A week is a long time in a film festival, and a film festival is a very long time if you are in Vancouver. While your average international film festival runs a couple of weeks (Toronto’s is only twelve days), the Canadian fest in the West runs a whole sixteen days. No wonder it is one of the largest film festivals in North America in terms of films screened.
While that means more choice for punters - 302 films in total - for those keeping the show on the road it requires the stamina of a long-distance-runner. It helps that there is an army of enthusiastic volunteers to keep things flowing and that Vancouver’s festival-goers are such a compliant bunch, queuing in the Autumn rain up to an hour before films start with rarely a complaint. Queues are accepted as part of the festival - even the likes of Ian McKellen (in town for X-Men 2) can be found taking a place in line.
The festival started strongly with Francois Ozon’s entertainingly eccentric thriller 8 Women, featuring eight of France’s leading actresses. The opening night thrash that followed was an easy-going affair held at The Commodore Ballroom (25th Sept), a particularly distinctive retro dancehall in this shiny new city of glass.
It didn’t rain (this was an unusually dry festival) and, in spite of the long queue, we got in fast - perhaps because we were so orderly. "Theme: festive" said the ticket, which most party-goers interpreted as smart, and shed habitual fleeces and gortexes (they don’t call this the "wet coast" for nothing) for frocks and smart jackets. Waitresses circled constantly with silver trays of white wine and red, while, chop sticks in hand, we chomped on hot beef noodles and something that looked like chicken and mash in a cocktail glass. Free cocktails too, helped ensure that later the party swung, although dancing came late. Vancouver being one of the busiest filmmaking centres in North America, albeit for mostly low-budget television movies, schmoozing seemed on most minds.
8 Women is one of the lightest films in what can seem a serious programme. But then VIFF solicits the serious, challenging and political. Audiences lapped up an expanded documentary section with the kind of hunger that comes after a year long famine. Artistic director said the success of the non-fiction series Holding History Accountable was "one of the highs" of the festival for him.
Many documentaries that make up part of the regular television diet in Britain are getting screenings in Vancouver. British four part documentary The Age of Terror, which over the course of 190 minutes charts the history and practice of terrorism from 1946 in the Middle East to the modern day. It was a big talking point with an extra screening added "due to popular demand".
VIFF’s special presentation of Bloody Sunday, Paul Greengrass’s scathing indictment of the British armed forces on that fateful day in 1972, has also had a strong response. Whenever I was chatting in queues with fellow festival-goers the question would usually crop up: "What did you think of Bloody Sunday?"
An emotionally-wrought, verite-style film, which many Brits will have seen on television already, it rams home the point that this was a shameful episode in Britain’s involvement in Ireland. The film left many here shocked by the events and subsequent judicial whitewash, although surprisingly few people I talked to seemed aware of Lord Saville's inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, even though it has been sitting since 1998.
Bowling For Columbine, the award-winning doc on American gun culture from burly corporation-basher Michael Moore, was one of the first to sell out and went on to scoop the Air Canada Most Popular Film Award. The man himself was due to be in Vancouver to give an hour-long talk to the Film and Television Trade Forum, but had to cancel ("no reason was given," said the press office) much to the disappointment of the organisers.
Nick Broomfield’s Biggie and Tupac, in which the lugubrious documentarian armed with trademark fluffy mike and headphones, investigates FBI connections to the two rappers deaths, also got good word-of-mouth.
The machiavellian machinations of Henry Kissinger came into focus in hard-hitting doc The Trials of Henry Kissinger, based on contrarian journo Christopher Hitchins' writings. Ex-colleagues, ministers, military experts and political commentators expose the former US Secretary of State as a brilliant but extremely dangerous, to coign a Kissinger term, "madman". He is alleged to have scuppered the VietNam peace plan of 1968 for fear that the US would "appear weak", masterminded illegal bombing raids in Cambodia, conspired the downfall of the democratically elected government in Chile and lent support to genocide of the East Timorese by Indonesia. It’s incredible to think that Kissinger could ever have been considered for, let alone won, a Nobel Peace Prize.
More bad news came in the documentary Stealing The Fire which revealed the ease with which nuclear technology that originated in the laboratories of the Third Reich is circulated on the black market.
On the flipside Nicholas Winton - The Power of Good brought a welcome ray of light with its Oscar-Schindler-like tale of an ordinary Englishman’s wartime philanthropy. Winton is a British stockbroker who saved hundreds of jewish children from the nazis as war broke out in Europe. What’s remarkable is that this Schindleresque story would have remained untold had his wife not found a scrap book that documented the evacuation while cleaning out the attic.
Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan (Sweet Hereafter, Exotica) was in town with his latest feature Ararat, a film he said he has wanted to make all his life. The film looks at how descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 are affected not just by the atrocity itself, but ignorance and denial from Turkey. "This film is not about an event that happened 85 years ago. It’s about living through that event," is how the filmmaker introduced the film.
Egoyan, who grew up in nearby Victoria, said it was an "emotional" home-coming for him. Disney and Miramax had been pressured not to distribute the film. "The Turkish government is guilty of systematically denying the right of its people to know its own history," he asserted, alluding to the fact that Turkey denies any aggression whatsoever. He added that he had been invited while at Cannes, to show his film at the Istanbul film festival.
Generally, this is not a festival of names and stars. So the queen’s visit to Vancouver on the night of the anniversary party, Bollywood/Hollywood, had some in the press office concerned that camera crews would all be tied up with Her Highness. The film, a vivacious frolic set in Toronto, merges aspects of Hollywood romantic comedy and Bollywood song and dance. It seemed to get the general thumbs up for fun value, and the party was attended by members of cast and crew included the lovely Lisa Ray, the Canadian-born model who stars as the alluring leading lady.
Among the highlights in the fiction department were Aki Kaurismaki's dour Finnish comedy, The Man Without The Past, David Cronenberg's Spider, and Olivier Assyas's Demonlover. The visually playful Hungarian film Hukkle, which was slotted into the VIFF program late in the day, was also surprisingly entertaining for a film without dialogue.
But for sheer heady experimentalism, Russian Ark took the pie. This opulent, time-travelling tour of the St Petersburg Hermitage museum was filmed in one long continuous take and features a cast of thousands.
