BC Business
The 43rd edition of the Vancouver Film Festival begins September 26
If you’ve ever spent any time in Vancouver, you’ve probably met at least one person who works in film production: it is called Hollywood North for a reason. And with the past few years being ablaze with industry-wide strikes, resulting in less work in B.C., it feels like it’s the right time to celebrate the changing tide.
Enter the Vancouver International Film Festival, the annual movie festival that showcases an array of films that are captivating in their own right, but also shines a spotlight on movies made right here in Canada—something that’s often overlooked at the larger, more flashy festivals like Sundance or Cannes. Though VIFF does still showcase many of the films which made their initial debuts at such festivals.
Here are five documentaries that we’re interested in at this year’s VIFF.
The official opener of the festival, Ari’s Theme profiles local composer Ari Kinarthy who lives with type-two spinal muscular atrophy as he works to compose music that will memorialize his life. The documentary handles what could be seen as heavy subject matter with a tender, thoughtful touch. When the film opens there will be a singular live performance in which members from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra play sections of the score live to sequences within the film.
Tojo’s has legendary status in Vancouver, not only because it’s one of the city’s oldest sushi restaurants, but because chef-owner Hidekazu Tojo can still be found behind the restaurant’s sushi counter making its famed omakase. This documentary chronicles the life story of Chef Tojo (the purported inventor of the California Roll) intertwined with the mystical presence of an animated Daruma (a round, red papier-mâché figure made in the image of a Buddhist monk). The film takes us behind the curtain of the journey Chef Tojo took to bring sushi to the mainstream while addressing the frictions of immigration and reinvention.
Starting in the 1990s, Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program attracted thousands of Filipino women to the country—this new program was incredibly enticing as it allowed them to send money back home and at the same time gain permanent residency. This documentary explores the impact that this had (and continues to have) on the children who were left behind in the Philippines, while also delving into the unseen pain of the women who sacrificed so much to raise Canada’s children and take care of our elderly.
This emotional documentary utilizes both archival footage and animation to take the viewer back in time to 1985 when there was a conflict-filled dispute over clearcut logging in the Haida Gwaii. On one side of the conflict stood the loggers and the B.C. government and the other, the Haida Nation which was looking to protect its traditional and ancestral lands from destruction.
Following the diagnosis of three of their four children with retinitis pigmentosa (a rare genetic disease that causes blindness) parents Edith and Sébastien Pelletier embark on a year of travel so that their children can see the world before they lose their sight. The directors worked with National Geographic to capture the bucket-list adventures that the family went on, while also touching on the bittersweet effects such a monumental journey has: self-reflection, family connection and ultimately processing the disease.