2008 will be my fifth year attending the Vancouver International Film Festival. In some years, the screenings I’ve attended in the festival have been the only movies I’ve watched in a theatre all year. I don’t know why that is, but I’m not really complaining.
The films I selected to attend this year are heavily influenced by my UK/Ireland/France trip, in part to relive the experience, and maybe to say (in my head, of course!) that I was just there. Here are the films with that theme:
- The Grocer’s Son: This year, the festival’s country spotlight is on French films, and this has been one of the big hits coming out of France this year.
- Happy-Go-Lucky: Personalities and teaching styles clash in this Mike Leigh film set in North London.
- Hunger: Re-creation of the last days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands (a mural of whom I snapped while in Belfast).
- Sleep Furiously: a mid-Welsh farming community, indicative of a simpler time before mass farming and mechanization, is examined in this doc.
- Stone of Destiny: The story of how four Scottish students took the title rock from Westminster back to Scotland.
- Suivre Catherine: Montreal-based director Jeanne Crépeau follows a French filmmaker called Catherine to Paris (hence the title), where Crépeau essentially lives for a year and documents the experience.
Seeing these films may not match the true feeling of having been there, but I’m sure it will be a fun experience regardless.
