Grace Dove as Aline Spears in Bones of Crows.Farah Nosh/Courtesy of Elevation Pictures
For a man who has to launch a major cinema event in a week’s time and confesses to getting little sleep the night before, Kyle Fostner is looking reassuringly relaxed in a recent interview at the offices of the Vancouver International Film Festival.
VIFF has made big changes this year, and Fostner, who was confirmed as the festival’s chief executive last year after serving as interim CEO since 2019, is convinced they are the right ones. Contagious diseases, streaming wars and competition from that elephant in Toronto don’t faze him. He and programming director Curtis Woloschuk have trimmed the festival by five days and 100 features and are ready to roll.
“It’s not just about opening the gate but about championing film,” Fostner said, explaining that the decision to slim down, which was already being discussed before the pandemic, will make the festival more cost-effective and more focused. “By making it smaller, we are making it denser and more valuable. … We’re cutting through the noise for you.”
The festival launches Thursday with the premiere of Marie Clements’s Bones of Crows, a sweeping and harrowing drama that follows the impact of residential schools through the experience of one woman. As a choice, it’s typical of VIFF’s backing of Indigenous and Canadian film over Hollywood glitz.
“We have a direct relationship with filmmakers and we want our filmmakers to have a direct relationship with the audience,” Fostner said. “We are a festival that isn’t rooted in celebrity.” He brushes aside any comparisons with the Toronto International Film Festival, saying Vancouver is a different beast, a community event that is about serving local audiences and local film.
VIFF has stuck with Canadian showcases long after TIFF abandoned its Perspective Canada showcase in 2004, as filmmakers complained it segregated their work. However, this year VIFF is trying a different approach with its Northern Lights program, dedicated solely to debut and second features from Canadian and Indigenous filmmakers. It includes B.C. titles such as Anyox, a documentary about a ghost town; Until Branches Bend, a whistleblowing drama set in the Okanagan fruit belt; and You Can Live Forever, a Montreal drama about a gay teen in a Jehovah’s Witness congregation that already has an internet following. Northern Lights also includes Riceboy Sleeps, the tale of Korean immigrants in a Vancouver suburb that won TIFF’s Platform Prize for director Anthony Shim.
Meanwhile, more senior Canadian filmmakers have been moved into international programs such as Panorama, which includes the world premiere of the ballet doc Crystal Pite: Angels’ Atlas, Hubert Davis’s doc Black Ice about racism in hockey and Clement Virgo’s literary adaptation Brother.
There’s still a load of content here, both Canadian and foreign, but the old, 240-title VIFF, one of the largest film festivals in North America alongside Seattle and TIFF, had become unworkable for organizers in an age where audiences can see so much film online. The slimming down is a response to that and a recognition of a paradox: The less that audiences see film in cinemas, the more they need the festival as a recommendation engine.
“The vast majority of our titles don’t get theatrical runs in Canada,” Fostner said. “Whether it’s a Canadian independent film, a documentary from around the world or even a premier director from East Asia, they don’t get theatrical runs here. This is the theatrical opportunity.”
For that reason, he sees VIFF’s annual film fest and year-round art house maintaining their relevance in the streaming age.
“Four or five years ago, the conversation was about how Netflix and Amazon were going to Cannes and buying every title before they even saw them. Online was king. I think their streaming services actually have made some excellent films … and managed to find some kind of equilibrium with the theatrical world. But what’s changed is that there are so many streaming services now. … We all have 10 different subscriptions and there’s 6,000 titles on every streaming service. A studio like Netflix wants to promote a film, wants to make a film an Oscar contender, they need the art house circuit as a validation. … Almost unexpectedly that’s the future strength of art house cinema – our ability to supply context and experience.”
Of course, if people are going to see films at a festival, there have to be cinemas – the house in art house. Like the two big Toronto festivals, TIFF and Hot Docs, VIFF has put money into bricks and mortar. The $2.8-million reno of its Seymour Street headquarters, which added a 40-seat flexible studio space, was opened in 2020, so this is the first season audiences are getting a proper taste of the new layout. The festival maintains its 185-seat Vancity Theatre, and relies on eight other central venues during the event, but the dream of another larger VIFF cinema, say 400 seats, remains distant for now.
For those who don’t want to venture into a cinema quite yet, the festival will maintain its VIFF Connect online platform this year, but don’t expect those fabulously convenient digital festival offerings to stick around forever, Fostner warns. In the first seasons of the pandemic all the talk was about how hybridity is here to stay, but he believes the economic model just won’t work: As distributors beef up their own streaming services, they aren’t going to keep offering festivals friendly prices on links for their audiences. Eventually, the festival will once again become … well, a festival.
“Watching films at home is awesome. I do it all the time. I love that experience,” Fostner said. “But I do look at my phone, I pause to go to the bathroom, I get up and get a snack. … We talk a lot in very aloof and poetic terms about the power of cinema. But it’s really true that a film that you watch in cinema stays with you longer.”
Marie Clements is a noted film director and “ex-wife” of Vancouver actor Niall McNeil, subject of her documentary Lay Down Your Heart. She has been his ex-wife since they first met years ago.
“When I met Niall, he just told me I was his ex-wife. I didn’t get the romance. I went straight to ex,” she said. That is, she is an adopted ex-wife, the same way that McNeil considers theatre director Steven Hill, older by several decades, to be their son.
Lay Down Your Heart, which premieres at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 6, is an investigation of McNeil’s creative processes produced by the National Film Board of Canada. McNeil, known as the star of Peter Panties and King Arthur’s Night, is a stage performer, writer and visual artist. He also has a day job stocking shelves at a Vancouver grocery store. McNeil has Down syndrome, and the film reveals his idiosyncratic approach to artistic relationships.
“It’s a wonderful piece about a creative artist who has Down syndrome,” McNeil said in the same interview. (He was in the East Vancouver home he shares with his mother; Clements was participating remotely from Halifax where she was promoting her other new film, Bones of Crows, a historical drama that opens VIFF on Thursday.) “When people’s parents die … I become their father,” he explained. “I want to be a father; I want to have my creative family so I can look after them.”
McNeil, who began working in theatre as a child at B.C.’s Caravan Farm Theatre and never suffers stage fright, now has a creative family that includes not only Clements and Hill but also theatre director Peter Hinton and actors Martin Julien and Lois Anderson, who all appear in the film. Meanwhile, fantasy sequences feature his stories about how he met Clements – in wartime, he was a wounded commander she took in – and how they broke up arguing over household chores.
“I was just following Niall to see where he would take me,” Clements said. “Niall has a unique way of working. It’s a piece about an artist who has no limits.”
The Vancouver International Film Festival runs Sept. 29 to Oct. 9.