Source Image: Andrew Hitchcock, "Film", 2005, Via www.flickr.com/photos/adpowers/8045962
The Vancouver Film Festival started on September 26th and runs to October 6th. I’ve always loved watching new movies. I’ve only gone to the Film Festival once in my entire life. I wish I could go this year, but unfortunately, I can’t. But it definitely looks like this one has an impressive lineup this year.
Now let’s get into some history. The Vancouver Film Festival started in 1958. But it did face financial hardship in the late 1960s and had to discontinue after the 1969 festival. The festival is now operated by the Greater Vancouver International Film Festival Society, which was incorporated in the early 1980s and launched the festival in 1982. When it had relaunched, it was held at the city’s independent Ridge Theatre. However, it did expand in 2005 when the Vancouver International Film Festival Centre was built in downtown Vancouver.
Some of the films this year are The Piano Lesson, a Netflix film which stars Samuel L. Jackson in the lead role, Emilia Pérez a Spanish-language French musical crime comedy that stars Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña in the main roles with Selena Gomez part of the cast as well, and even The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal a documentary series that is to premiere on Prime Video this year. It’s very Canadian of us to have a Canadian band in a documentary in the Film Festival. Believe it or not, it also won the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award for documentaries.
One of the previous films that I can remember that was pretty big was Room. It won Vancouver International Film Festival’s most popular Canadian feature film award and that was back in 2015.
Some of the films that I wanted to go to were: Curl Power, which is a documentary that follows a teenage curling team from the suburbs of Maple Ridge, BC. Flow, which is about a future without humans and follows a black cat surviving a tsunami and finds refuge on a sailboat. Also, the fact that it’s an animated movie gives it a bonus for me. Happyend, a Japanese American drama set in near-future Tokyo about two friends about to graduate with the threat of an earthquake. And of course, I can’t forget Saturday Night a biographical comedy-drama that’s about the night of the 1975 premiere of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. I was really looking forward to that one. Like always, there are other ones I want to watch but, of course, if I listed all of them then, this would be too long.