Eight VIFF Films That Deserve a Closer Look — SkimNews
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- VIFF's 45th edition spanned films from 76 countries, with high-profile entries including Jesse Eisenberg's "The Debut" (starring Julianne Moore), Martin McDonagh's closing-night "Wild Horse Nine" (with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell), and Peter Farrelly's "I Play Rocky," which won the Audience Award in its category.
- Andrey Zvyagintsev's "Minotaur" — a Cannes Grand Prix winner — follows a Russian transport CEO whose domestic unraveling becomes a microcosm of societal decay, as the Ukraine invasion drives military recruitment and local executives are pressured to hand over employees for the draft.
- Matthew Rankin's "Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney" ditches talking heads for remixed archival footage, animation, and music, tracing how the late Canadian prime minister's public image was manufactured rather than assessing his political legacy.
- Soran Mardookhi's "The Flight" follows three Iranian-Canadian families still seeking answers and accountability from the Islamic Republic over the January 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, which killed all 176 aboard, many of them Iranian Canadians.
- Jeremy Workman's "School for Defectors" documents teenagers at a Busan school for children of North Korean defectors navigating insecurity, shame, and discrimination, with several students learning the full story of their family's escape for the first time on camera.
- Noah Segan's "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" casts John Turturro as an aging pickpocket whose craft is obsolete in a cashless world, framed as a melancholy jazz-scored elegy for a vanishing New York.
- Radu Jude's "Diary of a Chambermaid" transplants Octave Mirbeau's novel to present-day Bordeaux, where Romanian migrant Gianina cares for her employers' son while her own daughter grows increasingly distant via video calls — a film built on the gap between her employers' progressive rhetoric and how they actually treat her.
Why it matters: VIFF's 2024 curation placed weight on geopolitical documentaries — the PS752 downing, North Korean defector children, and the moral rot of wartime Russia — alongside auteur portraits of aging and displacement, signaling which under-the-radar stories the festival's programmers believed warranted international festival exposure beyond the awards-season marquee titles.
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