The 45th edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival is well underway, running from October 1-11. This year's program is truly sensational, with more than 160 features on offer and so many titles I’ve been dying to see.
One through-line I’ve found throughout the festival, whether for R&R coverage or while preparing to moderate Q&As (for the first time ever!) and host the VIFF podcast, is a recurring interest in connection and belonging. Whether through family, friendship, community, or the uneasy spaces where people try and sometimes fail to understand each other, that search has surfaced time and time again. It’s genuinely been one of the most moving elements of the festival for me so far.
I’ll be sharing fresh dispatches of films I want to put on your radar as VIFF continues, but to kick things off, I’ve chosen three titles: Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva, Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, and Ian Bawa’s Strong Son.
La Gradiva (Marine Atlan; France/Italy)
Marine Atlan’s command of the visual language in her feature debut is sublime. Opening with lush summer photographs set to Satie, La Gradiva is so beautiful that, for a while, I was prepared to just let it wash over me. A train seen from a first-person perspective slowly transforms into an eye, and from there the film becomes filled with observation. People watch one another through doorways, windows, and across crowded rooms, trying to figure one another out. They often get it wrong.
A group of French high school students and their teachers head to Naples to study Pompeii. It feels cruelly perfect that the trip asks them to reconstruct vanished lives from fragments, even as they fail to understand the living people beside them. At the center is Toni (Colas Quignard), a drifting teenager carrying a romantic story about his family’s Italian past. As he tries to excavate this history, the story begins to fracture.
Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy hovers nearby as another specter of these ruins. Instead of a marriage that has slowly ossified, Atlan gives us adolescents on the brink of adulthood, surrounded by people whose lives have been permanently fixed into history just as their own identities are supposed to remain endlessly open. As the film closes with the dedication, “For all those who are not from here,” La Gradiva leaves behind a question sure to haunt: how much can we really ever know another person before they become memory?
You can watch La Gradiva at VIFF on Friday, October 9th, and Sunday, October 11th.
The Diary of a Chambermaid (Radu Jude; France/Romania)
Radu Jude has never exactly lacked bite, and I’d argue that he’s even sharper when he isn’t detonating every ten minutes. His latest, The Diary of a Chambermaid, works precisely because it keeps things at a gentle simmer. Loosely based on Octave Mirbeau’s novel, the film follows Gianina (Ana Dumitrascu), a Romanian live-in nanny and domestic worker employed by a wealthy family in Bordeaux. She cares for their son, though she’s left her daughter back in Romania with her mother.
Pierre and Marguerite Donnadieu seem perfectly kind. But are they? Every conversation is sprinkled with reminders: a joke about the “dash of Romania” in her cooking, Pierre parading her out at their dinner party to speak on Eastern European politics (while standing, mind you), or a supposedly generous favor that isn’t so generous when you sit with it.
Then comes a killer formal idea: when not working for them, Gianina spends her evenings literally performing The Diary of a Chambermaid with an “inclusive” amateur production — something her employers encouraged. The joke writes itself. The wealthy consume exploitation as provocative art, while remaining remarkably blind to the version taking place at home. All of this has exquisitely embarrassing “We’re enlightened people!” energy, and Gianina knows it, too, muttering in Romanian under her breath.
The heat never needs to be cranked higher. The longer Chambermaid simmers, the uglier all that good liberal hospitality begins to look. It might just be my favorite Jude yet.
You can watch The Diary of a Chambermaid at VIFF on Tuesday, October 6th, and Wednesday, October 7th.
Strong Son (Ian Bawa; Canada)
Harvey (Mandeep Sodhi) is very strong. His father, Jagdeep (Amrit Parbhakar), will happily tell you so, whether you ask him or not. But in Ian Bawa’s Strong Son, a bodybuilder’s impressive physique offers little protection against the emotional weight of caring for an aging parent.
Bawa’s debut feature, developed from his “Sad Dad” shorts and dedicated to his own father, is devastatingly tender without abandoning its sense of humor. Jagdeep sings, dances, and proudly boasts about his son, yet his insistence that Harvey be strong leaves little room for the younger man’s distress. Sodhi’s quiet and frequently tearful performance plays beautifully against Parbhakar’s buoyancy and stubbornness. The affection between them is unmistakable, from Jagdeep photographing Harvey’s workouts on his iPad to watching wrestling together. It’s still there, even when words fail.
Cinematographer Markus Henkel bathes the film in a soft, warm light that makes everything feel lived in, while Bawa’s moments of absurd comedy interrupt Harvey’s distress without ever diminishing it. I come back to Jagdeep’s declaration we hear multiple times in the film: “This is my son. He is very strong.” It takes on a new meaning, as the film smartly resists the easy triumph of a man learning to “tough it out.” Strong Son understands that strength can also mean admitting you cannot do everything alone.