats at one point
in the narrative.
In Thom Fitzgerald’s provocative THE
WILD DOGS, a Canadian pornographer travels to Bucharest,
while the central characters in Daniel MacIvor’s eloquent
debut PAST PERFECT meet on a flight
from Halifax to Vancouver. Co-productions with other provinces
includes Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s emotionally resonant
debut MARION BRIDGE, starring
Molly Parker, and Rodrigue Jean’s offbeat road movie
YELLOWKNIFE.
The themes of the familiar and the familial that run through
the features are echoed in this year’s short films in
wry, emotional, and occasionally macabre ways, including the
shorts package FOR MY FATHER,
which features Jessica Bradford’s poignant THE
TELESCOPE and Luke Carroll’s provocative FOR
MY FATHER. Romantic misadventures abound in KISS
OFF, a shorts package containing Mark Sawer’s
quietly hilarious LONESOME JOE
and Bart Simpson’s biting A VAMPIRE’S
GUIDE TO SWEDEN. Other shorts packages include the
award-studded IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD,
which showcases the Leo-winning DEATH’S
DREAM and the Cannes Jury Prize winner THE
STONE OF FOLLY.
Same Planet, Different Worlds
The Festival’s theme remains “Same Planet, Different
Worlds.” A non-profit society, its mission is to
encourage understanding of other nations through the art of
cinema, to foster the art of cinema, to facilitate the meeting
in British Columbia of cinema professionals from around the
world, and to stimulate the motion picture industry in British
Columbia.
The 21st Vancouver International Film
Festival runs from September 26 to October 11
Over 150,000 patrons are expected to attend approximately
500 screenings of 304 films from 52 countries at eleven Vancouver
screens: the Granville 7 (Granville Cineplex Odeon
Cinemas); the VISA Screening Room at the Vogue; The
Ridge; the Pacific Cinémathèque;
and the Blinding Light!! Cinema and Café.
VIFF tickets go on sale September 7
The fastest way to buy advance tickets is at www.viff.org,
open 24 hours a day, or through the VISA Charge-by-Phone line
at 604-685-8297, open noon to 7pm. For festival information,
call the Bell Mobility Info Line at 604 -683-FILM
(3456) starting September 7 or see the website.
For further information or interviews with Festival
Director Alan Franey or Festival programmers, please
contact Betty Verkuil, Helen
Yagi, or Andrew Poon at (604) 646-4770 or media@viff.org.
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