24th Annual VIFF Announces Full Line-Up of Films and Events

Vancouver, BC (September 7, 2005) – The 24rd Vancouver International Film Festival announced today that it will show 329 films, including 230 feature and mid-length films, at more than 500 screenings. The slate includes 8 World Premieres, 22 International Premieres, 38 North American Premieres, 59 Canadian Premieres and 10 English-Canadian Premieres. The Festival will open on September 29 with a Gala screening of Deepa Mehta’s WATER, will screen Mark Dornford-May’s U-CARMEN IN EKHAYELITSHA as an Anniversary Gala on October 8 and will close on October 14 with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’ENFANT. All Galas will be presented at the VISA Screening Room @ The Vogue.

GALAS
The Festival announced all three gala screenings for this year, as well as its line-up of Special Presentations, which features some of the years most honoured and anticipated films.

The Opening Gala, WATER (Canada), is the haunting, long-awaited final instalment of Deepa Mehta’s “elements” trilogy, and it is a feast for the eyes and the ears. In colonial India, eight-year-old Chuyia is sent to a home where Hindu widows must live in penitence. Her feisty presence affects the other residents, especially a young widow, who falls for a Gandhian idealist.

The Festival’s Anniversary Gala, U-CARMEN IN EKHAYELITSHA (South Africa) was the Golden Bear winner for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, Mark Dornford-May’s feature debut is a highly accomplished and original take on Bizet’s Carmen. It creates a synthesis of grand opera and traditional South African song and dance to tell the tragic story of a very sassy femme fatale in the township of Khayelitsha.

This year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s gripping and concise L’ENFANT (Belgium) will close the Festival. Ill-equipped to handle his new paternal responsibility, 20-year-old thief Bruno undertakes an horrific act, which itself begets other drastic, life-changing crises.

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

From the mind of Danish bad boy Lars von Trier comes two of the year’s most radical and controversial films. The second in his USA Trilogy, MANDERLAY (Denmark/Sweden/U.K./France) picks up where Dogville left off, as Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) arrives at a Southern plantation where, more than 70 years after abolition, slavery is still in effect. A love story about a boy and his gun, Thomas Vinterberg’s DEAR WENDY (US/Denmark), written by von Trier, stars Jamie Bell as the leader of the “Dandies,” a pacifist gang of weapons lovers. Again filming in France, Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke turns to the thriller genre to critique First World complacency. In the tense CACHÉ (Austria/France), winner of Best Director prize at Cannes, Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil star as a bourgeois couple who start receiving ominous videotapes on their doorstep, including tapes of themselves. Inspired by one of the first sexual harassment class-action suits in US history, and from Niki Caro, the director of Whale Rider, NORTH COUNTRY (US) casts Charlize Theron in the role of Lori Jenson, the woman who fought back after enduring abuse at the hands of her co-workers.

These films join the previously announced FATELESS (Hungary), Lajos Koltai’s tremendous Holocaust drama. All Special Presentations will screen at the Visa Screening Room @ the Vogue.

VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM CENTRE

As a special section of this year’s VIFF signalling the future direction for the Vancity Theatre in the Vancouver International Film Centre, the VIFF presents an eclectic mix of films, special guests, presentations and events meant to show the wide variety of programming that will be presented when the Vancity Theatre starts full-time screenings in early 2006.

We are excited to welcome Isabella Rossellini to the Vancity Theatre and the VIFF to present MY DAD IS 100 YEARS OLD. Directed by Guy Maddin from a script by Rossellini, the short film is a highly subjective and quirky tribute to her father Roberto Rossellini, in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2006. The short will be followed by a rare screening of Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist classic, ROME, OPEN CITY, a film that still thrums with energy and immediacy, despite its having been released 60 years ago

Dragons & Tigers juror David Bordwell, one of the US’s most distinguished film academics, will be presenting an illustrated lecture at the Vancity theatre on the afternoon of October 3 titled “The Modern Miracle You See without Glasses! The Aesthetics of CinemaScope.” It will be followed by a screening of Otto Preminger’s CinemaScope classic BONJOUR TRISTESSE, presented in a restored print courtesy of Sony Pictures. (Along with Rossellini, next year will be the 100th anniversary of Preminger’s birth.)

To bridge the gap between the film, fine arts and music worlds, we are presenting a special pre-festival event, AN EVENING WITH RODNEY GRAHAM. Graham and his band will be performing live at the Vancity Theatre on September 24th, kicking off the Festival early with a selection of songs from his recent albums, accompanied by specially prepared visuals, in anticipation of a European concert tour.

Also fine-arts related, the Vancouver International Film Centre will be the site of a rare video installation by one of America’s most respected experimental filmmakers, James Benning. Screening at the Vancity Theatre during the Festival will be Benning’s most recent films, TEN SKIES and 13 LAKES, both masterpieces of radical beauty that also make strong political statements about the place and future of nature in the current American landscape.

Keeping with the subject of nature, at the Vancity Theatre special attention will be given to programming films with environmental relevance. The year’s best film on the subject is Roberta Grossman’s HOMELAND: FOUR PORTRAITS OF NATIVE ACTION. As seen through the eyes of several activists, Grossman’s film exposes some of the most appalling environmental and human rights abuses in the US perpetrated against Aboriginal people. An angry and important film that deserves to be seen, it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

In anticipation of a forthcoming tribute to the works of one of Argentina’s most popular directors for Vancouver audiences, Adolfo Aristarain (Common Ground, VIFF audience award winner A Place in the World), we are showing his new and most accomplished work to date. In ROMA, Aristarain turns a compassionate eye towards his own spiritual and political education. Finally, we will open the Vancity Theatre with a special screening of Claire Denis’ extraordinary THE INTRUDER, which boldly dissolves the border between narrative film and dream life.

CINEMA OF OUR TIME HIGHLIGHTS
Our largest single section—and one often overlooked in the torrent of documentaries, Asian films, and Canadian films—is Cinema of Our Time, which again presents award-winning films and audience favourites from around the world. In addition to the films already announced in press releases on American independent cinema and Eastern European film, the Festival today announced the complete Cinema of Our Time series.

Highlights from other festivals include Radu Mihaileanu’s LIVE AND BECOME (Israel/France), the winner of an audience award in Berlin that tells the story of Shlomo, a nine-year-old Ethiopian boy sent to Israel. Neither a Jew nor an orphan, Shlomo is forced to adopt an entirely new identity in order to escape starvation and gain a new life. The timely and shocking story of the last few days in the life of two suicide bombers from Nablus, PARADISE NOW (Palestine/Netherlands/Germany/France) won Hany Abu-Assad the Best Director award at Berlin. (Abu-Assad will be in attendance at the Festival.) Winner of the Grand Prize at this year’s Moscow festival, Alexey Uchitel’s (Russia) DREAMING OF SPACE is set in 1957 after the Russians launched the first space satellite and a new spirit of hope arose. It finds likable cook Konyok longing for the love of Lara and the friendship of enigmatic former political prisoner Gherman.

Included in the many films selected from Cannes are a number of North American Premieres: João Pedro Rodrigues will be at the Festival to present ODETE (Portugal), an elaborate, strangely moving gender-bending melodrama of “vertigo pop”; ONE NIGHT (Iran), the first film from Iranian actress Niki Karimi, tells the story of a young woman’s fearless journey through one long night on Teheran’s mean streets, hitchhiking rides with male strangers who each seem to possess their own grave secret; DARK HORSE (Denmark/Iceland), the latest slacker comedy from Dagur Kari (director of Noi Albinoi), follows the exploits of a graffiti artist who has withdrawn from all social conventions, his rotund buddy Grandpa, who works in a sleep clinic while training to be a soccer referee and the bewitching bakery girl they both crave. Christoph Hochausler’s LOW PROFILE (Germany) examines the fate of Armin, a bored German teen living in the soul-killing suburbs, who starts writing letters to the police claiming responsibility for crimes committed in his neighbourhood.

The VIFF is also pleased to present the World Premiere of the latest work from The Amber Collective from the U.K. SHOOTING MAGPIES blurs fiction and documentary in this powerful story about a young mother trying to get her husband off heroin and a single father whose relationship with his son is threatened by events in East Durham, a poor post-industrial community. Also from the U.K., and very topical, is Kenny Gleanaan’s YASMIN, a film about a young Muslim woman, poised precariously between the modern culture of contemporary Britain and the traditions of her faith, whose life is changed after 9/11. One of the most popular Australian films in recent memory, Sarah Watt’s mix of tender live action and abrupt animation, LOOK BOTH WAYS, takes place over a scorchingly hot weekend, as photographer Nick gets an alarming medical diagnosis, and runs into Meryl, who is dealing with her own personal crises. Also mixing live action and idiosyncratic animation in its own inimitable way comes the latest from the U.K.’s Quay Brothers, THE PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES, a morbid tale of dead opera singers, mad scientists, dust, decay, dolls and other typical Quay obsessions.

Some films screening in Cinema of Our Time that will also be presented by their filmmakers include the North American Premiere of Ali Mossaffa’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY FAR AWAY (Iran), wherein a random phone call from a woman planning to kill herself sends a lonely architect on a journey of self-discovery. Shonali Bose’s AMU (India) sees a 21-year-old second generation Indian-American woman struggle for acceptance in both countries, while discovering a long-buried family secret revolving around the riots following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1984 assassination. Star Peter Franzén will be on hand to present the latest work from VIFF favourite Markku Pölönen, DOG NAIL CLIPPER (Finland), a lyrical rumination on the resilience of the human spirit starring Franzén as an idealist wounded in the head during WWII who refuses to give up on life and his fellow humans. In his impressively crafted and moving first feature NEWS FROM AFAR (Mexico), a Canadian Premiere, Ricardo Benet tells the story of a young man who sets off from a small village in the Mexican highlands to journey to Mexico City in the hopes of saving his mother and father from marginalization and poverty.

SPOTLIGHT ON FRANCE
With the help of the French Consulate General, we are again pleased to present a Spotlight on new films from France, encompassing a wide selection of films from well-known auteurs and up-and-coming debut filmmakers. In THE LAST MITTERAND, Marseilles leftie laureate Robert Guédiguian helms a shrewd and sensitive look at the last days of former French President François Mitterrand (a marvellous Michel Bouquet). Returning to Northern Africa, this time with two superstars in tow, André Téchiné spins an absorbing, fluid, and moody ode to adulthood, anxiety and obsession in CHANGING TIMES, which stars Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. In THE BRIDESMAID, French master Claude Chabrol adapts English mystery writer Ruth Rendell’s novel about a young femme fatale who demands the ultimate proof of love. Laurent Cantet’s HEADING SOUTH, a France-Canada co-production, stars Charlotte Rampling as a sex tourist in 1980s Haiti. Three women, one extremely young, if louche, man, and a little political murder only add to the intrigue in this twisted tale of sex and power. WILD SIDE is an elliptical, soulful, at times startlingly beautiful ménage à trois drama from VIFF favourite Sebastien Lifshitz.

Danis Tanovic, the director of No Man’s Land, returns for his sophomore film with HELL, a gripping story chronicling the lives of three sisters, bound forever by an act of violence witnessed in their childhood. Starring Emmanuelle Béart, the film was written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who developed this film as part of a trilogy with the late Krzysztof Kieslowski. An impressively original, dislocating and gripping film about the boundary between “normality” and insanity, Pascale Breton’s ILLUMINATION focuses on Ildutt, a fisherman recovering from a mental breakdown who develops a passion for his grandmother’s nurse. The title of Karin Albou’s debut LITTLE JERUSALEM refers to a suburb of Paris, but it could also refer to the sense of conflict experienced by Laura and her sister Mathilde, both of whom are dealing with the demands of tradition and the disruptive power of passion. César award-winner for Best First Film and Best Actress, Gilles Porte and Yolande Moreau’s WHEN THE TIDE COMES IN is an evocative tale about Irène, an actress who makes her living performing a one-woman Commedia dell’Arte-inspired show about sex and crime.

BRAZILIAN MUSIC
A highlight of this year’s Nonfiction Features series is a five-film subsection devoted to the popular sounds coming from Brazil. The series kicks off with the North American premiere of Georges Gachot’s MARIA BETHÂNIA, MUSIC IS PERFUME. Truly a legend, Maria Bethâia is a musical treasure whose soulful renditions of folk songs and ballads have inspired generations of fans and fellow musicians the world over. Now living part-time in Brazil, Finland’s Mika Kaurismäki has made his second soul-stirring documentary on Brazilian music. BRASILEIRINHO focuses on choro, Brazil’s original traditional music that pre-dates samba and bossa nova. EVERYTHING BLUE: THE COLOR OF MUSIC is a sweeping exploration of Brazilian music from director Jesse Acevedo that uncovers the long history of struggle, sorrow and political dissent that underlies the soul of Brazilian samba. Fernando Trueba’s rousing documentary THE MIRACLE OF CANDEAL is a colourful, good-humoured trip filled with foot-stomping rhythm and astonishing people, filmed in the Brazilian favela of Candeal, where the young residents gave up their guns for musical instruments. Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary’s FAVELA RISING tells the story of a remarkable man who emerged from Rio’s most violent favela and set off the nonviolent movement of Afro-Brazilian music and culture in the form of the music group known as AfroReggae.

NONFICTION FEATURES JURY
For the 14th year, the National Film Board of Canada will present an award for Best Documentary feature. The nonfiction jury will be comprised of: Kris Anderson, director of DOXA; Matt Henderson, head of production and sales for Seventh Art Releasing; and Josh Siegel, a film and media curator at The Museum of Modern Art.

The Vancouver International Film Festival has a reputation for presenting the best in world cinema. Beginning September 7, comprehensive information will be available at www.viff.org and the Starbucks Hotline at (604) 683-FILM (3456). Tickets go on sale September 10 through the VISA Charge-by-Phone line at 604-685-8297 and at www.viff.org .