VIFF is coming up fast, and I got several press releases about it just last week. Yes, I will be in attendance, like some of the other writers, but with just so many of us and so much else I’ve got scheduled and slated, you’ll have to see what these other guys say regarding coverage. This year, I give an announcement article combined with an interview I conducted with VIFF Live’s Curator Jarrett Martineau. Before I go into full detail about this interview, let me list some of the cool films and content to expect this year at VIFF.
BC filmmakers – Local is the most important factor, as I always say. This is due to me running a local business of course. The Opening film, Ari’s Theme is a BC film, and it’s all about Ari Kinarthy who doesn’t let his spinal muscular atrophy stop him from his dream of making music to remember him by. Even though he struggles to move, he makes quite a movement and this sounds like a beautiful film, especially with a live orchestra adding to the element for opening night. How about Ann Marie Fleming’s Film? Can I Get A Witness? is a story about morality and what the future is like after a severe environmental crisis. That’s not all, the protagonist Kiah struggles on her first day at her new job, and her mother Ellie is planning to take a special journey. Despite the casual style of the film, key information about the story builds up and the ending sounds intense. The Chef & The Daruma sounds appetizing as it talks about a Vancouver restaurant called Tojo’s, which focuses on Japanese cuisine. You can see it in the Insights Series as well as Curl Power which is all about an actual curling team of teen girls in Maple Ridge. The Northern Lights Series has another spectacular film called Inay, which is a deep and personal film that shows how Filipino women joined a live-in Caregiver Program and how they and their left-at-home children were impacted. Other content in the Northern Lights series includes Inedia where a young woman gets mysterious food allergies and learns to heal on a remote island, also check out Lucky Star (not this one) is about a former gambler who became a family man and fell for a tax scam, Mongrels focuses on a Korean widower who must learn to get over his grief while eradicating feral dogs in a small town of Canada, Preface to a History tells a tale about a musician who has a struggling relationship with his partner Sophy, and The Stand is another great documentary focused on logging in Haida Gwaii, which is something I haven’t heard about in a long time.
VIFF Short Forum Series – There are 69 of these for this year, (no relation to Deaner ’69 that I know of) and we have quite a few from the local sector once again. Take Delta Dawn for example, which features the first female Indigenous wrestler, who was also the first Canadian woman wrestler to compete in Japan the year I was born (91). Another great story is One Day This Kid which is about an Afghan-Canadian boy named Hamed and his father as the two have a struggle between each other, specifically about acceptance. Inkwo: For When the Starving Return is supposed to be set two lifetimes in the future and about a gender-shifting warrior named Dove who used the Indigenous medicine called Inkwo to save their community from strange beasts. We also have another Afghan Story by one of my personal favourite directors Panta Mosleh, which is about refugees hiding in a water tanker while trying to cross the border. It’s called Hatch and has nothing to do with the Crazy8’s film of the same name. We can expect some international content as well that has won awards, like You Can’t Get What You Want but You Can Get Me, which is a slideshow love story of 2 trans men, and The Return which tells a tale of Malih the first Maasai filmmaker who returns home and continue the tradition of storytelling, and Explosions Near the Museum, where a camera moves through an ancient museum in Ukraine that got unfortunately looted in 2022.
Yeah, we got a lot of stuff this year, and I’ve noticed there’s a lot of music according to the program’s content. I won’t get into all the music-based films right now, because it’s time for my talk with Jarrett. He can give us LOTS more details about VIFF is looking rather musical this year.
HNMAG: You’re the curator of the VIFF Live Series. What are the prime responsibilities in your role?
Jarrett Martineau: Focusing on the 5 events we have as that series, which are looking at the intersection of music and performance and screen culture. I’ve been working closely with Kyle Fostner who’s the executive director on the festival for putting on the program this year. The events that we’re doing for the VIFF Live series kind of expand on what a live event screening can look like.
HNMAG: And how do you decide what makes it in the program or not?
Jarrett Martineau: I would say it’s kind of a collaborative decision between the VIFF team and myself. A lot of it for me had been thinking about artists that had been doing interesting work already at this intersection of film and performance and music. We didn’t really have the timeframe for this year’s festival to commission and develop new work, so we were looking at new artists that had new projects that were in various states of development that would be prime to be able to present here in Vancouver and I feel very fortunate that some of those decisions lead to us being able to present work that isn’t being shown anywhere else or hasn’t been shown yet in BC or Vancouver so we’re going to get a bunch of new stuff which is great.
HNMAG: There’s a lot of music related content for this year, including Eno and a performance by Jeremy Dutcher and Alanis Obomsawin. Is music something of a theme for this year’s VIFF?
Jarrett Martineau: It is, yeah. That’s something that was interesting for me because I was working on the VIFF Live program as a standalone program. But the opening and closing films for this year’s festival in the main film program are also kind of music-connected and it’s merged as a theme throughout the whole festival’s program. It turned out really well, in terms of supporting the music presentations we’ll be doing as part of VIFF Live as well.
Jarrett has told me that the VIFF Live series has done everything historically from an evening chat with a composer to live podcast recordings. For this year, Jarrett focused on music content, because he’s mainly focused in music work himself. He remembered to make sure they had a screen element that could be explored.
HNMAG: The fact that some of the films are even music oriented, like GIFT, or the opening film Ari’s Theme. I guess you and the team must really favour musicals or stories about musicians.
Jarrett Martineau: I think that every year, and certainly for the film programmers, this is definitely their work, they may come up with certain themes that they may want to think about for their respective programs and then a lot of it is just looking at what’s being made in the given year. Work that’s been released and produced and kind of taken shape along certain lines, and I think that’s the same in my world from the music perspective too. You could have a year where certain thematics emerge more prominently than others, then a year where you wouldn’t necessarily see as much music.
HNMAG: What about Arcadia Archive? I understand it’s a live performance of music and video tapes. What is the process of that being set up?
Jarrett Martineau: Yeah, that’s going to be an interesting one. William Basinski is a long-time American composer, does a lot of experimental electric work, and is well known in the field of ambient music. He has had a preoccupation in working with physical media, like analogue tape logs. His primary means of performance and compositional tool is through creating sound loops and manipulating them in real time. Often through the very physical form of the tapes. He has a long standing partnership with James Elaine and created a new video work that would be tandem shown. James won’t be doing a live video performance, but the video has been recorded for this live performance by William and he’s kind of responding to the video work and also drawing on a physical archive of tape recordings and stuff that he made almost 4 years ago. There’s this kind of cool way of renegotiating and reimagining and reinterpreting the past, which has also been kind of a through line in the VIFF Live program which has been kind of cool.
HNMAG: And there’s another immersive multimedia show called Uvattini, which has even more such as narration and performance. Why is something so elaborate part of a film festival of all things?
Jarrett Martineau: This one is interesting because Elisapie is a very interesting Inuit artist, and for this new record that she released she basically took music from her childhood that were songs she heard from well-established popular artists. Bands like Metallica or Cyndi Lauper, Led Zeppelin or whatever and did her own versions of that music because it was music that she grew up with in her own community and reinterpreting them in her own language. Kind of a way as paying homage to her upbringing, community, and her youth. In order to build this new show, she really wanted to tell the visual story of those experiences as well. So she collaborated with a filmmaker named Emily Monet and they shot a bunch of stuff in her home community. They took archival work from NFB archives and various things then built this whole kind of visual narrative component to the performance as well.
Jarrett brought up the through line again with all the VIFF Live shows and how they exploit technology to show how what we can make in interesting ways. He also brought up Eno which was Gary Hustwit’s finest directorial work. A generative documentary, the first of its kind and all about Brian Eno. Brian and Gary really wanted to extend their collaboration and create an experience like no other. You’ll have to attend it to see what it’s like. Believe me, something like this may never happen again.
HNMAG: Aside from all the music related stuff, tell me more about what else there is.
Jarrett Martineau: I think we’ve covered almost everything. I’ll highlight the Brian Eno documentary because that one is quite an interesting experiment and I had a chance to see the version of the film in Montreal a few weeks ago at the Mutek Festival. This film is basically the first attempt at making a generative documentary. The director collaborated with a software developer and a digital artist. They built basically a whole playable AI software that could create real time unique cuts of the film every time the film is shown. Partly, that’s because the archive of materials this film is drawing from is a HUGE amount of material. Various formats of audio, old video tapes, and things over the years. Hustwit took over 50 hours of interviews with Brian Eno, and then a composite of other archival stuff that he pulled together and all of that gets fed into the engine of this software that was developed. Then he’s been basically able to create a real time edit of the film that is partly guided by him and the AI. Together they make these new versions of the film every time.
HNMAG: And as a curator, did you have to work with a big team?
Jarrett Martineau: I’ve certainly had the support of the VIFF team as we’ve moved toward computing all these grand ideas. One of them with Alanis Obomsawin for example, we’re putting together a unique ensemble for her performance because she is known as a filmmaker primarily. People know her from that work, she’s made over 50 films, she’s probably the most prolific and prominent documentarian in Canada. People don’t know that she also has this musical aspect to her career that began in her early part of her creative life. She’s going to do an early performance in her 90’s which is unbelievable to me. I’ve been chasing this, hoping for it for so many years. I’m glad that it’s happening this year. Most of the time, with coordination, it’s just me.
HNMAG: What about other curators of programs? Did you get to interact with them and give feedback on their plans?
Jarrett Martineau: I guess I was talking quite closely with VIFF AMP because they do a lot of programming with music that’s connected to the festival. I was working on the stuff that they were working on, and wanted to make sure there was enough complementarity happening between those programs and that there’s not overlap and anything else. There’s some good synergies there, I think some of the programming I’ve done with Eno is pretty aligned with some of the Signals Program which is also on the intersection of tech and cinema and storytelling. Then in terms of the main film program, they’ve been doing their jobs for quite a long time, and so they have a HUGE amount of material to get through. I’ve met everyone and t’s kind of cool to see where these intersections happen across people’s programs. I think everyone’s been heads down doing their respective curatorial work.
HNMAG: I hear there are 69 short films screening this year. Did you and Casey Wei get to talk about some of them together?
Jarrett Martineau: I actually don’t know from Casey if there are any musicals but there’s definitely some bold choices. I got to see a few excerpts of the program and it looks pretty awesome.
HNMAG: And are local filmmakers more situated in the same program, or would you say they’re interspaced?
Jarrett Martineau: My understanding is that there’s a little bit more interspace in where the programming lives, but obviously opening with a film from a local team, and there’s integration of local content through all the different programs. Maybe not all, but a bunch of the different programs. It seems like the local community is fairly represented in a lot of aspects of the festival this year which is amazing.
Alanis with a lot of local musicians, the opening film with a live orchestra, and all this other content. I think VIFF is going to have its most exciting showcase this year. I’m going to check out as much as I can and I urge you to do the same. You’ll be amazed, and just might even be singing any eagworms you pick up during the festival run for a whole month.